Talmage Cooley

Talmage Newman Cooley (born in Charlottesville, Virginia) is an American social entrepreneur and filmmaker. He is co-Founder and former co-CEO of The Center to Prevent Youth Violence (formerly PAX). While attending the Harvard Kennedy School in 2012 he founded Democracy.com. He has also written and directed several award-winning films.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, Cooley worked as a bond trader at Morgan Stanley in New York. In the mid-1990s he left Wall Street and began directing television commercials, including some for prominent social mission organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Partnership for a Drug Free America. Through this work, he began researching how large-scale social messaging efforts could successfully shift cultural norms and launch grassroots movements. This led to his founding of The Gun Violence Project, a collaboration with The Creative Coalition, and then co-founding The Center to Prevent Youth Violence (originally called PAX). In 2012, Cooley graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School with a master's degree focused on democratic inclusion, social network theory and movement building. This research informed the launch of Democracy.com, an online platform for civic engagement that "empowers every citizen to take action on the issues and elections they care about in under 60 seconds".

In 1994, Cooley founded The Gun Violence Project, a non-profit organization with the mission to reposition the gun violence issue as an urgent matter of public health rather than the seemingly intractable political wedge issue it had become. In 1996, The Gun Violence Project, in collaboration with The Creative Coalition, created its first campaign (voice-over by Alec Baldwin), which focused on the dangers of kids taking their parents' guns to school. In 1997, The Gun Violence Project merged into a new organization called PAX [1], founded by Cooley and Daniel Gross, an advertising executive whose brother was wounded in the shooting atop the Empire State Building in 1997.

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