Walt Roberts and Caleb Christen Talk about the Inter-Movement Impact Project
Newsletter 262 - August 11 , 2024
Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess talked with Walt Roberts and Caleb Christen on July 24, 2024. Walt and Caleb founded and co-direct the Inter-Movement Impact Project (IMIP), an example of what we have been calling "massively parallel problem solving" and "massively parallel democracy building" as it currently exists "in the real world." In this newsletter, we give some of the highlights of that interview; the full interview (video and transcript) can be found at https://www.beyondintractability.org/mbi-interviews/roberts-christen
At the beginning of our discussion, we asked Walt and Caleb to each share a bit of their background, as it informs what they are doing now. Walt explained that he has been doing social movement organizing throughout his entire career, focusing on the value of what he calls "high-quality generative conversations" in large group settings. He facilitated such conversations for the sustainability movement, the Occupy movement, and the Trans-partisan movement in which he worked Debilyn Molineaux, who was the first director of The Bridge Alliance, as well as with Peace Godwin as he was forming the Listen First Projeect, and the Listen First Coalition. Walt also piloted the program that became Livingroom Conversations. So he's been in what has come to be called "the bridging field" for quite some time. Caleb is a lawyer, and spent a good part of his career in the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. He changed directions after that and went to seminary and business school. The combination of all three of those things made him realize, he explained, that "communities weren't thriving the way they were supposed to and that it's on us to fix that. And democracy is one of those vehicles for doing so, as are networks and systems."
So Walt and Caleb teamed up to form the Inter-Movement Impact Project which is, in Walt's words, "a movement of many movements," which seeks to "build a community of connectors, where the connectors are building bridges between the movements for collective influence and impact organizing."
When I asked them what their original goals for IMIP were, Caleb answered that
I'll just set the table with what we were seeing at that time. And it was a lot of silos. There was a lot of wonderful efforts out there that related to civic health and pro-democracy from a nonpartisan, transpartisan kind of perspective. =But they weren't talking together, talking to each other, working together as much as they could have been. A lot of inefficiencies, silos, silver bullet mentalities. There's just a lot of meat left on the bone for overall effectiveness.
About that time Zach Beauchamp wrote an article in Vox where he said that the U.S. needs a pro-democracy movement and didn't have one. That, Caleb said, was the impetus for them to get started. They also were very much influenced by an article written by Rachel Kleinfeld (who is with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) entitled "Five Strategies to Support Democracy." (We, too, very much liked that article and had an earlier newsletter focused on it.) Rachel's fourth strategy was "build a broad-based, multi-stranded, pro-democracy movement around a positive vision concretized in locally rooted action." This, Walt said, laid out the "whole hologram" of what was needed, and what IMIP seeks to be and do. IMIP is "diverse. It's multi-stranded. It's a movement of many movements. It has a positive vision. It's got to be rooted, concretized, taken to the ground, solidified in communities, with locally rooted action."
Before long, Caleb and Walt attended the meeting of the 22nd Century Initiative, which held a conference in the summer of 2023, which sought to "forge a people-powered democracy." To do that, they argued, they needed to both "block" and "build." They needed to block the bad things that were happening (particularly toxic polarization and rising support for authoritarianism), and build something good in its place — that being "an inclusive, multi-racial, people-powered democracy." There was also a lot of talk at that meeting about the need to "work together." There were many different people and organizations represented, with different goals, different strategies, and different priorities. They needed to (in Walt's words) "get over their family squabbles" and start working effectively together. So Walt and Caleb added a third "B" to their rubric: Block, BRIDGE, and Build, a formulation that the leaders of the 22nd Century Initiative also adopted, though the put the words in a different order. Walt and Caleb developed this illustration to show their plans:
In order to bring their plans to fruiting, Walt and Caleb have been holding many one-on-one conversations (it must be over 1000, they agreed) with potentially interested (and interesting) people, and tried to bring many of them into a monthly conversation that they have been holding on zoom for a few years. This is how Guy and I got involved (credit to Mark Gerzon who introduced us to Walt), and we've been attending most of their zoom meetings for about 16 months. What we find particularly impressive is that when we started there were probably about 20 or so people on the call. Now there are 60 or more. And many of these people are folks such as Kristina Becevar, who is the current head of the Bridge Alliance, which is an organization of many other organizations, representing many thousands of individual people. Leaders of Braver Angels, and Livingroom Conversations are also involved, and they, too, are organizations that have thousands of members or participants. So the reach is growing substantially -- we talked later on in the interview about the "snowball effect." And out of the conversations which take place at the monthly meeting, are new projects that participants start, once they see the need and the opportunity to partner with other participants to start something new.
Walt added that the ability to bring about desired outcomes rests on three things:
First, the quality of our thinking. Number two, the quality of our conversations. And three, the quality of our relationships. Those things give the quality of the outcomes or results that we can produce in an organization, in a community, whatever. And so the quality of the conversation, the opportunity to really get clear about what a generative conversation is, basically a creative conversation. Something emerges from it. So the idea of "generate" is important."
Following on this idea, they have created the Generate Democracy! LinkedIn group, and urge people who are interested in learning more about this "movement of many movements" to go there to learn more and, if they desire, to get involved.
