Heidi Burgess Talks with Jacob Bornstein, Consensus-Builder and Co-Founder of Better Together America

Heidi: Hi, this is Heidi Burgess with Beyond Intractability. I'm talking today with Jacob Bornstein, who is the founder and principal at Wellstone Collaborative Strategies. And he's also a co-founder of the Better Together America initiative, and we'll be talking about both of those today. I went to the Wellstone website to learn a little bit about it for the introduction. And I just love the paragraph that you had at the beginning. So I want to read that. It says, "Wellstone, a translation of Bornstein"— I want to get you to explain that a little bit — refers to the boring stones used to dig wells. So often we have to dig deep to find solutions and approaches that will truly make a lasting impact. We believe that to do that, stakeholders need to work together to determine solutions. Here at Wellstone Collaborative Strategies, we support our clients in doing just that."

I love that. So I want to get you to expound a little bit on how Borenstein is a translation of Wellstone. I don't quite get that, but we'll go from there.  And then what I'd like you to do is to tell us how you got into this work and what it is about collaborative work that you find rewarding and important, ( probably the same things that I find important about it.) But I'd love to hear your point of view on it. And then we'll go from there. 

Jacob: Sure. Sounds good. Well, first, Heidi, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity to share. And Bornstein, when my grandfather and his family came over during World War II, getting out of Vienna, Austria. So it's a German name. They wound up dropping the E. So originally, it was Borenstein, and that translates as Boring Stone. And after he served in World War II, he started an architecture and building firm, and it was Wellstone Architecture. And then my dad started Wellstone Publications, and I started Wellstone Collaborative Strategies. So this history of using" Wellstone" goes back to my grandfather's translation of our last name.  He's the one who translated it, and it's become a family opportunity to just keep the tradition going. But when I was doing research trying to understand this myself, I really didn't know why he translated it as Wells Stone, but finding that it was a boring stone like one to dig wells with, that really resonated with me. And so I wrote that little piece.

Heidi: That's great.

Jacob: Yeah. So I guess your next question is how I got started in this work and what's important to me. I So it depends on how far back you want to go, Heidi. Anything that you think is relevant.

Heidi: . I'll just say Let's not spend the whole hour talking about that.

Jacob: I agree. Let's not spend the whole hour. Having moved 14 times as a kid from coast to coast, I think experiencing both Brooklyn, New York in the midst of the crack cocaine epidemic, and rural Oregon, gave me a sense that people come with different perspectives that I've always carried with me. It's sort of part of my personality. And then when I really got into facilitation, the state hired me to help with the water plan, which I know we're going to get into a little bit. And I was coming from being executive director of a statewide nonprofit, and they were really excited to have me. But I had not done that much stakeholder work before.

There are not a lot of opportunities to get to do something that brings together such diverse perspectives, which maybe we'll get into. But I'll just cut to the end. When we got consensus and I had Tea Party ranchers, a Tea Party rancher and a Boulder environmental progressive giving me hugs at the end of that.

Heidi: Whoa.

Jacob: I looked at what we had achieved. It was not a compromise. I mean, it was a compromise, but it was more than that. It was a set of solutions that worked for all the different stakeholders in a way that no one stakeholder could have achieved on their own, because they didn't know the different perspectives. And that's when I really felt this work is more powerful than anything else we can do to come up with solutions that are durable, sustainable, and meet the true needs of everyone.

So that's what I've dedicated my life to since that moment.

Heidi: But was that the first one?

Jacob: Yeah. In terms of facilitation, that was my first big facilitation. We had a hired facilitator for a while for the Inner Basin Compact Committee, which was the statewide body of the water planning process. And then there were nine regional roundtables. So I oversaw the stakeholder work, and I oversaw that facilitator. But we got a new director when there was a transition in who the Governor was. And he really didn't like that facilitator. And he said, "Jacob, you seem to be doing half the facilitation" (because I was the staff expert for the group). He said, "Why don't you just add facilitation to what you're doing?" So he threw me into the deep end, and we're talking a room with 35 people, head of Denver Water, head of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. In addition to those two individuals, we had industrial and environmental and agricultural and recreational reps. So very diverse perspectives from across the state. And as Mark Twain said," whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting, right? That's like the mantra of water in the west.

Heidi: Yes. Water in Colorado is more valuable than gold.

