2024-11-15T10:33:59-06:00 2023-12-31 411397419 Abdo LLP 5201 Eden Ave Ste 250 Edina MN 55436 990 2023-01-01 363611426 Center of the American Experiment CENT 6123383605 12600 Whitewater Dr Ste 150 Minnetonka MN 55343 John Hinderaker President 6123383605 2024-11-08 1 1 Steven D Anseth CPA P00552219 9528359090 2024-11-06 2023 2024-10-15 13:58:12Z X John Hinderaker 12600 Whitewater Dr Ste 150 Minnetonka MN 55343 4958323 0 X www.americanexperiment.org X 1988 MN Center of the American Experiment is a nonpartisan public policy and educational institution that brings conservative and free market ideas to bear on the hardest problems facing Minnesota and the nation. Through research, op-eds, public forums, legislative testimony, public messaging in a variety of media, and a stream of publications, we are working to build a Culture of Prosperity in Minnesota and the nation. 37 36 21 100 0 0 3290333 4458700 38639 61760 11931 18529 59049 122143 3399952 4661132 858500 695000 0 0 1663856 1952946 100000 0 269846 2383397 2223436 5005753 4871382 -1605801 -210250 1816526 1489913 727265 610902 1089261 879011 X Center of the American Experiment is a nonpartisan public policy and educational institution that brings conservative and free market ideas to bear on the hardest problems facing Minnesota and the nation. Through research, op-eds, public forums, legislative testimony, public messaging in a variety of media, and a stream of publications, we are working to build a Culture of Prosperity in Minnesota and the nation. 0 0 488300 Minnesota Economy:The Minnesota Economy Project was launched in 2016. Its goal is to educate Minnesotans to the fact that the state's economic performance in recent years has not been good, in order to build public and legislative support for lower taxes and less onerous regulation. Since 2016, the Center has published an annual analysis of Minnesota's economic performance in the 21st Century. We have publicized the findings of each paper with press conferences, radio and television appearances, op-eds in dozens of newspapers, radio ads on dozens of radio stations, three internet videos that have now exceeded 2 million views within the State of Minnesota, town meetings and other public appearances, and posts on the Center's web site and Facebook page. In 2023, we published and disseminated a report calling for cuts in Minnesota's income taxes, which are among the highest in the country, drive citizens out of our state, and suppress economic growth.In 2023, we also produced a major study on the relationship between levels of social capital and median household incomes. Our report, which was presented to the Midwest Economics Association, found that 55% of the variation of median household income across 3,000 American counties can be explained by variations in levels of social capital, especially Family Unity.On health care, we published and disseminated a paper on how to make health care prices more transparent in Minnesota. We published and publicized another paper on how reinsurance saved Minnesota's individual health insurance market, a successful policy that has recently come under attack. We published another paper titled "Guidance to Congress on Health Care Price Transparency Legislation," authored by Senior Policy Fellow Peter Nelson, who spent three years in the Trump Administration, working on health care price transparency regulations. We further published a paper on Minnesota's Individual Health Insurance Outlook for 2024.We also addressed transportation issues in a paper published in January 2023, titled "Minnesota Transportation After Covid-19," which documented the failure of public transit in Minnesota to meet its political objectives.Our policy goals include abolition of the estate tax; spending restraint to allow tax cuts; personal and corporate income tax rate cuts; regulatory reform; and increasing competition among health care providers and insurers. Other Center projects, such as our energy work, will also contribute to a stronger Minnesota economy. 996763 10914 Thinking Minnesota Magazine: Thinking Minnesota, our quarterly magazine, is an important communications vehicle for American Experiment, with a circulation of more than 80,000. The Center's goal is to continue to build circulation while using the magazine to spread conservative ideas and promote the Center.Sharp content and compelling graphics have driven the popularity of Thinking Minnesota. In order to reduce the net cost of the magazine we sell ads in the magazine, and also solicit contributions to help keep Thinking Minnesota free.Our magazine also features the Thinking Minnesota Poll, a top-notch, professional poll conducted by Meeting Street Research. For each issue, we survey Minnesotans on the topics that are covered in our magazine, so that legislators and others will know what Minnesotans think on key issues.Thinking Minnesota broadly advances the policy goals on which American Experiment is working. It also promotes the Center and exposes new potential donors to our work. 450575 50846 Forums:American Experiment continues its tradition of addressing important and timely topics through public forums. In 2023, a record 55 events were hosted which included 4 webinars, 28 Greater Minnesota events and a 22-city summer tour that detailed how the legislative session went "Off the Cliff" with spending, including spending the state's entire $17.6 billion surplus, and extreme new progressive laws were passed. We hosted forums with our own policy experts, scholars, authors, elected officials, and well-known commentators. Forum topics covered everything from energy to education to criminal justice. In May 2023, Dennis Prager was the keynote speaker at our Annual Dinner. In July 2023, over 400 people turned out for a forum in which Riley Gaines spoke about men competing in women's sports. In October, journalist Matt Taibbi headlined our Fall Briefing. We are proud to bring fact-based education on important policy topics to Minnesota and beyond. 