Caleb Christen and Vinay Orekondy Talk about the Better Together America Project
Newsletter 281 - October 1, 2024
I (Heidi Burgess) talked with Vinay Orekondy and Caleb Christen on September 17, 2024 about an exciting new program they are starting (with a number of other people) called Better Together America.
Vinay, an attorney, mediator, community organizer, advocate, and a coalition-builder, is originally from Australia. Upon emigrating to the United States, he became interested in electoral issues and was active in Rank the Vote's efforts to bring ranked-choice voting to America., He then sought to broaden his democracy-building efforts by becoming active in the Intermovement-Impact Project. He recently became co-chair of the Braver Network at Braver Angels, and is Co-Founder and Partnerships Director at Better Together America.
Before founding Better Together America, Caleb was also a co-founder with Walt Roberts of the Intermovement-Impact Project. Both efforts are based on Caleb's desire to transform American democracy and civic health by enabling and empowering others to work together to maximize overall effectiveness. Caleb is also a lawyer and a senior officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Caleb holds a JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School, an MA in Christian Practice from Duke Divinity School, a PGDip in Organizational Leadership from Oxford University, Said Business School, and a graduate certificate in International Politics and Practice and a BA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Theory Behind Democracy or Civic "Hubs"
Better Together America is working at the local level to help people build what BTA calls "civic hubs" or "democracy hubs" to strengthen civic engagement and democratic practice. I started out asking Caleb and Vinay to describe the "hubs" that Better Together America is helping communities to build. But Vinay suggested that he start by explaining the theory behind the hub idea. In his words:
This movement has been quite siloed until recently. It's not by design. It's just that each part of it was its own movement, whether it be electoral reform, or bridging, or participatory democracy, or any of that. And, I suppose, democracy was just the thing that you acted upon. There wasn't necessarily a thought, "Okay, we need this sort of unified civic health and democracy space."
But Vinay, Caleb, and the others behind BTA realized that each of these movements could be more effective if they worked together, instead of separately. As Vinay explained,
"If we're pulling these groups together by locality, then ultimately what should it look like in practice?" We've spoken about community building. So that obviously means building social connections and stronger connections amongst the participants, among the members of these various organizations. But it also means finding a kind of a structural workflow between these different parts. So for example, how does civic participation and volunteerism relate to bridging? How does bridging relate to participatory democracy? How does participatory democracy relate to campaigns?
And what we realized, is that the order that I just laid out seems to be quite a logical sequence. It's almost a journey from a starting point, where you've had no prior engagement with politics (and that's many people in our space, right?) Many people who have just become incredibly concerned with the state of democracy, who've never done anything political, are now joining at one of these various entry points, and other entry points, which I haven't mentioned.
So what we're trying to do is stitch these efforts together into a kind of a sequential flow.
Anyone can start anywhere. That's fine. [ Many start by participating in one civic activity,] because civic participation is a relatively straightforward ask. It's a low lift. You can engage a lot of people through that. Bridging is a more complex ask because you're asking people to challenge their emotions and their points of view. Engaging in deliberative policy discussion is harder still. Then you have to engage with not only a civilized and fair discussion, but engage with the information and policy questions as well. And then comes the question of what do you do with these recommendations? And that's when it becomes important to act on them--whether it be advocacy or some other community-based solution. But that is a big ask because that's a leadership development process. So what we see is the hubs constituting many of those elements. There's other elements I haven't mentioned that fall in the space, like the re-invigoration of local media. They fall within that too.
So a local hub, in its perfect form, would have all of these elements and would be able to house all these different parts in a kind of a sequential flow.
But, as Vinay pointed out, they are not "there" yet. All of the communities they are working in have had different starting points. And they aren't developing at similar speeds or in similar ways. But they are all trying to "build out" so that they eventually include all the different elements of a mature civic or democracy hub.
Examples of Civic Hubs
Caleb added that they are currently working with about twelve local and a few state-wide hubs. While they are all at different phases of maturation, many of the hubs are working to build
the collaborative, connective tissue in the local area between the organizations. So that means they are helping potential members understand why they might want to work together, and then have some sort of consistent get-together where they can build relationships and get to know each other."
Others are farther along and have actually started working on projects together. Two examples Caleb gave were in Akron, Ohio and Montrose, Colorado.
Ted Wetzel, who is working in Akron, is a great example. He's been leaning hard into using Poli.is [an AI tool] to help the community identify what it wants to focus on. And similarly, in Montrose, Colorado, they started with a pretty extensive series of citizen assemblies. And that was where the community, I believe, initially started off saying that childcare was their biggest issue. Since then they've identified others that they want to work on. So they were in a position where they said, "Okay, now we need the support of a hub to help the community move forward," while the community is also wanting to work together to solve those challenges.
And Vinay described the hub that is forming in Washington D.C.
