Bobby Milstein talks about the Power and Promise of Shared Stewardship and Thriving Together - Full Interview

Heidi Burgess: Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability, and I'm here today with Bobby Milstein with the Rippel Foundation. I also read that you're at the MIT Sloan School of Management and he was at the CDC for a long time, like 20 years, something like that. And it was back there at the CDC, I think, that you developed the notion of “thriving.”

So, you've been carrying the idea of thriving for a long time, and now you're working on something called “Thriving Together.” I've been very taken with that notion, because we've been talking for a long time about building a democracy for all. You put that together with Thriving Together, and it really meshes nicely, so I'm really interested in hearing more about your idea of “thriving.” Before we go there, though, did I leave out any important parts of your background that you'd like to share?

Bobby Milstein: Well, only that I'm really motivated by the fascinating role of inside changemakers: people inside their own families, inside their own organizations, inside their own systems. It's partly, I think, what drew me to study anthropology really early, and eventually to study public health — how we could be individuals, but part of a full society, and how we can be healthy at every level of that — and ultimately to questions about systems, and how we can be better stewards of the systems that shape our lives together.

So that's a through line of interest personally, and through all of the work I've done. I'm really just curious about how we can be those inside changemakers in various arenas of influence.

Heidi Burgess: Great! So, tell me about this idea of thriving: where it came from, what it means, how it's changed over time.

Bobby Milstein: Yes. Well, there are some intricate turns within it, which I can catch. But I'll say one of the things that's most attractive about it is that it's directional, right? We want to be in experiences and places where we thrive. Maybe that goes by other labels — health or flourishing or prosperity — but thriving is a pretty plainspoken word for the state of being that a lot of people really value and want. And it's contrasted against other states of being that, all too often, I and so many others find ourselves in sometimes, when we are struggling or suffering.

So, a lot of the work that I've done throughout my life has been about how we move ever closer toward those states of being that we really value, and how we move away from those things that are really marked with adversity and deep pain. A colleague of mine in this work, Gary Gunderson, says that healing flows to the points of pain, which means, even in really dark times, even in moments of great adversity, there is the possibility of healing. There's the possibility of moving forward. And so, where we are moving toward is something to orient our work around.

I can say a little bit more about how that came into greater focus, as I started to appreciate the consequences of disorientation. So many efforts in the world are designed around a program or a project, and other people are doing their programs and projects, and somehow it's supposed to add up to a better system. Very often that work is really meaningful and impressive, but it rarely adds up to a better system. It often creates a lot of fragmentation and disorientation: What am I doing, and with whom, and where, and why?

And so, with all of these changemakers seeking different paths to a better future, it really helps to be unifying and humane about what the big story is behind the near edge of the things that we're all working on. “Thriving together” was increasingly the simplest way of saying it. We heard it over and over again from colleagues doing this work when we asked: “What's the big why behind why you're working on changes in our economy, or our food systems, or transportation, or housing, or health care, in different walks of life? You ask what it is that you're trying to do with that work. And through the cascade of whys, eventually it just got to be so simple. It's like, well, we're doing it to thrive together. We want to live in a world where I can thrive, and other people can too.

That two-word North Star, if you will, ended up being the most unifying, plainspoken, humane way of describing the big why that motivates so many of us in this work. And it's extra helpful that the orientation around thriving together is easily distinguished from moves in other directions that are maybe marked with some people thriving, but many others struggling and suffering. And that's a future we don't want to see.

Heidi Burgess: We've gotten a lot of pushback from folks, because we're seen as being on the bridging side of the democracy-strengthening field. Many people have been saying to us — the line that David Beckemeyer used was "we are fiddling while Rome burns" — that we're just wasting our time trying to bring people together, that the situation of American democracy has gotten so grave that we have to fight for our side. And thriving together doesn't have any connotation of fighting for one side; quite the opposite. Have you gotten any pushback in that regard?

Bobby Milstein: Well, let's unpack that. There are layers in that question. I think. One is the recognition that we are far from where we want to be, and maybe even headed in another direction, which is very real. There is a widening sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo, and more and more people by the day who are saying, "This is not the kind of world that I want to live in. It's certainly not the kind of world that I want to pass on to future generations." There's skepticism when we look at the future, or anger, or hopelessness. There are a lot of emotions that are easily understood when you look at just how far away from our full potential we could be.

And for many, that can turn into outrage or apathy. I think the issue is how we channel those feelings — or sometimes it's not experienced emotionally, but analytically; there are a lot of good reasons to say we're not on the right course — how we convert that into constructive action that brings people into an orientation around this work that feels like we're turning away from the doom loop. Not exhausting ourselves with ever more diagnosis of what's wrong, but ultimately bringing together the means and ends that help us escape that doom loop and move decisively toward a future that is different.

