Support the Roper Center
The Center’s core activities focus on continuing to build a comprehensive archive of public opinion data from the premiere survey organizations across the country and the globe. Additionally, there are collections of data that are at risk of being lost to future researchers, because they are not yet archived. Identifying and acquiring these collections, and converting them into modern, usable formats, require significant effort. Gifts contributed to the Roper Center general fund support such archival operations, as well as outreach efforts to expand use of the data.
To honor Andrew Kohut, founder of the Pew Research Center, the Roper Center’s Board of Directors has established an endowment to create the Andrew Kohut Student Fellowship Fund for the purpose of supporting student research. Scores of junior colleagues and past employees have called Andy a first-class mentor, so it is especially fitting that the Fund will endow student fellowships in the Roper Center’s research unit. Kohut Fellows will receive training in public opinion research and mentoring by experts in public opinion and American politics, while digging into data in the archives. Supporters of the Fund are investing in training future opinion researchers in the intricacies of the field.
The Roper Center Board of Directors created a fund in honor of Warren Mitofsky, who was Chairman of the Board when he died in 2006. Warren had ambitious plans for the Center’s growth, for enhancing its visibility, and for modernizing its storage, retrieval, and data manipulation capabilities. The Warren J. Mitofsky Memorial Fund for the Roper Center supports special projects to expand and maintain the holdings of the Center, make the archive easier to use, and give new audiences access to the vast data in the archive. Specific projects that have benefited from donors to the Mitofsky Fund include expansion of the archive to increase holdings of research conducted in Mexico and Latin America and creation of teaching materials for innovative high school courses to introduce students to public opinion analysis.
The Mitofsky Fund also supports an annual award for outstanding research utilizing data in the Roper archive. The Mitofsky Award is considered one of the most prestigious in the polling industry. Past recipients have included some of the most influential researchers working in survey research today. Each year’s honoree is presented at a gala dinner that brings together members of the polling community in celebration of achievement in the field. More about the Mitofsky Award & Dinner.