Building a movement around good government ideals has eluded the transpartisan, bridging, and pro-democracy fields for years. After twenty years in this work, and hearing funders and partisans complain about “kumbaya” moments, I dug into why.
What I found: even people working in these fields couldn’t say how democracy improved their own daily life. “Democracy” had become too abstract to matter — too abstract even for me. So I went back to my libertarian roots and my reading of Atlas Shrugged. Where others saw only greed, I saw a core truth of human nature: we all want something for ourselves, and that desire drives most enterprise.
The question became: how do we channel that impulse into civic engagement?
The answer is simple. People don’t stay engaged in something they can’t feel in their own life. Ask them to defend democracy in the abstract, and they shrug. Ask what a better life feels like — for their kids, their street — and they light up. We move toward what we want, not what we’re told to believe about what matters or some idea of what being a citizen means.
That’s why personal visioning has to come before civic engagement, not alongside it. When people vision out loud, they discover they want nearly the same things: safety, better lives for their kids, neighbors who know their names. Nobody visions for gridlock.
Kumbaya asks people to feel good together. Visioning asks them to want something for themselves which turns out to be something together — and wanting is what keeps people showing up. Belief fades. Desire doesn’t.
When we start with issues or systems, we’ve stepped away from the personal desires that actually fuel movements. It’s time to start personally and individually. Nothing less will hold together for the time it will take.
JEDI Futures was created to address this need. The personal visioning tool is free to use or adapt with attribution. Together, we all want better lives. Let’s build the communities that house our shared future.