173447 Education:In 2023, our education work continued to focus on more accountability and transparency within the state's public K-12 system. Through events, town halls, and writings, we mobilized Minnesotans to get more involved in education from pushing back against illiberal teacher licensing changes by submitting public comments to an administrative law judge to serving on district advisory committees and reviewing curricula. We also continued to be the go-to expert on all things related to academic achievement. In January 2023, we published and disseminated a paper on changes to Minnesota's teacher licensing rules, which effectively require teachers to profess left-wing beliefs in order to be licensed.In a variety of ways, we continued to publicize the fact that, despite constantly increasing per-pupil spending, the quality of public education continues to decline. We worked with other groups to promote school choice in Minnesota and to educate parents on their legal rights with respect to their children's education. 377230 Energy:In 2023, our Energy Initiative continued to work to protect Minnesota families and businesses from policies that would increase the cost of energy. We educate Minnesotans about how adding weather-dependent resources like wind and solar energy to the grid drives up the cost of keeping the lights on. Our policy goals include preserving existing power plants to the benefit of ratepayers and the reduction or elimination of wind and solar energy mandates.Our energy team has developed a model that accurately estimates the true cost of wind and solar energy projects. We have used this model to analyze such projects in Minnesota as well as a number of other states--Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Colorado, North Dakota, Arizona, West Virginia, Washington, and others. We also calculated the cost and reliability impacts of proposed EPA regulations promulgated by the Biden Administration and filed public comments on behalf of the State of North Dakota. We have often done this in collaboration with policy organizations in those states. 232968 Educated Teachers/Employee Freedom:The Educated Teachers Project seeks to inform Minnesota's teachers about the fact that they are no longer legally required to support the state's teachers union, and about the alternatives to union membership that are available to them. The project also informs educators on how union dues are spent by Education Minnesota, the state's teachers union.The project's pressure on Education Minnesota contributed to an expansion of the annual "window" when educators can opt out of membership from a narrow seven days to 30 days. The project has helped thousands of Minnesota teachers to exercise their right to opt out of union membership, and union membership has declined, as has union revenue.Our policy goals include replacing the opt-out "window" with an opt-in requirement, and pushing for legislative action on annual union recertification measures to give teachers true workplace democracy. 190643 Greater Minnesota Initiative:The Greater Minnesota Outreach initiative seeks to extend the Center's influence outside the Twin Cities metro area. We help encourage and facilitate the trend toward conservatism, in addition to expanding the Center's fundraising. In 2023 we added our 5th chapter in West Central Minnesota and conducted 16 events in Greater Minnesota. In addition to increasing readership of our Thinking Minnesota magazine, we again attended Farm Fest, the annual agriculture trade show, as well as the Minnesota State Fair.Our policy goals include accelerating the process whereby rural Minnesota is becoming more self-consciously conservative across a broad range of issues and giving a voice to Minnesotans who live outside the metro area. 220080 Institutional Promotion:In 2023 the Center continued a concerted effort to boost our brand reputation and awareness of our programs by utilizing radio, billboards, and online advertising, as well as a marketing partnership with University of Minnesota athletics, to reach millions of Minnesotans across the entire state. 695000 695000 Non-profit Community Support: The Center takes a leadership role in the conservative, free market movement by making grants to other worthy non-profits doing important work. 88139 Spending/Golden Turkey:The Golden Turkey Award is a light-hearted contest to bring attention to wasteful spending by Minnesota's state government and allow Minnesotans to weigh in on the silliest spending of the year.The winner of the 2023 Golden Turkey Award was the new State Office Building the Minnesota Legislature is building for themselves without ever taking a vote on the floor of the House or Senate. Most employees at the MN House of Representatives still haven't fully returned to the office since COVID, but that's not stopping them from building a Taj Mahal of office buildings costing more than double what they spent on the entire State Capitol building renovation. For each award, American Experiment nominates four projects and conducts a weeks-long vote on a landing page housed on our website. We promote the voting with a marketing campaign that includes email, social media, digital ads and outdoor advertising. 