Tom Freedman
President
As President of Freedman Consulting, LLC, Tom Freedman is an advisor to leading foundations, public interest causes, and nonprofit organizations.
Tom served in the Clinton Administration as Senior Advisor to the President, and prior to that was Special Assistant to the President for Policy Planning. In the 1996 presidential campaign, Tom was Chief of Staff for Strategy, helping to create the policy and communications plan for Clinton/Gore ’96. Previously he was Press Secretary and later Legislative Director to then Congressman Charles E. Schumer (D-NY). He co-founded the non-profit organization the Welfare to Work Partnership, which grew to include more than 20,000 companies that hired more than 1 million Americans off of public assistance. Tom served as a member of the 2008 presidential Obama-Biden Transition Project on the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Policy Working Group, and was a policy consultant for President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, Obama for America.
Tom has been a Visiting Scholar at Resources for the Future and was awarded a traveling Watson Fellowship in 1985, through which he conducted a year-long study of the African famine. He has published opinion articles in a variety of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post. In 2009, Tom authored the chapter of recommendations for the next Domestic Policy Council in the book Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President (Center for American Progress) and wrote a chapter on ending child hunger in America with Joel Berg in the book Memos to the New President (Progressive Policy Institute).
Tom is an honors graduate of Carleton College, and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley where he was Editor-in-Chief of the California Law Review. He serves on the Advisory Board for the Eli J. Segal Citizen Leadership Program.