So when you think about that layer of it, it's not about pushback. It's really a question of what works for whom, under what conditions. Sometimes there are places to really focus on: Are there parties who are benefiting from the status quo, and if so, who is bearing the burdens of that? That helps us understand what path we are on and why we are on that path.

But that kind of examination of the present trajectory is only part of the challenge. The other part is to look for alternatives, and to embrace those alternatives in ways that don't perpetuate the us-and-them dynamics that we've got now, or the narratives about winners and losers. There are ways of making moves that bring a concern for everybody's well-being to the foreground, and that kind of solidarity that says we can thrive together, and we have to look for ways to make it happen. Because historically, our systems, our worlds, have never been set up for everyone to thrive. It should be no surprise that we find a lot of people struggling and suffering, and there are many reasons to believe that that adversity can get even worse.

So. it becomes a disciplined practice to look for those alternatives that are unifying, that bring our values for connection and contribution together, and to find pathways that work for virtually all of us. I say virtually, because the aspiration of thriving together has overwhelming agreement in almost every data source you'd look at, or every community conversation you'll be a part of. There might be a small fraction of people who are so interested in their own well-being as to be totally indifferent or hostile to others. But for the most part, it's really a perplexity of how we create the conditions for everyone to thrive together. And if we can find them, many, many people — overwhelming majorities of people in America and around the world — are going to choose those things that are unifying and humane.

Heidi Burgess: It seems to me that part of the story has to be getting people out of a zero-sum mindset, where you assume that the more that person has, the less I have, and getting them to realize that we can have a positive-sum situation — a rising tide will lift all ships, I guess, is the phrase — rather than having it be one versus the other. With our capitalist system, we seem to be so honed in on the notion that things are win-lose, and we're ultra-competitive. I find it's hard to get people to break out of that mindset.

Bobby Milstein: That's a beautiful question in the way that you articulated it, because the us-and-them worldview is actually relatively modern. It's been established through decades and decades of culture shaping that puts in the idea that we are not as interdependent as we really are, and that some can do well, even if others are doing badly. There are many examples of these norms of fragmentation, which would have seemed foreign to our ancient ancestors in the years before the global, modern turn, I guess I'll say.

So much of this work of thriving together is about turning — or maybe I should say returning — to some of the norms that have allowed human communities to thrive from the beginning, right? If we didn't have the capacity to care for each other, and to be connected, and to elicit contributions from everybody, we would never have evolved as a social species, in connection with an environmental home where we, too, are interdependent with the places that we live.

Sometimes this work is seen as a transition from a status quo that's marked by lots of signs of fragmentation, moving toward a norm of interdependence. And so sometimes we talk about this work as thriving together through shared stewardship. The shared stewardship part of that is quite important, because the way that we can escape the worrisome, alarming path that we're on and move in a different direction is through the practice of more intentional interdependence: by discovering that we are stronger together, and that when even one more person feels they belong, even one more person is valued for what they bring, together we can end up doing things that we could never do alone.

So, the practice of shared stewardship is itself a way of flipping the script on scarcity and abundance, or us-and-them narratives, to discover that that has never really been true. What we've lost touch with is the norms and practices — even the visibility of stewards in our lives. To me, that's one way that we can accelerate this shift from fragmentation to interdependence: just by starting to think and act like shared stewards together.

Heidi Burgess: That really resonates with me. How do you sell it to people who aren't used to seeing themselves in that way, to taking responsibility? I've been talking quite a bit with Harry Boyte about courageous citizenship, and we've posted, as you know, all of the citizen scholar papers that you guys put together. I just read your paper this morning and really liked it.

But it's clear that a lot of people aren't thinking in that way. They're thinking of citizenship, as Harry puts it, as just something that you have legally or you don't. I think it might have been your paper that talked about vending-machine citizenship versus barn-raising citizenship. I love that metaphor. It strikes me that so many of us are in vending-machine mode.

Bobby Milstein: Yeah, it's an excellent point. Harry's been a great friend and colleague for decades in this work. I've learned so much from him.

To answer your first question directly — how do you help people appreciate the feasibility and the significance of the difference between leading on behalf of your own issue or institution, being an administrator or a manager of some kind, versus being a steward? This is a role and an identity that has ancient roots, and it's not as visible or valued in our present day. But if you go looking for it, you can find stewards everywhere. We have a podcast at Rippel called Unsung Stewards, which is designed to illustrate that there are people in our sight line, if you turn your attention to look for stewards that you admire, you're going to find them. You're going to find them in every organization, in every community.

These are the people who have ways of thinking and acting that connect across difference, that expand opportunities where they don't exist, and they learn and adapt in very remarkable ways. It's not usually a skill set that people learn in school, or certainly rarely on the job. But they are those people who can stay human in very dehumanizing times and dehumanizing situations. They are the glue, and they bring the love and the healing into situations that are fraught with major challenges of division and adversity.

So, the first step in recognizing that we can strengthen shared stewardship — and that it can propel us toward a future where we thrive together — is to recognize that there are stewards all among us, and it's actually quite an abundant asset. That's really good news. If you're not paying attention to it, and you're feeling skeptical about how we are ever going to address the challenges we face, the answer is: we are already a bigger "we" than we think.

The orientation of mainstream news and information is going to feed you a steady stream of adversity and crisis. So literally, we're not paying attention to the other signals that are all around us, that say there are people who are willing to do impressive things, who are willing to be courageous, who see themselves and others as citizens and stewards of things that they value. That asset is actually a lot stronger than most people understand at the moment, because we're not really paying much attention to it.

So, it's very good news that the practice of stewardship is alive and well all across the country. It just can get a lot stronger. In fact, it needs to get a lot stronger, because our lives depend on it, and when we are out of touch with that, it ends up creating some of the conditions for deepening adversity. So when we think about alternative futures, it's a little bit countercultural to suggest that a lot of those futures are in our own hands. It's a question of whether those hands join together and pull us into a future that we know we have to create together, versus those hands doing small things in separate ways, with lots of people on the sidelines wringing their hands and saying, "Oh my God!" Those are not the conditions in which we can make decisive moves in a better direction.

For me, and for many colleagues in this work, that alone is an energizing idea: that we are very close to being able to do many of the things that would be in widespread interest. We just have to think more like organizers than administrators or managers.

Heidi Burgess: Give me one or two examples of stewards who are doing this kind of thing that we aren't watching.

Bobby Milstein: Yeah, one of my favorite examples is from Palm Beach County, Florida. This is a group that galvanized after the Parkland shooting, which was in an adjacent area. That was, and still is, one of the most deadly high school shootings in the nation. It kicked off for them a real frustration that the status quo they were living through was no longer acceptable. There was that deep dissatisfaction with the status quo: cycles of violence and trauma, the habit of relying on experts who never seem to have a good enough solution to stick, generations of young people feeling like they don't matter. Their desire to create a very different future was very strong.

They came together and sketched a path that was really about the whole community being a place that valued young people, and the values that held people together there. They lived in that creative tension between the world as it is, and the world as they want it to be. And very quickly, as they started to think about what it meant to think and act like stewards, they focused more and more on the world that we make together. They called more and more people in to see themselves as playing complementary roles in stewarding the future of well-being in Palm Beach.

Heidi Burgess: How did that start? Was it one person who got some people together?

Bobby Milstein: No, like a lot of things, it's a small network who then bring others in over time. It grew from a handful of organizations. Many communities across the country have multisector networks. In this case it was called Be Well Palm Beach County. And the self-identity of what Be Well started as and grew into was not just around the mental health crisis or behavioral health. Mental health and behavioral health were the near edge of a larger vision of being a place where we could all be well.

They've played in that creative tension really well, because it invites people from all walks of life. By that, I mean folks in government agencies, child service organizations, members of the taxing district, philanthropy, journalists, neighborhood organizers — quite a cast of characters. And they started to discover that when they can connect together and practice the work of shared stewardship, they can feel like they're making some motion toward things that matter, and each of those things is a capacity builder for the next new thing that they can do together.

So, they've been going through various cycles of action and capacity building that have built out a pipeline of career professionals, including early-career investments. They've made what they called mini-grants to neighbors — folks who would never have been seen as investable, but who had an idea to create conditions for health and well-being in their community. Giving these neighbors a few hundred dollars, up to maybe $5,000, to just go run with their ideas has been a remarkable energizer for building the chief asset, which is a greater sense of belonging and civic muscle.

When that group grows through actions that build belonging and civic muscle, they can tackle bigger and bigger things. Since then, millions — tens of millions of dollars — have been moving in different directions across Palm Beach County over the last several years, because there are more and more people who see themselves as stewards.

If you go to the Be Well PBC website, you can see videos that are kind of unusual as videos: 20, 30, 40 people who stand up in front of the camera and say, "I'm a steward in this community because…," and here's why. There aren't a lot of communities across the country where you can point a camera at dozens of people and they can all say what their part in this large story is. So Be Well PBC is just a nice, succinct example of a pattern we see in lots of places — hundreds, and really, honestly, everywhere we look. Their effort at making a decisive move away from the pattern they were in, sparked by their disgust at the Parkland shooting, has meant that they've been deepening their commitment to a different path. And that path is marked by people who see themselves as stewards.