In DC, Caleb and I started "Democracy Drinks" a couple of years ago, and it has been running for about a year and a half now. Once a month, we pull together people in the democracy and civic health space to just connect with each other in a social setting. And it has that sort of DC vibe about it. Some great networks have come about through it. And now there's a lot of cross-promotion that occurs in that space. But now a leadership team for a hub has sort of emerged out of that. Right now, they are planning their next steps. The next step that's looking most likely is looking at how they can get deliberative democracy going in the city.
There is some of that going on already, Vinay explained, but they are doing one-time events. Better Together America is helping them to coordinate their efforts more, having them look at the same topic at the same time, and perhaps invite local media to get some press coverage about the process, which they hope will help them find other organizations who are either doing this already, or which are interested in starting working in that way.
The idea is essentially scaling and normalizing deliberative democracy, There are many activities that a hub can do. But deliberative democratic practices are kind of the anchor point around a lot of which this revolves. And it's a good way of helping understand what a hub is, because there's a whole lot of community-building activity that's required for a deliberative process to even function. You've got to do bridging. You've got to get people thinking civics is important, and civic participation is important. You've got to be engaged more broadly. You've got to have local media involvement. At the same time, following the deliberative practice, you've got to actually take action too. Otherwise, it is a meaningless activity.
So we've thought of it almost in phases — the pre-deliberative phase and the post-deliberative phase. So that's what I mean by deliberative practice being the anchor that kind of holds it all together. All the activities are critical, though, to be clear. They're all critical parts of it. Otherwise, it wouldn't function in that final vision.
Although they are only working in about twelve localities now, the hub idea seems to be catching on quickly. Vinay noted that
we are quite close to having a lot more hubs because there are some national organizations that we've been talking to that realize that they've got part of the pie and they're interested in getting their members to engage with the whole pie. So it's accelerating quite quickly, which is exciting."
He also explained that the the [democracy-strengthening/civic-health enhancement] movement already exists — Better Together America is not creating it.
Our role is to stitch it together. It's not to build. Eventually, we'll have to do some building. But primarily, we see our job as stitching and connecting. Eventually, we'll start finding places where there's no civic health organizing of any sort in the locality. That's when we'll build. But there's a lot of work to do before we exhaust all those existing possibilities.
Deliberative Democratic Processes
I asked Vinay to explain what he meant by "deliberative democratic processes," because I wasn't sure all our readers and listeners were clear on what that means. He answered by distinguishing it from representative democracy, in which our primary method of engagement is voting. Or maybe if we're really engaged, he said, we'll write letters or make phone calls to our representative. And that's what we think of as "democracy." But that isn't working very well here in the U.S., he said, or around the world. Deliberative democracy gets around that by bringing democracy "back to the people."
If you want rule of the people, then that means we've got to bring it back to people. So the deliberative part refers to the deliberations, the discussions that occur. We're bringing people together to solve problems in a discursive manner. But that doesn't mean you have to solve everything by consensus. You can vote as a group. But ideally, you've talked things out. In many cases, when deliberative democracy occurs, things do get resolved by consensus or by large majorities.
In those settings, it's important to note that you should bring in expertise from multiple perspectives. It's a lot like a jury. And I think that's a good model for people to think about. It's very much like a jury, but instead of deciding someone's guilt or innocence, you're taking a collective position on a policy question, whether it be local or international or everything in between.
Caleb added
There are a whole range of activities that deliberation could look like. So on one end of the spectrum, you have Braver Angels Town Halls, which are fairly informal and low effort to put together. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have more citizen assemblies and more formal, much more in-depth type activities.
Going back to Vinay's comparison to juries, I pointed out that most people don't like serving on juries. If they weren't required to do so when they are called, most people wouldn't do it. So I wondered, how the hubs are able to get people interested in participating. Vinay said that it was a matter of culture.
The cultural element of this is critical. It's not enough to just build a structure, whether it be conversations or assemblies. That's not enough. What matters is the community that feeds into it. Because you could have things that nobody shows up to. Or you could have things that are not representative, or are only representative of those who can afford to be there. That's all bad. It's still better than our current system, but it would still not be good.
That's why so much of what a civic hub is, is community-building. That's why we've incorporated bridging. It's why we're incorporating civic participation. It's why we're incorporating many other elements that will help that process of normalizing participation. And the social element is critical. So we are strongly encouraging, as these hubs develop, that they think about how they can build community. It actually is an opportunity. The loneliness crisis is massive in this country. But we have a massive opportunity to counter that with these civic hubs.
Caleb added:
It is an act of re-imagining democracy. And so everything that Vinay just described with the very participatory, deliberative type processes, it's practicing democracy. And over time, hopefully, it's building the muscle memory for it, almost to the point that it's really getting injected into the DNA of communities. That's not an overnight thing. But eventually, the hope is that it will become normalized, similar to what Vinay talked about in Vermont [Vinay had earlier described the culture of Burlington, Vermont, where participatory dialogues are commonplace. Everyone participates in them regularly.]
I reflected on my colleague Paul Wehr's research on social movements from years ago. Paul was a professor at the University of Colorado who did research on why people got involved in social movements, and why they stayed, even if they weren't successful in their efforts. (Paul was primarily looking at the anti-war, peace, and anti-nuclear weapons movements, which often were not successful.) He found that people stayed in for the social values — they made friends, it was fun (and they thought they were doing something worthwhile).
