New Founders Press, Ltd., was established in January, 2006, by Sylvia Clute, a trial attorney and author in Richmond, Virginia. Her interest in government was deeply affected when she spent a year of college studying the European Community in Paris, France, 1962–1963. French President Charles de Gaulle called upon the French people to set aside their intense hatred of the Germans, who had occupied France two decades earlier. In a Europe still suffering from the ravages of two world wars, De Gaulle argued that forming a shared economic community would lead the way to a lasting peace.   

After college, Sylvia served in the Peace Corps in Nepal. In the years following her return to the United States, she received her first Masters Degree in Public Administration, was married, started a family and completed law school (J.D., Boston U. School of Law, 1973). She became the first woman attorney employed by Reynolds Metals Company, where she worked in equal employment law. She left Reynolds to open a practice as a trial attorney.

For all of her adult life, Sylvia has been keenly interested in how government serves the people, and how to fashion remedies when it fails to do so. She helped to modernize Virginia’s laws relating to women and children, and later, worked to reform child sexual abuse laws.

But by the mid-1980s, Sylvia was convinced that there was something profoundly wrong with our legal system, which is an adversarial, win/lose structure guided by the code of “an eye for an eye.” When clients came to her with broken relationships, there was nothing she was trained to do that could help heal the breach. Sylvia realized, as our criminal justice system has moved to greater extremes with “get tough on crime” policies, that this vengeance model is destroying the fabric of communities, a price which we will all pay. It is robbing resources from education, housing and health care.

The real alarm came when decades of nuclear disarmament efforts were abandoned after the 2000 national election, and a downward spiral of hyped militarism commenced that has made the world less safe than ever before. It was time to get serious about deep, structural reform.

After years of study and a second Masters Degree in Public Administration (Harvard, 2005), Sylvia became convinced that public policies based on the principle of treating others as we want to be treated, just as Charles de Gaulle had urged, are effective, inexpensive and lasting. When we seek vengeance, or bully others, we set a path to certain disaster.

New Founders Press, Ltd., was founded to clarify the weaknesses of fear-based public policy, and to give positive public policy a legitimate and respected voice in public policy discourse. Only this will assure that all the children of all nations will inherit a world that is safe and whole