Heidi Burgess: You said a few minutes ago that this isn't something that is taught in schools. But it sounds like it is something that folks in Florida were able to learn from watching other people behaving that way.

Bobby Milstein: Yeah, I'm so glad you made that point, because the fact that it's not taught in schools is more an issue of curriculum than of it not being teachable. The mindsets and practices of stewardship are actually a very practical, humane way of being that can be modeled from others that you see. It certainly can be learned and coached. Having accompaniment and peer connections helps to benchmark: Here's what I'm doing, but what are counterparts like me in other places doing? So, we can start to strengthen shared stewardship. Absolutely.

In our work at ReThink Health and Rippel, we've been going for almost 20 years now through cycles of action learning — like three-year cycles — asking what we are learning with colleagues who are on the frontiers of the field. Some of the initial questions were: Would anybody care about wanting to become a steward? What is it that helps us differentiate practices of stewardship from other kinds of leadership that might be less oriented around unifying and thriving together?

The answers to many of those early-stage questions were yes, this is feasible. You can see very clear patterns of mindsets and practices, even in stewards who don't see themselves in those words or couldn't articulate it for you. But when you observe how they're working, it's quite obvious how they're able to, let's say, listen to unheard voices, or weave vested interests together, or change a storyline to point out multi-solvers, or bridge time horizons, to focus on our legacies of the past and the future, legacies that are just and unjust. Or maybe they're really good at using data to chart progress and really question what our next move is.

The practices of shared stewardship became very easily identified when we looked at colleagues across the field. And so those things now open up a new horizon of how we learn and deepen this as a norm. So, it ends up being about establishing norms.

We learned this the hard way, but when we do self-assessments, we ask: What kind of a steward am I, and could I be better at that? There are three levels at which you can often pose that question. You could do it personally: What are the things that I do, as Bobby? Then I can also ask: What about the organizations that I'm a part of? My strengths and shortcomings as a steward may be different from my organization's. Very often, we find that individuals have a much more developed practice of stewardship than the organizations they're a part of. So, our organizations inhibit us in many ways, and detach us from the habits and mindsets of stewardship.

And then you can also ask across networks: My organization may be growing in its way, but how are we connecting with others? If you work in and through those three levels — individually, organizationally, and across a network — then new norms can start to take hold really quickly, so we can start working together. Because the expectation is that we're going to connect across difference as a norm. We're going to expand opportunity where it doesn't exist as a norm. We're going to learn and adapt, rather than pretend there's one and only one way to do this work.

We ended up creating a list of 15 of these practices, which are linked to here. 

Heidi Burgess: Great.

Bobby Milstein: That's one of the chief findings of the prior rounds of action learning. At this point, it's not whether people could be better stewards or might want to be, but how we do it, as far and as fast as we can. How do we do it in really high-stakes, contested situations, so that we bring the best of our stewardship to the hardest of our challenges, and help to navigate through some of the adversity that we face, with this relentless effort to move toward thriving together?

Heidi Burgess: The thing that's jumping out at me is that, while you said it's not taught in schools, my image is that we're going through a period now where we're trying to reinvent civics education. There was a long period in which high schools weren't teaching civics anymore because it was so contentious; it was easier not to teach it. And now we're seeing the downsides of that decision, because there are students who don't have the faintest idea how the American government is supposed to work. This curriculum would slide right into what strikes me as a marvelous civics education program for high schools.

Bobby Milstein: Yeah. I visited a high school in Atlanta recently that had made a decades-long investment in what's called a Purpose Built Community. They made a number of intentional changes to create the kind of community conditions that they value, including a lifelong learning infrastructure: pre-K, a lower school, which I didn't physically visit, and the upper school. I was there and was given a remarkable, indelible tour by a group of young people and their teachers and school administrators, who had created an environment that was infused with many aspects of what I would recognize as stewardship.

It's not important that people use the exact words. What's important is the mindsets and the practice. And again, you're going to find positive outliers in lots of places; the issue is whether we start establishing these as expected norms over and over again. So for sure, bringing back the elements of civics education is a step in the right direction. And civics, not just in the sense of our orientation to the state through elections, or even our roles as volunteers, but also the daily work we do through our jobs. How do we do things of lasting civic significance?

There's a wonderful curriculum called Third Way Civics that helps to identify the unifying, pragmatic traditions that have been hallmarks of American history, where we're really building a commonwealth together. That has fallen out of sight and out of fashion in many ways. Reconnecting with that element means the expectation at every grade level is that you're not just preparing young people for future citizenship. You're helping socialize them and create environments where people are connected and contributing to create the conditions that they care about: in their classrooms, on the walk to school, in their families.