109277 Young Leaders Council:Our Young Leaders Council (YLC) aims to engage and empower young people in the conservative movement through professional networking and development opportunities. YLC members share a desire to promote a free and thriving Minnesota grounded in limited government and individual freedom. As a branch of Center of the American Experiment, YLC connects young people to business leaders, legislators, policy experts and political voices both locally and nationally.In 2023 we held multiple events for members and also created social media content targeting young people with various conservative messages. 156048 Public Safety:American Experiment launched a public awareness campaign in June 2021 to show support for law enforcement in Minnesota during the ongoing public debate over the role of police in our communities. The campaign included Facebook ads, digital ads and a radio campaign in the Twin Cities metro area during June and July. The campaign also included 35 poster sized billboards across the greater Twin Cities metro area and one large billboard at a high traffic intersection. The billboards simply read Support Our Police, Sign the Petition. Minnesotans were encouraged to visit the website SupportMNPolice.com, where they could sign a petition to support law enforcement, see crime data, learn about our recent polling on Minnesotans' views on crime and law enforcement, and browse related news reports and commentary. Thousands of Minnesotans signed the petition to support our police.In 2022 American Experiment's public safety policy fellow completed a comprehensive analysis of Minnesota's crime rate and found that in 2020, for the first time in history, Minnesota's serious crime rate exceeded the national average. As a result of these findings we initiated the "High Crime MN" campaign to bring attention to the issue through live events and on-line seminars. Gubernatorial candidate Scott Jensen used the data from "High Crime MN" in his campaign, including at the Minnesota State Fair. Our public safety policy fellow also monitored the actions of the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission and reported on its proposal to eliminate the custody status point in the criminal history computation at sentencing, which would reduce Minnesota's already-weak criminal penalties for large numbers of convicted felons. We established a public awareness campaign on the issue which resulted, in a matter of days, in thousands of public comments, in the form of emails, being sent from our web site to the commission. This campaign was persuasive and resulted in the commission tabling the proposal.In 2023 our public safety policy fellow has followed this work up with an exhaustive report that, by analyzing data on commission of crimes, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, incarceration and victimization, conclusively proved that there is no race discrimination against blacks in Minnesota's law enforcement and criminal justice systems. 333472 North Dakota: In order to expand the Center's work into North Dakota, we officially launched fundraising efforts in 2021 for that purpose. In late 2022, we inaugurated a campaign to support the oil and gas industries in North Dakota. We produced 30 second and 51 second versions of a digital ad in which North Dakotans express their support for oil and gas, along with scenic footage and basic facts about the contributions of those industries to North Dakota's economy. Those videos have now been seen more than 222,000 times in a state whose population is around 780,000. We also erected billboards on North Dakota's major highways, urging citizens to support North Dakota oil and gas.In 2023, we continued our support, advocacy and research efforts on behalf of North Dakota's overall energy sector. We also worked to advance education freedom by working with various stakeholders on a bill to allow unfettered school choice for families across the state. In addition, our website -- AmericanExperimentND.org -- regularly covered multiple topics and news stories that are important to all North Dakotans. 2576304 695000 4511942 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 14 0 1 21 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 X 37 36 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 MN X X Center of the American Experiment 6123383605 12600 Whitewater Dr Ste 150 Minnetonka MN 55343 John Hinderaker President 40.00 1.00 X X 150000 0 33072 Ron Eibensteiner Chairman 1.00 1.00 X X 0 0 0 Molly Cronin Vice Chair 1.00 X X 0 0 0 Scott Rile Treasurer 1.00 X X 0 0 0 Ed Anderson Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Elam Baer Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Asim Baig Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Mike Barry Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Bob Breckner Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Mitch Davis Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Jerry Dettinger Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Barbara Dovolis Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Greg Frandsen Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ben Golnik Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Sharon Hawkins Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Mike Hayden Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Lowell Hellervik Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Robin Kelleher Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Russell King Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Mark Kroll Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Robert Kukuljan Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Jeremy