Self-Description: Common Assets Defense Fund (CADF) was formed to preserve the public assets of the United States. Common assets include the air, the water, the airways used by TV and radio, and the Internet.  Collectively such assets are worth more than our entire privately owned property put together. Worth more in dollars, and worth more in terms of health, happiness, and quality of life. Common Assets Defense Fund animates new policies, public understanding, and community-based strategies to protect and extend this common wealth.

Actual: A small grant-driven, foundation-ruled group of highly sensitive individuals opposing private property, private enterprise and all things private per se with an ideology that mocks, devalues and destroys the private individual and private ownership in favor of collective society and collective ownership. The concept assumes but does not say that government owns the commons. CADF's creators are profoundly intellectual. One of them (Barlow) is a Marxist "but not prescriptive. I am a fan of the clarity of Marxian analysis." CADF's board is profoundly analytical, widely experienced in movement dynamics, and well grounded in their beliefs. Their original executive director, Adam Werbach, was not, a young man suffering the platitude-ridden hubris of early celebrity as having been the youngest elected president of the Sierra Club. CADF ditched him in 2006 for Julie Ristau, co-creator with Eric Utne and publisher of Utne Reader (1983).

Background: CADF was an outgrowth of the small prototype Tomales Bay Institute,  which was merged into CADF in 2006. CADF's original board of directors included:

Harriet Barlow, CADF President. Barlow created and directed the Blue Mountain Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. She is also executive director of the HKH (Harold K. Hochschild) Foundation, the $30 million Hochschild family philanthropy based on the AMAX mining fortune. The Blue Mountain Center is a project of the Hochschild family heirs, and was the original registered address of CADF, odd for an organization incorporated in California, which reveals the HKH foundation influence. The Center was paying Barlow $84,895 salary and $4,775 benefits in 2002.

Barlow has also served as a director of the Foundation for National Progress (publisher of Mother Jones magazine) and the Sequoia Fund (Adam Hochschild's trust that funds only the Foundation for National Progress); trustee of the Institute for Policy Studies; and Director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. She is a Distinguished Advisor of Vermont Law School.

Peter Barnes, co-founder and former president of social change telephone company Working Assets Long Distance, author of Who Owns the Sky: Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism; Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons; and Climate Solutions: A Citizen's Guide with a foreword by Bill McKibben. Barnes has written for Newsweek, the New Republic and the New York Times, and was a co-founder of Common Assets Defense Fund. Barnes was the originator of the Sky Trust concept.
 

David Bollier, long-time collaborator with television writer/producer Norman Lear (also senior fellow at Lear Center) and author of
Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth;

Original Executive Director, Adam Werbach, enfant terrible of the Sierra Club as its youngest elected national president at age 23 in 1996, credited with reinvigorating and rejuvenating the "aging and moribund" group founded by John Muir in 1892. Emphasizing the intergenerational divide, he brought friction to CADF as well as enthusiasm for the Apollo Project when it became part of CADF's funding package dictated by the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He departed CADF in a dispute over leadership in the Apollo Project.

CADF's tangled relationship with the Apollo Alliance is revealed in the grant description of the Nathan Cummings Foundation: