Michael E. Hartmann is senior fellow and director of the new Center for Strategic Giving at the Capital Research Center. For more than 18 years, he served on the program staff of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, including as its director of research. He assisted Bradley’s vice president for program in administering the foundation’s grantmaking in K-12 education, employee rights, economic growth and prosperity, energy and the environment, law and legal reform, equal opportunity and individual liberty, and family and society. He is a past visiting fellow of the Philanthropy Roundtable in Washington, D.C., where he researched and wrote Helping People to Help Themselves:  A Guide for Donors. Before joining Bradley in 1998, he was director of research at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

A graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, Hartmann has published law-review articles on the constitutionality of school vouchers and aspects of welfare reform, as well as on the First Amendment and intellectual-property rights. He has also been a consultant to other foundations and education-reform organizations.