Álvaro Salas-Castro was a young man from Costa Rica with an idea when he first stepped onto an Atlas Network stage. He had been rehearsing his pitch for his organization for weeks, and had even received coaching from Linda Whetstone, one of the classical liberal think tank movement’s great formative figures.

When the clock started and the lights came up before a packed crowd at Liberty Forum in New York, something shifted. Álvaro wasn’t reciting a pitch anymore. He spoke from the heart and began to tell the story of a boy raised by a single mother, expelled from high school twice for his stubborn resistance to authority, who at fourteen saw his best friend killed by local drug dealers in a neighborhood where the war on drugs had failed the people living in it. He made the case for a new innovation lab in Costa Rica dedicated to training freedom advocates and taking on government corruption and inefficiency.

“That scholar, that boy, that man is me,” he told the crowd. He walked off the stage having won Atlas Network’s John Blundell Elevator Pitch Competition, and the attention of everyone in the room. More importantly, he walked off with a community ready to support his vision.

The organization he pitched that night became Demo Lab Foundation. In the years that followed, Álvaro and his team built a functioning laboratory inside the Costa Rican Congress itself, a space where citizens, ministers, journalists, and young leaders could share one table and reshape how power listens. They developed tools to track congressional voting in real time, extended internet access to indigenous communities in some of the country’s most remote regions, and cultivated a new generation of freedom-oriented leaders across Latin America. Atlas Network supported Demo Lab’s Tech and Freedom Academies along the way, part of a partnership that would only deepen over time.

Demo Lab co-hosted Latin America Liberty Forum in Costa Rica and launched BLISS, an annual gathering for philanthropists and family offices that has become one of the worldwide freedom movement’s most productive convening spaces. Álvaro credits Atlas Network at every turn. He went through Executive Accelerator, Atlas Network’s rigorous cohort-based program for think tank leaders, and says it gave him things no conventional training ever could: how to turn a hypothesis into a measurable organization, how to fundraise, how to lead. “No one brings you other people having the same challenges as you at the same moment in time,” he has said of that experience. “When you’re alone in your country or in your office, the fight is so big and so difficult that you feel really lonely. Executive Accelerator provided a community of kindred spirits.”

When Demo Lab faced its hardest early stretch, Atlas Network offered strategy, connections, and belief in a project that others had underestimated, not just passive funding, but active partnership at exactly the moment it matters most. From that foundation, Álvaro’s most significant chapter was still ahead. At a gathering that could only happen inside the freedom movement, he met Tim Reynolds—an American entrepreneur and investor with a restless, data-driven mind and an unshakeable conviction that freedom is the world’s most urgent cause. Tim had been asking himself the same questions Álvaro had spent a decade trying to answer. How do you make the world freer?

How do you create genuine equality of opportunity in places where the deck is stacked against it? The two discovered they were, in Álvaro’s words, “vibing at the same frequency.” “It was the kind of ambitious, visionary leadership from a founder I had been looking for my entire career,” Álvaro said. “Tim provided that rare combination of vision, relentless determination, and optimism.” When Tim asked him to help build something larger—to lead The Reynolds Foundation as its president and CEO— Álvaro said yes without hesitation.

“He told me that in his wildest dreams, his top three goals were human dignity, freedom from pain, and toppling as many dictators as possible. That was the moment I went all in.” — Álvaro Salas-Castro

The Reynolds Foundation, guided by Tim and his wife, Caroline, whose warmth and vision Álvaro describes as essential to everything they do, has become one of the most consequential new voices in freedom philanthropy. Its work spans frontline support for dissidents and democracy movements to education initiatives reaching students across multiple continents. Running through all of it is a conviction Álvaro has spent his life arriving at: that freedom is not one cause among many, but the precondition for all the others.

“What drew us to this work wasn’t just the data or the philosophy, it was the people,” said Caroline. “When you sit across from a dissident from Venezuela or Iran and hear what they’re risking to make their country freer, you understand very quickly that this is the most human investment you can make. Atlas Network brings us those people, and that changes everything.”

That conviction has found its intellectual expression in a framework Álvaro calls “Freedom Alpha.” In his white paper of the same name, Álvaro documents a striking imbalance: fewer than one percent of global philanthropic dollars flow toward freedom and democracy, even as more than 70% of the world’s population now lives in countries classified as autocracies. Borrowing the language of portfolio management, Freedom Alpha asks philanthropists to measure the return on freedom investments with the same rigor they would apply to any other asset class.

“The vision is straightforward: make freedom the most attractive investment category in philanthropy,” said Tim. “Not because it’s noble but because every single thing donors care about depends on it. Atlas Network is central to that mission.” That philosophy has deepened the partnership between The Reynolds Foundation and Atlas Network in concrete ways. Atlas Network’s Reynolds Freedom Fellows initiative identifies and supports bold leaders for freedom in some of the world’s most difficult places. The inaugural class includes a public intellectual and policy architect from Iran, a think tank leader from Lebanon, and a media innovator from Turkey. Each fellow receives grant support and a platform at Liberty Forum and beyond to advance their work and introduce their stories to a wider philanthropic audience. It is exactly the kind of investment Tim and Álvaro have always believed in—leveling the field and enabling equality of opportunity.

Drawing on one of the most recognizable stories in sports, Álvaro describes how The Reynolds Foundation and Atlas Network think about identifying talent. “You don’t know who’s going to be the next Lionel Messi just because he’s playing soccer without shoes,” he said. “If we provide the opportunity and level the field, that’s where we make the difference.” The Reynolds Freedom Fellows are that bet made real: exceptional people doing extraordinary work in Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey, given the platform and resources to go further. Atlas Network is proud to count The Reynolds Foundation among the partners who have walked this road with us, from our Liberty Forum stage where Álvaro first told his story, to the Reynolds Freedom Fellows now telling theirs.