About Us
Since our founding, the Stanley Center has brought together members of the global community to exchange ideas, foster innovation, and take collective action. We believe inclusive dialogue and diverse perspectives create better solutions.
Our vision is for all people to share and sustain a secure and enduring peace with dignity, justice, and freedom.
Our mission is to catalyze and nurture just and sustainable solutions to critical global peace and security challenges.
Our Story
The Stanley Center—based in Muscatine, Iowa—advocates for systemic change and policy progress around the globe. Our founders, Max and Betty Stanley, established an endowment for the center’s work. The proceeds fully fund our operations and programming today.
Working together with our partners, we organize global convenings, commission original research, produce and develop important stories, create fellowships, and provide additional tangible resources to help achieve our collective goals.
In the decades since our founding, our issue portfolio has grown, and our strategy for creating lasting change has sharpened.
Today, we pursue impact on three global challenges: mitigating climate change, avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, and preventing mass violence and atrocities.
See the evolution of our work from 1956 to the present:
Our Team
From the beginning, the Stanley Center’s approach has focused on people coming together to address complex challenges. Our team is made up of people with diverse skills and perspectives who share common values.
Our Approach
We believe that change will not happen by accident but through strategic, thoughtful, sustained advocacy for progress, and we devote our time and resources where we believe we can make the most difference.
The Stanley Center utilizes our resources to develop programming, commission research, and organize action to nurture global policy progress and systems change. In all our work, we aim to be thoughtful partners who elevate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders around the globe.
We never unilaterally set agendas but instead aim to facilitate the discovery of common ground among stakeholders.
We know diverse perspectives lead to new and better ideas, and we are committed to elevating those perspectives in all our work.
Our Values
Our values form the foundation on which we perform our work and conduct ourselves, individually and as an organization. They guide decisions we make in our pursuit of a better world for all people.
Our Local Commitment
Though our policy work takes us around the globe, we remain committed to our community by creating opportunities to facilitate inclusive dialogue and elevate diverse perspectives.