This can be done in an age-appropriate way all the time. The neurobiologists and psychologists have shown that there's a deep psychological need at a very young age not just to connect — we're all born connected to a parent and in social relationships, so isolation is totally toxic — but there's also a deep need to contribute by early adolescence. If we're not creating opportunities for people to contribute, we're really depriving ourselves and our whole community of immense assets, and it should be no surprise that there are downsides to that, if people are only seen as the recipients of services.

This is where that vending-machine metaphor starts to really matter. If the dominant metaphor of society is that we are individuals, we pay taxes, and the government — or maybe professionals — delivers services, that strips away much of what I think a lot of us would say is a necessary feature of living life in a commonwealth.

Heidi Burgess: A requirement of thriving.

Bobby Milstein: Yeah. One of the founders of our organization was Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. The very conspicuous Nobel Prize is one thing, but behind the scenes, she and Harry Boyte were very involved in creating the field of civic studies, to regenerate interest in — like a renaissance of — understanding what we can learn by studying civic life. She was one of the pioneers who helped start ReThink Health and our decades-long commitment to studying what it takes to thrive together through shared stewardship. Her Nobel Prize was for decades of worldwide work showing that we can be better or worse stewards of the things in our vital interest.

Heidi Burgess: This all sounds really good. I want to go to your recent report that you did with Gallup, which doesn't sound so good.

Bobby Milstein: Yes.

Heidi Burgess: There is a way out at the end, but the statistics at the beginning of that report were jaw-dropping to me. I don't remember the numbers, but something like 40-some percent of people now in the United States — I gather this is just the United States — see themselves as thriving. How is thriving defined?

Bobby Milstein: Yeah, I'll answer the definition question in a moment. But I just don't want to skip over the very title of this report, which is about thriving together in America. So this is a quest: How can we thrive together in America? It's a compilation of insights from many sources and many contributors that equip us all to be better stewards of the things that we value. To be sure, this is a very high-stakes situation that we're in. And the reason that we and so many people contributed to this report together was because we're not all connected with the knowledge and tools and information that we need to be the best stewards that we can be.

The report has a number of insights from the decades of tracking that Gallup has done so remarkably. But it's also coupled with profiles of more than a dozen communities that are organizing around well-being. In some ways the statistics about who's thriving and struggling and suffering are not good news, but the fact that there is so much organizing underway — and more and more of it, which is beyond the scope of the report — really offers insight into how we can escape this escalating challenge. But you're absolutely right that the data are troubling. Well-being in America is low and falling fast. But those data are not our destiny.

Heidi Burgess: The fact that it was as low as or lower than the early days of COVID just blew me away. Because, of course, in the early days of COVID, some people were totally panicked. I don't know what you meant by early days, and whether that included when we were locked down, but people were furious about being locked down, they were scared they were going to die. It was pretty grim times, and to say that we're back there is pretty demoralizing.

Bobby Milstein: Yes. I mean, in an order-of-magnitude sense, we're back there, in the sense that the latest figure was 48. In fact, several of the last data points have all been below 50. So we are in a situation where the majority of people in America are struggling and suffering. And we've been there before. We've been there in the early days of COVID, as you're saying. At the peak of the economic recession in 2008, there was another very low point.

So, one way to read the time trends is that there have been severe double-digit declines, and there have been double-digit improvements over time, and we're in a period of decline at the moment. The question is how we don’t just respond to the exact situations of this adversity, but make changes that will allow us to thrive together and have it stick, and get persistently higher and higher than it's ever been.

I should answer your question about exactly how it's defined, because that's important to the nature of the response. This is remarkable, but Gallup uses two and only two questions to estimate well-being in America and around the world. It's an index built on two questions that they've been using for almost 20 years — 3.1 million surveys in the U.S. alone.

The brilliance of it is that the questions don't even use the words thriving or struggling or suffering. It's built on the metaphor of a ladder; pretty much all people around the world can understand what a ladder is. So, the question is posed: Imagine a ladder, with the lowest rung being your worst possible life and the highest being your best possible life — a ladder that goes from zero to 10. Where do you stand today on this ladder of your life? All you're doing is assigning a number. And then they ask the exact same question: Where do you expect to stand five years from now?

So, you mix this current life evaluation and your anticipated life evaluation and bring them together. People who are high on both — and we can tell you the number cut points in a second, if you're interested — people who are consistently high in the present and in the future are thriving. People who are low at both the current and the future are suffering. And folks who are in the middle are struggling.

This has turned out to be one of the most remarkable measures in all of social science: just self-rated life evaluation. It turns out we are very good at appraising our own well-being in these ways. You ask two questions, you separate these three groups, and those three groups are consistently, strongly related to scores of other things: health care utilization, premature death, workforce productivity, depression. Pick your issue area; it's often strongly related, just by asking these two questions. So that's how Gallup does the tracking. It's really built on these two questions that separate the entire population into thriving, struggling, and suffering, and we know statistically that those are related to most other metrics that matter.

