The foundation is a major donor to the Tides Center and the Media Matters for America, a left-leaning center for journalism founded by author David Brock.
[1][2] Furman was born in 1946 to a Jewish family in Queens, New York, the daughter of Martha and David Gorman.
[5][7] In December 2003, Furman attended a gathering in New York City organized by Erica Payne in order to watch a screening of Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein's PowerPoint presentation, The Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix.
After the presentation, Furman agreed in front of the group to donate more than $25,000 to fund Stein to conduct a research project to determine "what kind of groups the Left needed to fund.
"[9] Furman along with George Soros and other Democracy Alliance members John R. Hunting; Paul Rudd (co-founder of Adaptive Analytics); Pat Stryker; Nicholas Hanauer; ex-Clinton administration official Rob Stein; Drummond Pike; real estate developer Robert Bowditch; Pioneer Hybrid International-heir and congressional candidate Scott Wallace; Susie Tompkins Buell; real estate developer Albert Dwoskin; and Taco Bell-heir Rob McKay, funded the Secretary of State Project, an American non-profit, 527 political action committee focused on electing reform-minded progressive Secretaries of State in battleground states, who typically oversee the election process.