Drummond Pike
Key Player

President, Tides Foundation & Tides Center; president, eGrants.org. president, Highwater Inc.; director, Environmental Working Group; director, Solidago Foundation; founder & assoc. dir., Youth Project (Wash., DC); former exec. dir., Shalan FoundationDrummond Pike is one of the chief rainmakers of the anti-consumer movement. His nameplate appears in the boardroom (or in the driver’s seat) of a wide variety of organizations: the Environmental Working Group, the Solidago Foundation (which works on “trade issues” and “corporate accountability”), the Shalan Foundation (which seeks “social justice and environmental balance”), and several more.

But Pike’s most influential role is Money-Launderer-in-Chief for the Tides Foundation. With Pike’s help, Tides gives away other foundations’ money, shipping it out to fringe organizations whose missions might not pass muster with the funds’ original donors. An adjunct called the Tides Center, also run by Drummond Pike, offers a kind of legal and tax-exemption umbrella for a wide variety of leftist “social change” groups that could never hope to pass the IRS’s tests on their own.

As if that’s not enough for one activist, Pike also runs “eGrants.org,” an online fundraising company that he says “was created to facilitate online giving to progressive groups,” and the Tsunami Fund, “dedicated to the support of progressive advocacy work on a variety of issues.” Pike was also one of the founders of Working Assets, the left-leaning telephone and credit card firm, in 1983.