LaBeau Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Carol Lanners Hockert Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ken Morris Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Charles Nickoloff Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Mike O'Shaughnessy Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Richard Penn Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ted Risdall Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Kent Roers Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Tom Rosen Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ron Schutz Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Daniel Spiegel Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ross Strehlow Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Barb Sutter Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ben Wilmoth Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Ron Yougdahl Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Nick Zerwas Director 1.00 X 0 0 0 Isaac Orr Policy Fellow 40.00 X 120000 0 25176 Peter Nelson Policy Fellow 40.00 X 130000 0 18140 400000 0 76388 3 0 1 0 0 256809 4201891 4458700 Forums 900099 50846 50846 Publications 513190 10914 10914 61760 18529 18529 370334 297191 73143 73143 Shared Service Revenue 541900 49000 49000 49000 4661132 61760 0 140672 695000 695000 183071 128150 18307 36614 1369685 1302885 23000 43800 55441 52101 1150 2190 228492 213571 8707 6214 116257 107704 2907 5646 851 779 26 46 26936 26936 168047 168047 96839 96839 58448 55695 984 1769 95916 87851 2880 5185 114226 104622 3430 6174 31758 31593 59 106 565680 562733 1052 1895 3372 3088 102 182 1800 1649 54 97 Publications 732379 732379 Printing and Marketing 324935 165007 159928 Research Materials 2249 2249 4871382 4511942 89594 269846 1125530 883720 15203 43839 214402 205871 11903 8531 663890 553823 1816526 1489913 59807 47500 667458 563402 727265 610902 X 1089261 879011 1089261 879011 1816526 1489913 -210250 0 X X 0 1 X 1 0 X 4059719 3519451 5341937 3290333 4458700 20670140 4059719 3519451 5341937 3290333 4458700 20670140 4885236 15784904 11974 26744 5251 11931 18529 74429 7501 9000 59049 49000 124550 20869119 181478 0.75640 0.73640 X RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED 59875 0 59875 4463764 4523639 376182 94046 0 0 351103 357102 381400 376182 1465787 2198681 35087 98600 14500 59875 208062 87776 89276 95350 94046 366448 549672 13373 88600 4500 59875 166348 214402 205871 8531 8531 Lease Deposit 3146 Right of Use Asset 550677 553823 Operating Lease Liability 563402 563402 Annual Dinner 295601 295601 31500 92282 61299 Fall Briefing 44732 44732 41706 18890 1 30001 30001 25745 7115 18654 370334 370334 98951 99397 98843 297191 73143 0 Alpha News 13033 Ridgedale Dr 101 Hopkins MN 55305 473178268 501(c)(3) 130000 0 Nonprofit community support Horowitz Freedom Center 14724 Ventura Blvd Suite 820 Sherman Oaks CA 91403 954194642 501(c)(3) 105000 0 Nonprofit community support MN Parent Alliance 1161 E Wayzata Blvd 55 Wayzata MN 55391 882484659 501(c)(3) 10000 0 Nonprofit community support MN Voter Alliance PO Box 4602 St Paul MN 55104 202957982 501(c)(3) 100000 0 Nonprofit community support Prager U 15021 Ventura Blvd 552 Sherman Oaks CA 91403 271763901 501(c)(3) 105000 0 Nonprofit community support TakeCharge 8421 Wayzata Blvd Ste 105 Golden Valley MN 55426 853095062 501(c)(3) 20000 0 Nonprofit community support Turning Point USA 217 1/2 E Illinois St Lemont IL 60439 800835023 501(c)(3) 105000 0 Nonprofit community support Upper Midwest Law Center 8421 Wayzata Blvd Ste 105 Minneapolis MN 55426 832728196 501(c)(3) 120000 0 Nonprofit community support 8 X X 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 John Hinderaker President 150000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 33072 0 183072 0 0 0 Form 990, Part VI, Section B, line 11b A copy of form 990 was provided to each board member for review prior to the board meeting; approved by the board at meeting. Form 990, Part VI, Section B, line 12c Board members are sent the policy and response form multiple times a year and are given the response form to sign at each board meeting. Form 990, Part VI, Section B, line 15 Compensation of the organization's president was recommended to the organization's board of directors by a committee of independent directors which included the chairman and vice chairman. The committee compiled and reviewed comparable data from other nonprofit state-based public policy institutes on compensation of the top paid executive position. This data was used by the committee in making its recommendation to the board. The board considered the committee's recommendations, discussed the president's performance and appropriate level of compensation, and approved the proposed compensation for the president at the regular meeting of the board. Minutes of the board's deliberations and decisions were recorded by the secretary of the organization, presented to the board at its next regular meeting, and approved by the board. Form 990, Part VI, Section C, line 19 Center of the American Experiment will make available upon request the annual financial statements. Form 990, Part XII, Line 2c: The process for approving the audit has not changed from prior year. American Experiment Foundation 8421 Wayzata Blvd Ste 110 Golden Valley MN 55426 833831129 Raise funds and support the Center of the American Experiment MN 501(c)(3) Line 7 Center of the American Experiment 1 Upper Midwest Law Center 8421 Wayzata Blvd Ste 110 Golden Valley MN 55426 832728196 Legal support for people in need MN 501(c)(3) Line 7 N/A 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0