Jacob: Yes. So it's a bit of a miracle that we were able to get to consensus with that group, and I can explain how we did it. But that was a really exciting deep end to be thrown into. And I had been supporting it for years before I was facilitating the final throes of the water plan. But yeah, that's essentially where I really got the bug, Heidi. This is what I'm meant to be doing.

Heidi: I can see that. Who was the sponsor of this? Was it the state?

Jacob: Yeah. What happened is that, in 2005, the state legislature passed a bill calling for the formation of a stakeholder process. So that led to the creation of nine regional basin roundtables across the state and one inter-basin compact committee for the full state. And these were designed to be very specific in terms of the breadth of perspectives for each of the roundtables. Those roundtables then each elected two members to serve the statewide body, and then the governor got to appoint another set of seven individuals. And then the organization that I worked for, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, is a statewide body under the Department of Natural Resources that managed and staffed that process. So I worked for the state at that time, and we started with a third-party facilitator, but then wound up with me.

Heidi: It sounds like you did a great job. I want to back up a little bit. And if you weren't in charge of the facilitation at the beginning, you may know this story. Or you may not. But I'm going to have the same question for you for this and for the civic hubs with BTA. How do you get people who are at each other's throats, who hate each other, distrust each other, and are used to seeing each other in court, willing to sit down around a table and work together?

Jacob: Yeah, that's a great, great question. I think first, because this was important, the government was behind it. It started under a Republican governor and then migrated to two subsequent Democratic governors over the 10 years that it took to get from formation to a water plan. So it was a 10-year process. And so a lot of people said "yes,"because they were afraid decisions would be made that would hurt them, right? So they were not coming out of the generosity of their hearts to collaborate.

The second thing that was really important is at the basin roundtable level, even in these regions, you have regions that include places like Aspen, very wealthy, very environmentally oriented, to places like Rifle and Grand Junction that are much more conservative and much less, especially at that time, interested in the environment and natural resources and recreation and all that stuff. So even within each of these regions, they were used to suing each other.

So the first step was to get some cohesiveness within the region. One of the brilliant parts of the founding legislation is it also came with some money to support a grant program. And a portion of that money was available for those regional roundtables to spend. The first couple of years, those projects, a lot of them, weren't amazing projects. What they were, was horse-trading. I'll support your thing, if you support my thing, right? Okay. That works. And that allowed people to get to know each other, allowed folks to have activities outside of the roundtable meetings themselves to connect and tour other people's facilities or projects and the like. So that relational capacity along with the structural horse trading capacity was really important.

I would say for any effort, especially one as contentious as in Colorado, where water is a bit of a wedge issue, for that or other highly contentious processes, having both the ability to support each other in that sort of horse-trading way and build relationships is really important.

The second piece was that it was diverse. The perspectives were very diverse, and they had to deal with each other. It was really important for that. When we set it up (because I was staffing it, right, so I was still in charge of the overall process even if I wasn't facilitating it)

Prior to this development, there was a project that was very data-driven, asking what is the data telling us about water? The state had spent over a million dollars in developing our understanding of water resources in the state. And we had the roundtable start to buy in on the next iteration. So what is it? How should we do this better? How should we calculate water demands for communities? How should we think about water supplies? Should we consider climate? How should we consider climate?

So they had buy-in. Sure, there were lots of disagreements, but lots of buy-in into what data they needed to have in order to have a picture of what water needs and supplies should look like in the future. So having a data-driven process was really important. 

But the thing that we did, we had our technical consultants, and they said, "Well, we'll present all these scenarios for what the future could look like." And they came in to the Inter-basin Compact Committee, and they presented, I think, 48 scenarios. And I was just sitting there like, "Oh, my gosh," and seeing all the reactions and angst and people asking "what does this mean for us?" That was a pretty rough meeting. And then I said, "Well, the human brain can really only handle five things at most. You need to have five scenarios, not 48 scenarios." And so I worked with them to decide what were the major driving components?

So the major driving components were, obviously, what's going to happen with water supply, especially in relation to climate? What's going to happen with demand? How much water are we going to need, especially considering municipal and community needs? And then third, they decided, what are public attitudes going to be? Is it going to be a green culture in which everybody's going to want to conserve, or is it going to be a, "Crap, we're in crisis. We need to use as much as we can."

