Our Model: Coach, Compete, Celebrate

Atlas Network Academy is the premier professional development program for think tank leaders and staff devoted to a free society. We offer certifications in Think Tank Foundations, Marketing and Communications, Fundraising, Leadership Development, and more that are designed to help people and teams in the freedom movement scale up their work and the impact of their organizations. We offer courses online and in-person tailored to every experience level.

Atlas Network Academy trainings are not lectures. They use a facilitated approach to learning, where program participants share and expand their knowledge by equipping each other with new resources, practices, tools, and mentors.

To help our partner organizations accelerate their impact, Atlas Network offers our partners in-depth, confidential consulting services with our in-house experienced consulting team. Atlas Network Partner Consulting practices what is known as process consulting, which emphasizes the client’s own leadership and autonomy, in support of their local vision and priorities to increase economic freedom and human flourishing across the globe. The first consulting engagement is pro bono, and each one is customized to meet the particular needs of the partner organization.

Thanks to our donors, who trust Atlas Network’s acumen in finding high-impact mission-aligned projects, we are investing over $10 million annually in projects that emerge from our grant and prize competitions.


Atlas Network helps think tank entrepreneurs establish new pro-freedom organizations with Think Tank Startup Grants, publish literature on the ideas of liberty in their local languages with our Book Translation Fund, and pursue ambitious policy and educational projects through a variety of competitive grant opportunities. 


Atlas Network’s grantmaking is focused on projects that strengthen the freedom movement, increase economic freedom, defend personal liberties, and foster innovation. Our approach to grantmaking is to focus on proposals that build the organizational capacity of our independent partners and generate a philanthropic return on investment for the worldwide freedom movement. Atlas Network’s project grantmaking is often modest, and strategically designed to encourage matching grants that help build sustainable organizations with a broad base of local support in our grantee’s country or community.


Successful Atlas Network grantees have started their professional journey with grants as small as $250 to attend a conference, or $2,500 to establish a think tank—and multiplied these investments by building highly-impactful organizations that help enact major policy or societal change.


Through programs including the John Blundell Elevator Pitch Competition and Atlas Network’s Smart Bets accelerator, we give think tank leaders and staff a chance to sharpen their vision and win additional grant support by pitching their projects to their peers and panels of seasoned philanthropists.

Every year, Atlas Network hosts events on five continents, connecting friends of freedom so we can learn together, inspire each other, celebrate great achievements, and raise the ambitions of liberty advocates worldwide.

The spirit of friendly competition and camaraderie on display at Atlas Network’s Liberty Forums is a constant source of inspiration for our partners and donor community. Thanks to the generous support of our donors, we recognize the year’s most impactful achievements with grant awards that encourage freedom’s champions to strive for more. At each of our Regional Liberty Forums, we recognize one organization with our Regional Liberty Award.
At our flagship Liberty Forum & Freedom Dinner in New York, the year’s most exceptional achievements are nominated for the prestigious Templeton Freedom Award. The winner of the award is selected by an independent panel of expert judges, with one of the nominated organizations receiving a $150,000 prize in recognition of their successful efforts for individual rights and free enterprise.

After nearly half a century of working in countries where freedom is threatened, Atlas Network has developed a proven process for increasing the effectiveness of people and teams that seek to advance the cause of liberty. By bringing together freedom advocates from around the world, we are creating a stronger support network for professionals who promote the principles of free markets, property rights, and personal responsibility, no matter where they are.

When you support Atlas Network, you’re multiplying the impact of nearly 500 independent organizations supporting freedom worldwide—benefiting millions, if not billions, of people. Our partners are promoting trade policies that lower the cost of food for families in Indonesia, they’re removing burdensome inheritance taxes that forced low-income taxpayers out of their homes in Spain, they’re ending shortages of fuel and medicine by restoring sound monetary policies in Lebanon, and they’re championing the fundamental property rights that allow homeowners, entrepreneurs, and farmers to live and work with dignity in countries including South Africa, the Philippines, and even here in the United States.