Heidi Burgess: Do you know that they relate to the other metrics because you've measured it on a population basis, or do you ask the same people, "What's your income? What's your health?" How do you come to the conclusion that it tracks with the other measures?

Bobby Milstein: Gallup's survey is a nationwide representative survey of U.S. adults, so they're not tracking the exact same individuals. But many of the communities that are organizing around this do their own local data collection. So, they're not just relying on Gallup to give them a number; they're actually turning to their neighbors and asking these exact same sorts of questions. And rarely, if ever, are there just the two well-being questions. There's also an inquiry about who feels they belong, and where we are on all of the other vital conditions that matter.

So well-being surveys are tracking personal experiences of thriving, struggling, and suffering. But the response to that is not just individual; it's to create the vital conditions around individuals that stack the deck in favor of more and more people thriving together. So it's an organizing tool that takes an individual measure and turns it into actions of shared stewardship, and efforts to create a world that is built for everyone to thrive together, with no exceptions.

The relationships there are enduring. People can track this individually, and you can also see that there are times and places when it's financial worry or social disconnection that is the primary issue people are concerned with. In the pandemic, for example — you referred to just how disrupted and disoriented people were in those early days of uncertainty and fear, and then responses that limited our ability to move and to even be present with each other — when you look at the section of the report that talks about the difference between current and future life metrics during COVID, the drop in well-being was almost entirely caused by people rating their current life situation as really bad. So, things really were bad in the present. But in those years, 2020 through 2023 or so, there was a very strong, in fact growing, sense that the future would be better.

Maybe a lot of people would say, "How could the future not be better? Because this is really bad." So, there was this kind of hopefulness: the current situation is lousy, but it's got to get better. And that hope has eroded and even inverted in the last several years. Now hope is beneath the current life evaluation. And it's not just because of a temporary COVID situation; it's for other reasons that people are rating their current life low and rating their future life even lower. So that's a troubling situation.

But as we read that data — and as a lot of these community organizers are orchestrating responses to move in a different direction — there is no better time than the present to recognize that dissatisfaction and to connect with each other in and through it, so that we can spring forward through this adversity to something much better. So ,the fact that we're losing hope is really worrisome, but when people find hope — and often find it in each other, in others who are trying to make a difference — that can have a powerful effect in the opposite direction.

Heidi Burgess: So, what are the reasons that you're finding that people are losing hope?

Bobby Milstein: Well, this report doesn't speak directly to it. There is adjacent information cited in the report that says there's been a drop in the number of people who say there's anybody in their life who makes them enthusiastic about the future. So, people don't have relationships with others that help them feel like the future can be better. Some of that has to do with the way our information is connected, and the way that leadership is conducted and experienced. It doesn't necessarily give people the sense that there's anything to be optimistic about, anything to be enthusiastic about.

We talked about young people having opportunities to contribute, and they need that early in life. Study after study shows that there's a very high appetite for people to participate in joint activities to make their communities better, but they are not given opportunities to do that. So, when there's the sense that the system is rigged, or that the world is headed in a direction I don't like, and there aren't opportunities to connect and to contribute with others to make a difference around that, it can deepen and turn into anger or hopelessness or fear. There is a climate of fear that has been part of the playbook of rising authoritarians, and that certainly plays a role in this work.

So, when you look at the macro story of thriving or struggling or suffering, you don't have to look very far to find reasons why we're sliding. The issue is how we pay more and more attention to those who are forming these connections that build belonging and civic muscle, who are talking about and inviting people into questions about how we create systems that are fair by design. Just the very act of asking those questions and connecting with each other can be a move out of this doom loop and into something that is much more promising.

So, the project of establishing the vital conditions we need together is itself a way to pull people out of a situation where they're seen as isolated players in a big drama that somebody else has orchestrated. They really can be the authors of their own future together. In the second half of the report, we see dozens of communities that are turning toward each other and starting to ask, "What's our way toward a thriving future?" And they're finding exactly the opposite: more and more energy, more and more people coming and joining into this work. What they lack is really the full resource investment to manage and make the most of this growing appetite to be part of a path that everybody can be proud of, that would be meaningful to us as individuals, but, more importantly, that we can pass on to future generations.

So that aspiration of being part of something is a really strong signal in the community stories in this report. It's just not the nationwide norm, and that's why we see the national data pointing in the other direction.

Heidi Burgess: That's the basis of my next question, which is: How do you scale this up? It's great that there are 12 communities, and I'm sure there are more than 12 — there are probably 1,200 communities doing stuff like this — but compared to the number of communities we have in the United States, it's still a pretty small number.