And so we set out all those parameters and then described five points that describe the outside edges for those pieces. And then we wrote those up, and then we had the basin roundtables each develop using a portfolio and trade-off tool that we developed solutions for those scenarios.

So that was really exciting to bring in scenario planning as part of this. And we were the first state to bring in scenario planning and an adaptive plan for how to address it at the time. So we were cutting edge, developing an interactive tool to allow folks to weigh in, cutting edge, very exciting work so that people could say, "Well, I think we're going to have lots of water in the future and this is how we're going to solve that problem. And then what are the impacts to cost? What are the impacts to the environment, endangered fish, etc.? What are the impacts to agriculture?"

And then the amazing thing is, all of these nine roundtables started being like, "Well, I didn't know that would have this impact to endangered fish. I didn't know it would have this impact to agriculture and drying up water on agricultural lands." And we saw everybody start to come to the middle, rather than shouting, "This is the solution!" out on the fringe edge of the possibilities.

So all of those portfolios were then brought to the statewide body, and we wrestled with it and came up with the set of portfolios that was essentially the average of all the other roundtables.

And then the critical thing that we did was say, regardless of each of these futures, what do we need to do now, no matter what the future is, and what do we need to do to prepare for those possibilities, for those possible futures, that's a low risk? Like what studies or policies or whatever do we need to put in place? So we called that "the no and low regrets strategy."

And that was one of the places we got consensus that was really exciting. So we had, I would say, relational capacity, data-driven, scenario planning where everyone could see themselves in the final product, and then an opportunity to identify the common path forward that was needed, regardless of that future that really helped bring them together.

So it's a pretty complex series of efforts that we ran through to get consensus.

Heidi: If I'm understanding it properly, it seems like a really interesting workaround to a problem that we had in a similar project that I was involved in years and years ago. I told you a little bit about this when we were together at the BTA meeting.  I worked with Accord Associates on the Metropolitan Water Roundtable back in the '80s, I guess, early '80s, yeah which was a similar consensus process for Metropolitan Denver trying to decide how they were going to manage their water.  And we had terrible disputes over data because the Denver Water Department was coming up with one set of data that the environmental representatives just didn't believe. And so we went back and forth. And one of the problems was that Denver Water had infinite resources, and the poor little environmentalists had no resources. And so we ended up getting some resources to help the environmentalists develop a different model.  And we had endless fights over whose model was right and, indeed, whether there was enough water, whether there was too much demand. And it was just really, really hard to resolve those. And it sounds like you didn't try. You just came up with different scenarios saying, "We are going to have to adjust to whatever we get." So there's no point in arguing over these scenarios.  Let's just assume that any of them could come to be. Is that true? 

Jacob: I don't know that that's fully true, Heidi. Yes, any of them could come to be. But for instance, on the population figures, we all agreed to work with the state demographer to identify a range of population figures. So she's still there. Elizabeth is still working for the state all these years later.  She's absolutely astounding. If you ever want to talk demographics with anybody, she's amazing. And we said, "Well, water takes a long time. So we need a longer planning horizon and we can't pick just one number. Help us come up with a methodology that can pick a low, medium, and high level of population out to 2050. "That was our planning horizon.

She presented a methodology, and people bought into that. So, rather than Denver Water fighting the environmentalists, it would be, instead, if Denver Water and the environmentalists chose to use a third party and agreed to the methodologies before seeing the results. And then they would both have to accept that. And instead of saying, "Our experts are smarter than your experts." But then, because there's uncertainty out into the future, and we can't control a lot of that, as a water industry, we were able to say, "here's the range of possibilities and how they fit into different scenarios." So there were still viable futures to have high population and low water supply versus low population and high water supply, etc.

Heidi: Yeah, that later one, I'm going, "Yeah, right." 

Jacob: Maybe so. But you have to remember, this was January 2015. So the acceptance of climate change, which is now quite well accepted even among water professionals in rural parts of the state ,because it's just changing how people are able to ranch and farm and producers are more and more accepting of it.  But at that time, that was not the case.

Heidi: At the time I was doing it, the Denver Water Department wouldn't stop harping on the notion that people had a God-given right to an "English garden-style lawn." And that was their marching directive that we're going to provide the water for those English garden-style lawns. I think they've gotten over that from what I've heard.

