About the project

Imagine vibrant, interactive installations popping up in communities across the country, creating spaces to gather, fostering a sense of curiosity, creativity, and belonging in regular civic life – the new barn raising.

New rituals

Small-scale, low-pressure fun gatherings with a light civic component meant to be heavy on listening and community as proof that a new experience is possible.

  • Hosted & open-sourced, self-organized gatherings
    • Community Conversations
    • Civic Potlucks
  • Gently guided experiences and listening sessions
  • Storymining to create inter-community bridges and counternarratives to the national hyperpolarization story

Disenchanted or misenchanted?

Disenchantment is downstream from disappointment and frustration is downstream from exclusion, disregard, and the failure to deliver. Misenchantment is the adoption and celebration of principles counter to our small “d” democratic culture.

  • People otherwise oriented toward working in and being part of institutions make outsider choices when they become disenchanted
  • People become disenchanted when they are excluded, disregarded, ignored, or told out right they don’t matter
  • The people who drive extremist American politics are misenchanted by cultures of ideological purity performance art, politics as celebrity, winning at all costs, and demonizing opponents as enemies.

Re-enchantment

The process of bringing people back into system with intentional, personal invitations to belong and participate rooted in their language and the communities they are already participating in despite their disenchantment with politics at large.

  • The resacralization of civic life should be guided by earnest commitments to each other and defined by new civic rituals we undertake together
  • Common Bond is an invitation to civic experiences animated by a commitment to community, mutual duty to serve others, and a desire to reclaim our civic life.

New experiences can create a renewed sense of possibility in The Disenchanted that will help to reweave our frayed social fabric and start people down a path to healthier civic life.