What is particularly exciting to Guy and me about this effort is the ability it has to generate hope and to show people that there is an alternative to the extremely toxic and dangerous politics that is dominating the United States right now. As Guy and I said in our post on Massively Parallel Partisanship, right now the forces sowing hatred, fear, and polarization are dominant. And many people have given up hope, figuring that democracy in America is doomed. But if you look at the work that is being reported monthly on the IMIP calls, it is amazing. Effective bridging efforts, effective deliberative democracy efforts, effective structural change efforts are happening all over this country. But they aren't getting covered by the media, which is much more interested in conflict and blood. (Remember the line "if it bleeds it leads?") The same is true, even more so, for social media, where people try to build support for their side and make themselves feel better, or feel important by posting the most outrageous stories about the other side, and the best about one's own. IMIP is trying to coordinate the many people and organizations who are trying to block such divisive behavior (the block component), while helping both sides bridge to the other, and build a new, more resilient, and healthier democracy in which everyone would want to live. In Walt's words:
Caleb and I have focused most of our attention, like 90% of it, on the ecosystem of many movements and the practitioners and the active citizens and volunteers and players and communicators and influencers who are working on generating democracy, fixing what's broken about our political stuff, etc. So there's a community to build out of the folks that are already in the ecosystem and spending a good part of their time working on those things.
And then there's the rest of the world. There's everybody else who really doesn't even know that these literally more than 10,000 organizations that are all somewhat nonpartisan, cross-partisan, transpartisan are working on all these different sort of dimensions of fixing what's broken and strengthening what's good. And so how to get that word out? ...We're working on that.
Caleb added another metaphor to the conversation about how to get the word out:
I was thinking of the metaphor of just like a bee. If you're outside and maybe you have a couple of bees floating around, you might notice them. You might not. But if you got a whole hive there, well, there's a whole lot greater likelihood that you're going to notice that hive. And I think that's really what we're building towards. And I think there's a lot of beauty in that metaphor as well, because with the forums that Walt hosts and Generate Democracy! LinkedIn Group, it is all building this kind of collective intelligence, as well as the individual organizations are driving a lot of value from connecting with each other and finding synergistic opportunities. But then having this whole hive that's developing that are all connected to each other, moving in the same direction. Not only do you notice it, but there's a lot greater impact that can come from all these different organizations working together.
Guy pointed out that IMIP is not only an example of what we call "massively parallel problem solving" and "massively parallel democracy building," but it also corresponds to his notion of "society's learning engine."
It's basically the principle that all problems create opportunities for people who can solve them. And what's so exciting about this project is that it consists of lots of different groups of people who have seen some problem in this larger context of dysfunctional democracy and figured out something that they can do to help solve it. And it's a lot of very different things. They're sort of in parallel, but sometimes there's some pretty significant disagreements. Some folks approach things largely from a left-leaning progressive perspective and are working toward the center. Other folks are approaching it from a more conservative perspective. And then there are folks that approach it from a sort of centrist, transpartisan perspective. Somewhere, I have a PowerPoint slide that I've used often showing that there are lots of different ways to build bridges. And that's what's happening. And I think one of the real strengths of this is that it really does promote a wide variety of efforts and provide a home for people with a wide diversity of views about how to solve this. And instead of getting caught up in this endless debate over who's got the right answer, the truth is it's an all of the above answer.
Walt added to that, pointing to their six-circle venn diagram. There's nothing magic about the number 6, it could be 12, he said, but it gives you a sense of how all these movements and organizations are working in different areas, on, as Guy said, from a variety of perspectives, but they all come together in the center where they are generating democracy together.
Walt then added that "one of the more important things that I think is central to all of this is communication. How can we network together all the communication networks that there are and start to have a more coherent and cohesive message? IMIP, he says, is working on that, and the Generate Democracy! LinkedIn page is a start of that effort.
Walt then explained what IMIP is doing in a different way -- how it relates to what he called "the big picture of things."
I find myself wanting to speak to is the bigger picture of things — what's at the root of our discontent and lack of harmony. And there are huge, wicked, systemic problems: how we practice capitalism, how that plays with politics. And that's a huge thing, and that's not being talked about very much, and it needs to be addressed. And that's going to take decades to transform that and/or adjust it, so it's a little bit more just and equitable. And in a way, the part of what we're doing that's not spoken out loud, but Duncan Autrey put it well in a forum a couple of months ago. He said that, "Oh, I get it. What we're doing, what the Inter-Movement Impact Project is doing, what Generate Democracy! is doing, is we're we're working on the wicked problem of how do we solve wicked problems together?" And that's really it. Democracy, if it's not functioning, then we can't really generate the policies. We can't respond to the needs of the people. And the discontent has come from decades of lack of performance by our political system to produce sustainable, reasonable results and policies around things that are challenging, both kitchen table issues, economy, taxes, and just getting along. So anyway, at the heart of it, how we do capitalism and how we actually have the mechanism and the incentives and the structures and processes to solve wicked problems together is a really important part of what we're doing
We ended the conversation by talking about timing. Are they thinking long term, or short term -- preparing, for example for the U.S. presidential election. Walt responded that they are doing both. A lot of what they are doing now is forming the connections and getting people to think in terms of responding quickly after the election. They are asking people they talk to whether they are "ready for the tsunami of badness that might be coming? Will you join the tsunami of interested people who want to make a difference and do something to be on the right side of this? Are you ready to welcome people who want to come rushing to the movement?" If we are ready, he said, we can make a difference. If we are not, the opportunities might just go rushing by. So Walt and Caleb are particularly focused on the next eight or so months, wanting to prepare for the election and its aftermath, and trying to make it a victory for democracy, not its defeat.
We talked about much more, so if you find this interesting,
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