The Move is We Who Engage!
A letter to our followers about our recent renaming.
To all of our followers:
The Move is officially renaming to We Who Engage!
In the Fall of 2017, we launched The Move as a movement to transform our democracy’s civic engagement infrastructure. Motivated by the belief that democracy in America has not been designed to manage the tensions that come with inclusive public conversations, we sought to nurture spaces, places, and institutions needed for our demographically complex public to come into meaningful dialogue with one another. Our work is grounded in eight principles of Civic Design, and six conversation types that the public needs to be involved in, in order to intentionally create these spaces, and to achieve more equitable outcomes in our democracy.
As we have continued our programming this year, two pandemics — COVID-19 and structural racism — have cast the unjust foundations of our democracy even further into the spotlight. They have also triggered a global expression of civic might, where millions of protesters raising their voices over physical and virtual thoroughfares to demand racial justice and government accountability. These actions and current moment of reckoning have together challenged the imagination of state leaders, organizers, and communities across the globe, to build civic infrastructures built upon values of justice, care, and human flourishing for all.
Within our team, these events have only reaffirmed our belief that the movement to build a more equitable democracy must be led by We The People.
It must be led by we who demand, imagine, and enact change by transforming our civic engagement infrastructure; and we who hold our own unique histories, questions, and motivations that inspire us into dialogue and action. Sharing with these stories and voices has been a long-standing theme of our own work, spanning from our podcast series, to our America’s Path Forward question campaign, our We Who Engage and We Who Engaged Instagram series profiling individual civic engagement experiences, and our newest Instagram Interia Live Cast series, featuring candid conversations about current events in our democracy.
By embracing a new name — We Who Engage — we hope to to reflect these values and direction, and to unite our past, current, and upcoming digital media initiatives; and to explore narrative as a way to rebuild our nation’s civic engagement infrastructure.
In these ways, we are looking forward to growing this work in community as We Who Engage, and thank you all for your engagement with us so far. Please stay plugged into our Instagram, Twitter, Medium, Soundcloud, and MIT Open pages to learn about our upcoming initiatives and projects.
Sincerely,
The We Who Engage Team 2020 (Ceasar McDowell, Sharon Velasquez, Julia Curbera, Josiah Washington, Ahalya Ramgopal, Ayushi Roy, Babak Manouchehrifar, Courtney Lee, Catalina Romero, and Amelia Seabold)
