Team Thomas
A political nerd & proud hoya …
Team Thomas is led by Ben Everidge, our Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.
Ben had his first professional brush with politics and policy more than 40 years ago as a young campaign aide to a then-state representative who would win a seat in the U.S. House, fly aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia as a Mission Specialist, later become state insurance commissioner, then the senior United States Senator from Florida, and now the 14th Administrator of NASA, Bill Nelson.
Ben’s congressional experience would also include a decade working for Nelson as a Legislative Assistant on his House staff, the United States Senate Budget Committee Chairman and eventual late-Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, and the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce led by Michigan’s late Congressman John Dingell, and an influential subcommittee chaired by James J. Florio of New Jersey, who himself would later serve as Governor of his great state. He also worked on over two dozen successful and highly competitive campaigns for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and Governor with an impressive win rate.
While working on Capitol Hill, Ben earned his undergraduate degree in International Studies from American University in Washington and a Master’s degree in American Government with a minor in International Relations from Georgetown University, where he was also awarded a prestigious University Fellowship.
In addition to serving as our Editor-in-Chief of Thomas, Ben is also the Managing Partner of Cannon & Caius LLC, a strategic transformational collaboration practice specializing in creating, funding, and managing public-private philanthropic partnerships that also do great public good.
With a rich background in American lawmaking and the Congressional process, Ben is an expert in sophisticated funding platforms such as Social Impact Funds and Program Related Investments (PRIs), principal and deferred giving, family offices, family banks, national and international ventures, and guides high net worth clients on how best to leverage their philanthropic and private equity strategies through their public and private portfolios. His personal best donation raised from a single donor is $75 million - a record gift the Advisory Board in Washington, DC, said at the time was the most significant gift ever to a community hospital.
As Executive Senior Fellow of the Generosity Institute, Ben is leading academically-centered studies on the impact transformational generosity is having on critical segments of American society today as more than $59 trillion in family wealth changes hands from one generation to the next. He has worked extensively on healthcare, commerce, space, consumer protection, environment, energy, education, defense, foreign affairs, budget and appropriations issues. His federal government experience, for example, also allowed Ben to consult to FIFA’s 1994 World Cup at all nine of its venues when America hosted the world’s most popular sport in the USA for the first and only time.
A two-time cancer (Stage 4, Level V Malignant Melanoma) survivor, Ben uses his skills as a highly experienced philanthropreneur, known for his professional and personal perseverance, to raise large sums of money for transformational health initiatives, life-saving programs in predictive and regenerative medicine, and patient safety initiatives that have helped keep him cancer-free for more than fourteen years.
Ben previously served as Senior Vice President, Chief Development Officer of Bassett Healthcare Network in Cooperstown, New York. As a teaching hospital and medical school campus partnered with Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons, and through a nationally renowned Research Institute and partnership with Silicon Valley's iconic Andreessen Horowitz's a16z bio + health venture capital initiative, Bassett is continually advancing its 100-year-plus mission of patient care, teaching, and research always anticipating and developing to meet the evolving needs of the people and communities in an upstate region the geographic size of the state of Connecticut. Ben was responsible for significant fundraising goals, marketing, federal government relations, volunteers, and spiritual care.
He also served as Vice President Development for Give Kids The World. In this storybook village, children with critical illnesses and their families go cost-free for a week-long vacation to iconic area attractions such as Walt Disney World, Universal Studios Orlando, SeaWorld Orlando, and Kennedy Space Center. He was also past director of development for the largest admitting hospital in the United States, Executive Vice President at an academic medical center committed to building the safest hospital in America, first president of a state-mandated space research foundation that brought ten universities together on a joint research agenda for the first time, and CEO of the Astronauts Memorial at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which was funded by the first-in-the-nation specialty license plate he helped establish for use by charity and promoted creation of the first ever commercial spaceport authority. He also handled national media for the Korean War Veterans Memorial project on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
His latest extracurricular endeavors include penning a Russian Revolution-era biography titled Rescuing Nicholas: The Secret Mission to Save the Tsar (published by Cannon & Caius, January 2018), which is based on an extraordinary family story passed down generationally detailing an Allied forces rescue mission of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were reportedly assassinated more than 100 years ago in Yekaterinburg by Bolshevik troops loyal to Vladimir Lenin. Ben also released his first political novel, Hoya: The Watchmen Waketh (published by Cannon & Caius, April 2017), about the fictional 47th President of the United States who is struggling to provide security to Americans at home and abroad in the aftermath of an unexplained nuclear explosion in Pakistan. A central theme of the book comes from the speech John F. Kennedy gave on that fateful day in November 1963 at the Dallas Trade Mart Luncheon. It was Kennedy's chief photographer, Captain Cecil Stoughton, who first made Ben aware of JFK's speech and its percipient message, which is as relevant today. The sequel to this novel is forthcoming in 2024 and is entitled Hoya Saxa: Among Grey Ghosts. Two other books are also coming from Ben: Torn: When Plan “A” Goes Astray and Generosity: Giving, Getting & Managing Philanthropy Preeminently.
A registered Independent (he was a Democrat from 1976 to 2012) who labels himself a Jeffersonian, Ben and his wife, Nan, have four children. He is a rabid soccer parent who is a big fan of the USA National soccer teams, Chelsea, DC United, & Washington Spirit soccer clubs. He can be reached via social and other media at:
On email at: beneveridge@cannonandcaiususa.com
On Linked In at www.linkedin.com/in/benjamineveridge
On X at www.twitter.com/greyhoya