Are You Ready to Step Into the Arena?
How We Engage For Change to Create the Future We All Want
I stepped into the Arena in August of 2016 when I quit my job of four years and accepted an offer to become a field organizer for the Clinton campaign in South Florida, working 80 hours a week for less than minimum wage.
I thought I was signing up to help elect America’s first female president.
I couldn’t have imagined I was signing up to lose.
The days after November 8 were hard for me, as they were for many.
I saw the first Arena Summit in Nashville from afar — I was too tired to do anything yet. But eventually I overcame my sleep deficit and I was ready to get back at it again.
I believed we needed to fundamentally reinvent how we do politics, to look for ways that design thinking — methods that have disrupted almost every other sector in the world — could help us better understand our voters and to clarify the values on which progressives run for office. I wanted to find ways to make both politics and governance more collaborative and inclusive.
I created a Google Drive folder called Future of Democracy.
I started looking everywhere for people who saw the same opportunity and when I walked into the Arena Summit in Detroit, I found them. I met Steve Sinha, the founder of Empowered To Run, and worked with him to create an online course to help candidates better understand their voters through in-depth interviews, which we’re testing in a partnership with She Should Run right now.
I met Adam Anderson, a future candidate for state office in California and worked with him to test a workshop on the future of education with about 40 parents, teachers, principals, and education advocates in San Francisco and Sacramento.
There were countless other amazing people who showed up in Detroit whose work I admired from afar.
And my work to revitalize and re-integrate our democracy didn’t stop there.
This winter, I worked with Represent.Us to produce the first Unrig The System Summit, which brought together more than 1500 democracy reform scholars and organizers in New Orleans.
This spring, I worked with Personal Democracy Forum on a digital promotion strategy to reach 75,000 people across the country.
I worked with LabGov — an Italian organization expanding into the US — to produce a retreat at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center to bring together European and American city leaders to explore new models of collective governance and pooled economy.
At home here in Brooklyn, I’ve been working with the New Kings Democrats on The Vision Project: The Future of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. We’re hosting workshops across Brooklyn asking Democrats to define the values they hope will guide their leaders, the qualities of a good leader and a good citizen, and the ways leaders can work together with citizens to strengthen our communities. We’re inviting them to imagine with us a future in which the local Democratic Party represents the values of the 1.25 million Democratic voters across the borough.
I believe that running for office is vitally necessary but insufficient to actually change the nature of politics in America.
We’ve got to dig deeper, into the systems and standards that have kept political power in the hands of elite power brokers for way too long. We’ve got to reimagine politics and redefine the shared values we take for granted in our efforts to find common cause.
I’m headed to the Arena Summit in Philadelphia next month because I want to make more amazing connections with people doing the hard work to bend the arc.
I want to hear about the victories, defeats, and lessons learns over the past year.
More than anything though, I want to make plans. I want to figure out how we forge ties and deep understanding, how to build connections that can ensure the progressive movement in America prevails.
I know I’ll run for office at some point in the future (we all have to — especially women — is we want anything to be different from how it is) but right now I’m focused on how to change the game itself. I’m stepping into the Arena to engage for lasting change, once and for all.
Who’s with me?
You can register right now at this link for as little as $50: https://thearena.run/philadelphia/.
PS: If you are inspired by this message, but have not yet thought about how politics affects your life or how your life can affect politics, that is totally okay. The Arena is a great place to start. I hope I’ll see you there
