Greg Colvin

GREG COLVIN was born in Seattle and raised in a log house in Mt. Rainier National Park. He was an Eagle Scout, twice president of his Auburn high school class, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1968 from the University of Washington. At the UW, he majored in political science and began a life of activism as a campus organizer for the anti-Vietnam War presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy.

He went on to Yale Law School during the time Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were there, and wrote for the law review based on an “intensive semester” of 7 months in Chicago clerking for lawyers with the Contract Buyers League, a black homebuyers organization. He graduated in 1971.

Mr. Colvin then began a 35-year career in public interest law, starting as a prosecutor with the Federal Trade Commission, taking on cases against General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and other companies. Moving to San Francisco in 1977, he drafted three city initiatives to tax the major corporations that benefited from the Proposition 13 property tax revolt and represented a number of grass roots social action groups.

In 1986, he joined a San Francisco law firm that became Adler & Colvin, specializing in nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations. His range of clients has included MoveOn.org, Toastmasters International, the Humane Farming Association, Mother Jones magazine, the Polly Klaas Foundation, American Youth Hostels, the Mennen Environmental Foundation, and the Volunteer Center of Orange County. He has written three how-to books to help activists start new charitable projects and become politically effective. He has been a national leader in the development of so-called “527” funds to support progressive political candidate campaigns and voter initiatives and a commentator on controversies such as the nonprofit ethics investigation of Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997 and the use of voter guides by the Christian Coalition.

In 2005, Greg began a correspondence with Bill Moyers and other liberal intellectual leaders, calling for a concerted effort to define progressive American political philosophy for the 21st century. “After forty years as an activist and lawyer supporting causes that have lost too many battles they should have won,” he says, “I thought we needed some inspiring, unifying philosophical direction to answer the question: ‘what do you stand for?’” His first writing on the subject, titled “The Progressive Trinity: Family, Business and Public Service,” was published on the website of The Washington Monthly in June, 2006. In his blog introducing the piece, editor-in-chief Paul Glastris said: “No summation can quite do justice to this long and wonderfully vernacular essay, which has the feel of something the writer has been living with and turning over in his mind for years.”

Greg Colvin, his wife Donna Emerson, a psychotherapist, photographer and poet, and 9-year-old daughter Juliet, divide their time between home in Petaluma, California, and a log cabin in Bath, New York. Besides progressive political philosophy, Greg’s other big project is a 12-year campaign to hike the 2700-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada with Chris and Jared, their adult sons—600 miles so far.