Christopher T. Gates

Gates serves as the Executive Director of PACE, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement. PACE, based in Washington, DC, is an affinity group of the Council on Foundations and serves as a learning collaborative of American foundations that fund work in the fields of civic engagement, service and democratic practice. In this role Gates works with those philanthropic organizations who strive to strengthen America’s democratic practice and serves as a voice for philanthropy in broader conversations about civic engagement and service. Gates also speaks and teaches extensively around the country.

Gates previously served for eleven years as President of the National Civic League (NCL), America’s oldest good government organization, founded in 1894 by Theodore Roosevelt.

Gates is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and serves on the boards of Public Agenda, a New York public opinion research and public engagement organization founded by Dan Yankelovich and Cy Vance in 1975, and Mobilize.org, a national non-profit organization that empowers and invests in Millennials to create solutions to social problems. Gates is also a member of the editorial board of Public Administration Review (PAR), a scholarly journal serving both academics and practitioners published by the American Society for Public Administration, and a member of the board of advisors of the National Conference on Citizenship.

Gates received his Master of Public Administration degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he studied the interaction between the public, private and non-profit sectors, and an honors degree in economics from the University of Colorado. He also studied political economics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Gates was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Law degree by Elizabethtown College in 2006.