Anna Brown
Anna Brown’s father was in the Coast Guard for 26 years, and her mom was a librarian. She was raised in a culture of public service, where debates about politics were dinnertime conversation.
“It turned me into a bit of a contrarian, because of course, if your brother takes one position, you automatically want to argue the opposite side,” says Brown, executive director of the nonprofit group Citizens Count and the Warren B. Rudman Center for Justice, Leadership and Public Service.
In 2013, Brown, who has a master of arts in justice studies from the University of New Hampshire, joined Citizens Count, rising to executive director in 2020. Last year, she joined the Warren B. Rudman Center at the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law.
“There’s not a lot of money in nonprofit, and there’s not a lot of glamor. But in New Hampshire I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with such really enthusiastic people who I think share my values about what really matters in terms of having a free and fair society.”
This interview was adapted from Brown’s recent appearance on NH Business Review’s “Down to Business” podcast.
Q. What is Citizens Count and what issues does the nonprofit help citizens explore?
A. Citizens Count is a New Hampshire nonprofit focused on the Granite State that provides unbiased information about issues and candidates. We have a really wonderful citizen legislature in New Hampshire. But it can be really hard to follow what they’re doing, with roughly a thousand bills a year.
That’s where we try to step in and make it easier to follow what’s going on. Some of those hot issues are housing and affordable health care. People are always interested in gun laws and minimum wage, frankly, two of our top issues of all time. We provide layperson summaries of the bills. Just easy, simple language. You can search by keyword, search by topic. And we have profiles of all of our elected officials.
Q. At the State House, are you having conversations with legislators?
A. Sometimes. But post-COVID there is so much information that happens online. You can livestream public hearings as well as the session days. After committee hearings, you can see what people are submitting sometimes about their statements. If I want to research a bill, I can see what the same legislators or a different group were saying a couple of years ago.
Q. Besides housing, has any other issue been front and center for you?
A. It’s a state budget year, so everything is just budget, budget, budget. And it’s interesting to see the space between the House and the Senate. They’re both controlled by Republicans, but they’re very different groups of people. They operate in different ways.
We don’t have an income or sales tax, and we run our budget accordingly. But that makes it really tough when some of those existing revenue streams, like business taxes, are going down. When you don’t have as much federal money coming in, it makes for really tough choices.
Q. Let’s talk about your other role, as executive director for the Warren B. Rudman Center.
A. At the center, I have the opportunity to support students interested in public service. That could be working for the attorney general. It could be working for a nonprofit like 603 Legal Aid. And then we give them events they can go to on campus that feature people who are practicing law in the areas they’re interested in.
We also support these students by providing fellowships for them over the summer, when they are volunteering with nonprofits and government agencies and doing internships. This is very much a part of when you go to law school, but if you’re not going to do a for-profit space, how are you going to be paying your rent? Because these are not paid opportunities. We really like to help these students and encourage them to go that route, because we know that student debt is a real issue, and that turns many people away from public service.
We’re going to need prosecutors; we’re going to need public defenders. That’s another cool part of what I do. I get to hear the stories when the students come back about the cool work that they did.