Caleb agreed, adding that
there is something like the "Join or Die" concept going on. There's fun, but there's also this need for belonging. This offers opportunities for people to belong to something. And when you combine the fun and the belonging, I think there's real power there.
Scale
I also asked Caleb and Vinay to expand upon their notion of "scale," which Vinay had mentioned early on in our conversation. I prefaced my question with the observation that many organizations which do dialogues alone seem to think that they can change the culture, just by doing a lot of them. But participants tend to go home to their "same old toxic culture," and their transformed attitudes don't tend to last very long. Vinay responded "yes, we're well aware of that problem, and we've been working to address that from early on."
The main way we're addressing it is by asking how dialogue can become action— for a couple of reasons. One is that — let's use political polarization as our example here—it's not the only form, but it's a major form. You may be depolarized, but then the next step is forming a shared identity, in your locality. I think that's how you have the strength, the continuous relationship over time to push back against those forces that you mentioned. You need to continue to be present in a continuous, shared relationship. And how do you do that? By doing things together. So that's the core of the theory here. It is shared identity through shared action and shared problem-solving. Now, shared action and shared problem-solving has an enormous ripple effect. Because people see actions. Media can report on action. Of course, they can report on dialogue too, but they're more excited by action. So that's why we think that that would lead to scale within the community level.
Now, the other thing we're trying to do about scale is by doing this across the country. The goal is to have, eventually, hubs everywhere. There's no limit to where there are hubs. And they are networked with each other. Because the other potential flaw in this model, if we didn't network them, is you could put all this effort into setting up a hub that is reliant on one person doing a lot of the work. Every hub will have its idiosyncrasies. And it might have some problems. And then without external support or help, it would struggle. And I think that it can feel like, "Okay, well, great. We've got our community together, but the country as a whole is a wreck." But what if you had lots and lots of these hubs networked with each other, sharing ideas with each other, boosting each other's morale, that's exciting. That's the power to act and think locally and have a national or a potentially even greater impact. So that's the other way we're looking at scale.
And there's other things you can do once you have that level of scale. If they're coming up with policy recommendations, what if they were sharing policy ideas amongst this network? So there's huge possibilities that can come out of this.
Learning Together
Caleb added that they have set up a learning cohort for all the people who are building these hubs.
That's a direct offering that brings them together to exchange lessons learned, best ideas. And so, to me, a big component of all this work is learning and information sharing. A lot of it is experimental. There's no one-size-fits-all model. One thing that works really well in one community might not work in another. But at the same time, creating these linkages enables the learning, the different ideas, to get passed along. We also are curating a resource center that is, again, collecting all the latest and greatest ideas and concepts and innovations, as well as trying to capture the different kind of journeys in the hub's life. So that future hub builders can kind of see how others have experientially gone through the process. And so those are all really important pieces of that learning infrastructure.
Why People Should Get Involved in This Effort
At the end of the conversation, I asked Vinay and Caleb how hubs get people involved and excited, when so many people have given up, thinking politics is hopeless and there's just no point in trying to fix it. I thought their answers were particularly powerful and persuasive.
Caleb answered first:
My immediate response is, as a country, we have delegated a lot of problem-solving to, especially, the federal government, but institutions as a whole. And we've centered ourselves on issues, very polarizing issues. So what this is offering, and a reason why it's a place to refocus our energies, is it's focusing on communities and that we have the power to solve our problems. So we don't have to entirely rely on politicians and elected officials. We can still work with them. And it's not to say that they're not important in their own right. But that together, I guess it's in our name, but together, we can solve problems. And there's excitement in that. There's also very real, and in some ways, unrealized potential there that we're tapping into.
And then Vinay added:
When people say "you know, it's all pointless," I'll say, "Well, let's look at what's dysfunctional and sidestep that." Because actually, the whole model is built on sidestepping that which is dysfunctional. It doesn't mean this is going to be easy. Rebuilding community, as a concept, is hard! The process of destruction started in the Industrial Revolution. So it's not going to be easy; it's going to be a challenge. But it's a vital one. And I think that there's a critical mass now. There's this urgency, this feeling that "something has to give." And I believe that this is, actually, despite being a big challenge, it is actually the easiest way forward. Because people want it.
If You Are Interested, Please Reach Out!
If anyone is reading this who might be interested in getting involved or is a funder who is interested in this effort, both Ca
Caleb and Vinay urge you to contact them.
If you want to start a hub, please reach out to us. If you you're a national organization who wants to support hubs or you want your local organizations to be involved in this, please reach out to us. Our goal is to help this movement and help everyone in it. And even if you don't think you can do it, if that seems like too big a lift or whatever, there's so, so many ways to be involved in this. Countless infinite ways. So, if it's just interesting and you don't know how you want to be involved, please reach out to us as well. We'll find a way.
We talked about many more things too...so if you find this interesting, please
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