The conservative movement in Chattanooga and Hamilton County is alive and well and will continue to thrive without Hamilton Flourishing, the think tank’s founder, Doug Daugherty, maintained last week.
“The conservative voice is growing,” he said in a phone conversation with the Free Press. “All kinds of things are happening that bode well for conservatives.”
Hamilton Flourishing, created in the fall of 2018, was to be a “think-tank-with-legs” with the aim “to provide the public, policy makers and media with sound research to support … solutions and … to communicate principles and policy in a meaningful and influential manner.”
Its focus, Daugherty said at the time, would be “liberty and responsibility, strong families, educational excellence, free enterprise, good government and civil society.”
Although he didn’t use the word “conservative,” it was implied Hamilton Flourishing would be a conservative alternative to UnifiEd, a local organization created in 2014 to help parents be more involved in their children’s public education but which wound up creating a political action committee to elect left-leaning office-holders.