Bobby Milstein: Yeah, I guess my quick answer to that is that we're not trying to treat this like a social-entrepreneur kind of program that invests in a few demonstration sites and then gets replicated. This isn't that kind of phenomenon at all. Even the dozen spotlight examples in this report are, as you say — and I agree with you — a dozen out of a countless larger pool. And that pool is growing, not because anybody's paying them to do it, not because they're given a playbook or a program model to follow. What they're doing is turning toward each other as an alternative to the dehumanizing situation that more and more people are experiencing. And then they're discovering that together we can create things that build our assets together before we start dividing them.

So, the dynamic here is much more organic than a program that needs to be replicated and scaled. It's much more about tapping into an experience that people are thirsty for: connecting and contributing, seeing themselves as stewards of their lives together, and honoring what that role could really mean. Many people are thirsty for that. And it can start very small, just as each of us as individuals can start thinking and acting in ways that expand opportunities for others to connect into this work as well.

Then each new connection becomes a little cluster of "this is how we do things around here," and that can become a norm that gets established organizationally, or across networks. When things grow through network diffusion, they can grow really far, really fast, in a way that no program administrator or scaling entrepreneur could ever engineer. So, this is already growing exponentially through network diffusion, and every sign suggests that there's still immense room to improve. So, this isn't an issue of how you take something rare and promote it and sell it. It's much more: How do you enable it to go further, faster?

That enabling can come from many sources. It can come from individuals just making a decision to turn toward each other. It can come from the bridging work that we're talking about. It can come from the solidarity that says, "My neighbor is feeling fear, and I'm going to stand with them, to communicate the love and solidarity that I know we all deserve. I would want someone to stand with me if I felt that kind of fear, so I'm going to stand with them, even though I'm not the target of this at the moment."

It can come from investments in the very inquiry of how many people are thriving: turn to your neighbor and find out. Because the data infrastructure in this nation is not really oriented around asking who's thriving and who's struggling and suffering, or who feels they belong. This report is woven together with information that is available to us, but this could become much more. If we want to thrive together, we need to be more consistently oriented around tracking who's thriving and struggling and suffering, and how we are establishing the vital conditions that everybody needs. When that project starts to become a norm, it can cascade very quickly, because we've become detached from some of the work that we know is so life-giving and so valuable.

Anyway, that's my quick answer. Yes, there are a few exemplars that you can point to, but it's much more about why we are seeing those exemplars at all. It's coming out of a deeper dynamic.

Heidi Burgess: So it sounds to me like it's coming out of an innate need, and there's a need to fertilize the ground so that people can grow their own solutions in their own way.

Bobby Milstein: I mean, a truism that has been reinforced over and over again is that when systems collapse, people rise. And we're in an era when systems are collapsing. The things that we thought we could all rely on to be healthy and well and reach our full potential are no longer working for many people. There are whole groups of people for whom they've never been working; there's intergenerational suffering that's gone on, and there's nothing accidental or random about that. What we're seeing now is that even those systems that had enabled some to thrive are collapsing in other ways. And that is how you get to a majority of Americans who are struggling and suffering.

So, many are looking to the future with skepticism and fear because we haven't been oriented to the routine work of being stewards of the things that we really value. The good news is that there are a large number of areas in play — common-sense actions that are unifying, consensus agendas. Think about the Grand Bargain Project and others. When we look at the array of actions that supermajorities of Americans would all support, they look like an agenda that would move us much closer toward thriving together. Those are the things that could propel great strides.

So, another way to look at this predicament of the current slide is that there's no better time than now, with more and more people struggling and suffering by the day, to start orchestrating serious moves in another direction, because there are more and more people who will benefit from that right now.

Heidi Burgess: Makes sense.

Bobby Milstein: And this has been the case in other periods of American history or world history: in periods of decline, you can end up seeing a renaissance of human values, and a renaissance of things that pull people together. We are badly in need of that at the moment. To me, this is a learning thing. How can we learn from those stewards in our midst? How do we recognize that some of the assets that we believe we need are already here? We just need to start exercising them, and using those small assets that we have now to grow even bigger going forward. The pie can get a lot bigger just through the practice of belonging and civic muscle.

I guess I want to say one more thing about that, which is that there are a lot of assets in the world that get smaller when you use them: your housing budget, or your transportation budget, or your food budget. Everyone knows that there's so much pressure on our material assets at the moment that more and more feels impossible. But belonging and civic muscle is a different kind of asset, and Elinor Ostrom's work showed this. Commonwealth economics are such that each new connection that expands belonging helps build civic muscle, which allows you to do the next thing that's bigger, and to connect with the next group of people who don't feel like they're feeling it.

