“When is your mission complete?” a donor asked me recently. He said that as a challenge, having seen nonprofits mistake growth for impact. He wanted to know if we were any different.
Honestly, I would love to put ourselves out of business. If free markets were allowed to work, government stayed within its proper limits, and individuals were trusted to make their own decisions, we would close up shop and figure out what’s next. But that’s not where we are.
As Ronald Reagan put it: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on.” He was right. Every generation needs to relearn these lessons. The case for liberty must be made again and again, to new audiences, in new contexts and against new arguments. This is the work, and it does not end.
That’s not merely an abstract statement; we’ve acted on it repeatedly. The Mackinac Center took Gov. Whitmer’s COVID overreach to the Michigan Supreme Court and won unanimously. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2018 Janus decision that public employees could not be forced to pay unions, its decision cited Mackinac Center research.
When a teachers union illegally claimed pandemic relief funds, the Mackinac Center exposed the fraud, and public officials recovered the money.
The Mackinac Center helped make Michigan a right-to-work state and made sure workers knew what that meant for them. Then, when a newly elected pro-union majority reversed that policy, we started laying the groundwork to get it back.
For the first time in 25 years, Michigan did not offer any no-bid corporate subsidies — because the Mackinac Center kept pushing against them.
None of these successes happened without you. The Mackinac Center doesn’t take government money, which means the people who fund this work are the people who believe in it. You are the reason we can operate the way we do.
When is the mission complete? Maybe never. But the measure of success is not whether the Mackinac Center exists; it is whether the people of Michigan are freer thanks to the Mackinac Center’s work.
