May 30th, 2026

I have had the good fortune of getting to travel for work and do some speaking engagements again. As I transitioned out of my role with CTIPP and was doing grad school in addition to running The Change Campaign, I had to travel less because I simply didn’t have the capacity to do everything, but it is so nice to be back. From Walla Walla, Washington - leading a community conversation on our Building Bridges curriculum Jared Yates Sexton and I have been working on together to create community dialogue across ideological divides to work toward common sense solutions together, with a specific focus around the climate crisis in our meeting in Walla Walla - to York, Pennsylvania - where I got to speak about the work of HEAL PA and be a panelist for a shared dialogue at the Forum on Pennsylvania’s Children - these past few months of getting to travel and meet with different communities and organizations has been wonderful.

It is always humbling to leave the DC bubble and get the important reminder that while policy work is important, systems transformation work is about so much more than just policy alone. There is incredible work being done and organized by community members that want to build stronger communities, support healthier families, and help people thrive. When I turn on the news at night, these are rarely the stories I see being told, and when I do see such stories, the meat of the work is boiled down to a few minutes that captures parts of but misses so much of the magic around the amazing work that is being done. Knowing that this work goes on builds hope, not just because it is nice to know that people are out there doing good things in the world everyday, but also because we can learn things that we can do to make our world a better place as well. So many times we think we need money to get the work started, and I will address funding issues because it is necessary in talking about sustaining and scaling the work we do, but there are also so many examples of people doing things that make the world better and cost no money, but the very valuable resources of time and effort, which given the disparities in our world, I just want to explicitly recognize that not everyone has the same capacity to give. 

But for those who have the capacity to watch hours of tv and feel hopeless about the state of our world, which is many of us, myself included sometimes, and I do not say with judgement, there are opportunities for us to work together to work toward the world we all deserve. Our community fabric has been fraying for a while, and bingeable television and social media have been major accelerants, but the antidote is each of us. As we create healthy relationships with each other and just be good neighbors, we are beginning to reweave the social fabric. We can take next steps by bringing together coalitions that bridge work across silos in our communities and work to reduce resource gaps and support service delivery where it is necessary. 

We don’t hear these stories enough, and that is part of the work I am trying to move into. This is not only a detriment to individuals, but also to organizations and communities who do not learn from the good work that others are doing. It is not the fault of communities nor organizations that are doing grassroots work that this is so prevalent. Grassroots work often takes so much time and capacity that those doing the work are not thinking about how they can become known by communities they do not know, they are thinking about how they can help the most people in their communities. As local media becomes less and less prevalent, we are faced with a new question of who then is telling these stories? And then, because we know that these stories are being told, we are then faced with other questions of how do we get more people to hear them?

I just learned this week that my LinkedIn posts when I put up my blog each Saturday are probably less viewed than they would otherwise have been because I put the link in my post instead of putting it in the first comment of my post. That to me logically makes no sense in a normal world, but that is how to supposedly play the algorithm (I will test it out this week and see if it works). But when organizations share their stories it is often in development efforts to fund their own work, so we share links for people to give. If you don’t have that specialized knowledge, your stories get suppressed. Meta’s algorithms make it challenging for at least some nonprofits to scale messages that are asking for donations. So when there are people sharing success stories, sometimes we also have algorithms that further keep them from being known. 

We need to solve this. From the macro to the micro levels, we would be better off if we start hearing these stories. I love public speaking, it is something I feel I am good at and get a genuine rush out of. It is as close as I get to the feeling I used to get pitching, where you prepare and then have to trust your preparation because once you are out there, it is gametime, and whatever happens is what will have been. And yet despite how much I love the speaking part of such engagements, the best part is getting to learn from others, what is happening in their communities, what matters to them, what their needs are. You learn quickly that different communities have different populations, needs, resources, and desires, but that there are also a lot of similarities across demographic, geographic, and political differences. We are not as divided as we think we are, if only we could really see and hear each other instead of the social images of the other that are portrayed through media that very often has its own entrenched interests that determine what gets seen and heard, which then further entrenches us into our predispositions as social media reinforces echo chambers. This is not an accident, but is the design of the current system. Sowing division has raised fear that has been a powerful fundraising tactic used by both sides in different ways, but reinforced by both, at the expense of all of us and the communities we live in. We must navigate beyond these limitations.

I think about this as I travel back from these gatherings, whether classes or community meetings or full blown conferences, how lucky I am to have been witness to/part of such an event and how many more people would benefit from learning what I just did. Communities not needing to reinvent the wheel and learn from each other, individuals finding realistic senses of hope because there is greater recognition of the good work that is happening rather than just being flooded by the bad stuff going on in our world (which would create virtuous cycles as people then find inspiration to get involved in meaningful ways, finding purpose that promotes wellbeing, and creating more work that can then be inform future work by others as well), and our systems organizing around promoting and supporting the good work that is being done. 

While I did not expect to end up here when I started writing, this supports the ideas of The Full Press. Creating a strong, coordinated social infrastructure that connects systemic wellbeing to community wellbeing to family wellbeing to individual wellbeing, and creates a new financing model to sustain and scale good work that promotes wellbeing, which creates cost avoidance. Our society is in deep debt, financially, morally, spiritually, and otherwise. We need solutions to solve each of these, and I think as we do we will see that they are interrelated in unexpected ways. But we must tell the stories that we currently do not hear. We must learn from others working in similar contexts about what has worked and what has not worked so we do not need to make the same mistakes nor learn from scratch what others already know. That is what system efficiency looks like, not reducing workforces but enhancing it so that it grows stronger across generations rather than provides short-term shareholder value at the expense of long-term wellbeing. The media and knowledge ecosystem is a part of the broader strategy of The Full Press, a way to heal capitalism and our democracy, where we are building a real vision for what a better future looks like, toward a sustainable planet and a better future for all.