So belonging and civic muscle are like a sharing economy, or other elements of our interdependence: the more you do it — like love — the more you give, the more you're going to get. So, this is really good news: one of these assets, which is not zero, but is not where we need it to be, can be a thing that brings even more assets together. When you're in a crisis, or you're headed in a direction you don't want to go, the first thing to do is to invest in building the assets that allow you to get even more assets, and to pull together the strength and wherewithal to make the moves that we need to make.

There are lots of people who are learning that lesson over and over again. It's an ancient lesson from throughout Indigenous communities and marginalized communities throughout history. A lot of our ancestors knew this, and we have become detached from that insight. So, it's no surprise that belonging and civic muscle are kind of low at the moment. But it's the top investment priority that can help pull us out of this predicament.

Heidi Burgess: That's really a great way of putting it. I found myself visualizing, as you were talking, that the vending machine has stopped delivering. We're putting lots of money in, nothing's coming out, so we're going to have to start raising the barns ourselves.

Bobby Milstein: Yes, yes. It's a playful metaphor. It's not mine; there was a city administrator years ago who came up with this distinction. He was talking about how people relate to the government, but I think you can apply it to all of our lives together, right?

Heidi Burgess: It applies to your story perfectly.

Bobby Milstein: If we're expecting a vending machine and it's not working, you could start kicking that vending machine, and ultimately you're going to break your foot, and then you can't afford to go to the hospital. So, kicking the vending machine can only go so far. Eventually, you're going to have to say: if what this vending machine is holding is something important to me, then we're going to have to build it outside of the locked gatekeeper of the vending machine, because the gatekeepers and those who hold the purse strings over the assets of our lives aren't delivering.

That's a good way to say it, right? The system as it's built now is not delivering on the vital conditions we all need, and it's not producing that sense of opportunity and invitation to help shape our lives together. That vending-machine impulse may be reasonable in a situation where we wanted to expect that there was somebody or something caring for our well-being. But the answer is no: if we're going to care for our well-being, we have to do it with each other.

That's where the renaissance of these values can start to shine. You're not expecting somebody else to come solve these problems, or an act of Congress that's going to make the world better. You start making the world better right here, with people close by. You build belonging and civic muscle to make moves that set your community on a different path, maybe from others who haven't been doing that, and eventually we build the capabilities to act at higher and higher scales.

That kind of American pragmatism is a strong tradition. None of the achievements in American history were done first at a nationwide level. They were always preceded by smaller, local actions that grew, saying, "These ought to be the norms of our nation." And then you end up with innovating states — the laboratories of democracy — where you can see some states in the lead over others. We should learn from those experiments, and ultimately start to establish or reestablish norms of what kind of a nation we're going to be.

Are we going to be a place where everyone can thrive together, no exceptions, with that as our orienting North Star? Or are we going to be a place that turns a blind eye to the struggling and suffering of others, and ultimately pulls us all into a deeper and deeper spiral of more and more of us feeling unmoored and insecure? So that's one way of seeing the vending-machine metaphor: as just one way of relating to the things that we all need. And the idea of the commonwealth, animated by people who care about each other and are doing the work of building belonging and civic muscle and establishing these vital conditions — that's a path available to us. Many people are already moving in that direction. The issue is whether we can connect even just one more person, relentlessly, into this work. It can rise very far, very fast.

Heidi Burgess: Super inspiring. What have I not asked about that you want to share?

Bobby Milstein: I think we've covered a lot of ground. Maybe the thought to leave on here is how personal this can be. It's been a surprise to me that when I start looking for things that give me hope, I find them, and the impressive acts of stewards that I didn't even know existed help me become even more disciplined and optimistic when I'm engaging in the next conversation. The possibilities get higher with each new person that you see doing this work. So that starts personally, by looking for those connections and bringing myself into relationships with other people.

In the end, this movement is for anybody who's curious about better ways to thrive together. As long as we maintain that curiosity, along with the ambition of thriving together — the curiosity of asking how, and under what conditions, we can do it — we're going to find energizing answers. I'll say that I have the experience of finding energizing answers to that every day. It helps me try to become a better steward myself, and it helps me be influential in the organizations that I'm connected to, and so forth. So, it can be very personal: just asking the question, are there better ways? And where are there stewards who are unseen and uncelebrated? Those are the ones that I want to connect with.

Heidi Burgess: Great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I'm just really impressed with what you're doing, and it indeed helps me have more hope.

Bobby Milstein: Thank you for doing everything that you and Guy do on Beyond Intractability. It is an amazing asset for the field, and I'm so delighted to have contributed to it.

Heidi Burgess: Well, great. Thanks very much. Talk soon.