The Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation

What SMRF Is

SMRF is a research foundation and trade school, structured as a Colorado state-registered private occupational school, with three operational layers:

• Curriculum. Civic-education programs structured as competencies, not survey courses. Ballot literacy, appropriations literacy, legislative-tracking literacy, lobbying literacy, election-administration literacy, civic-society-versus-government literacy. Each is taught the way the work itself teaches it: through the operational task that requires it.
• Field operations. Volunteer training, campaign staff training, candidate training. SMRF has trained operators on real campaigns, including unseatings of incumbents, in races where the curriculum landed because the work was real and the consequences were real.
• Research and writing. The published output that anchors and propagates the curriculum. The SMRF book series begins with two volumes: Campaign as a Classroom (the political-science volume) and CyberSocial: How Sociology Is Taking Over PopTech (the sociology-of-technology volume).

The foundation is nonpartisan by design. SMRF curriculum, research, and outreach explicitly stay out of left-right political advocacy. The foundation engages mechanism, not team. The result is a body of civic instruction that any citizen — left, right, center, none — can use to read the system honestly.

Why It Was Built

Imran Cooper grew up in Kentucky, in a public-school system ranked among the worst in the country, in generational poverty. He watched the institutions that should have taught civic literacy fail to do so — not because the teachers were unwilling, but because the curriculum had been hollowed out. Civic education, where it survived, had been replaced by consumerist political marketing. Voters arrive at ballots having been told whom to support but not how anything works.

By his early twenties, Cooper had run political campaigns. Some of them won. Each one taught him the same lesson: a well-run campaign is the most efficient civic-education program in America. Volunteers walk in not knowing what a precinct captain is. Six weeks later they can name every county clerk in the district, read a campaign-finance report, and explain to their neighbors what the school board does. The campaign teaches because the campaign needs them to know.

SMRF formalized that observation. The foundation registered with the Colorado Department of Higher Education in 2016. The first occupational-school registration of its kind. The premise: build the curriculum the campaigns already use, decouple it from any single political team, and ship it as instruction.

Foundation Facts

Acceptance Documentation

The foundation's registration with the Colorado Department of Higher Education, Division of Private Occupational Schools (DPOS), is the legal-status anchor for SMRF as an occupational school. The acceptance documentation establishes the foundation's standing to deliver curriculum as a registered private trade school in the state of Colorado.

What Came After

Cooper went homeless during the early SMRF years. He rebuilt, took a corporate job that a friend fought to get him into, used the income to buy a twenty-year-old dinner-only restaurant, and lost it during the post-2020 grocery-inflation cycle. The macroeconomic forces that reduced SMRF to a part-time vehicle are the same forces the Historical Apoplexy series later named and diagnosed. The foundation persists. The curriculum persists. The published output is now ramping back up through the SMRF book series and through the cross-foundation work happening at imran.theamanuensis.com.