Jacob:  Well, they invented Xeriscaping. So yeah, they've gotten over that a bit. 

Heidi: So I'm curious about where this has gone and where your work has gone. You stayed in the water area doing consensus projects. Are they all working along the same model or have you changed? Are you working with clients beyond the state? 

Jacob: Yeah. Great question. At Wellstone Collaborative Strategies and the co-op of consultants that I co-founded called the Civic Consulting Collaborative, I work on a lot more than just water now. So I work on behavioral health and affordable housing and juvenile justice and a whole range of issues, public safety issues, etc. And I work across the country, as well, on a variety of issues from the West Coast. I haven't gotten all the way to the East Coast. Ohio is as far as far east as I've gotten with the work where we did the Cleveland Tree Plan as a Cleveland City. 

Heidi: Oh! I'm from Cleveland!

Jacob: Oh, well, there you go!

Jacob: So, Cleveland's nickname is "the Forest City" and they were asking  "How do we get back to becoming the forest city that has lost a lot of tree canopy?" And so we facilitated a coalition plan for how to do that. So I think coming from a quite well-resourced project, like the water plan project, where we could spend a million on technical analyses and have full staff supporting this work, it's very different than, say, a project like the Tree Coalition, which has one full-time staffer, hosted within another organization.

Heidi: Cleveland didn't pay for this, huh? 

Jacob: The city of Cleveland did not pay for it, but we involved them. So I think the question whether I'm working on Nebraska's which was paid for by a pseudo-state government, affordable housing framework, or the Pacific Crest Trail work, or whatever it is, or Denver's Climate Action Plan, all these big efforts, what I've taken forward is how to involve multiple stakeholders, how to ensure you have the public involved.  I didn't even mention we had 33,000 comments on the water plan. We incorporated all of that

Heidi:  You had to do that before ChatGPT.

Jacob: That's right. We had to do that with interns who then would code things wrong, and we'd have to correct it and all that type of thing. So lots of qualitative analysis and sort of a gaggle of interns helping us with that, which was great.  So that was very well-resourced. 

A lot of nonprofit work, a lot of work in local government cannot be as well resourced, and even statewide government efforts are not always as well resourced. So finding ways to adapt the model to still be inclusive, to still think about, oftentimes, not even five scenarios, just two scenarios.  Where are we headed? What does business as usual look like? And in the future, where are we headed if we don't change course, versus where do we want to head? So that's just a breadth of different ways to work with stakeholders and the public, to do a participatory strategy.

Heidi: So one of the questions that I should have asked before the last one, but I didn't, and it also relates to BTA, is the role of government in these processes.  I was struck by what you said that the state started this whole water project, that it was a Republican governor who started these nine different advisory groups. That's not the word you use for them. 

Jacob: Roundtables, 

Heidi: Yes, roundtables. And that struck me as —this is going to show my prejudice — "Wow, I'm surprised that a Republican governor would do that. I'm even surprised that a Democratic governor would do that because doing that relinquishes power, to some extent, from the government and gives it, I think, to these roundtables. Now, I'm assuming the roundtables were structured so that they were just advisory. They weren't passing laws. So whatever they recommended still has to go back to the government to actually get implemented. But it strikes me as noteworthy that the governor was willing to delegate as much power as he did. And I wonder how often that happens? And how you can work if it isn't started at the government level. And then the flip side is, what do you do when people distrust the government? So, there strikes me as problematic issues in both directions, in terms of government trusting citizens and citizens trusting government. 

Jacob: Yeah. Amazing set of questions. And I just want to call out former Republican Speaker of the House and Department of Natural Resource Director at the time when Governor Owens was when Governor Owens was governor, Russ George ,was really the visionary around establishing this.  And I think he saw that there was no viable path because of the challenges that you're talking about, lack of trust in state government, different stakeholders deeply disagreeing and having vastly different ideas for what water needs in the future were. He didn't see a viable path, and water was too important to be caught in the polarization of right and left.  And so he pitched to Governor Owens, "Let's do this." And much to Russ George's credit, the governor said yes. And then he had just come from Speaker of the House, the state legislature passed it. 

So it's not that common that such far sight is seen. But I have seen a number of times when local and state governments have said, "We've got to figure out how to get the stakeholders together to find a path forward." And it's often around these contentious issues where there's not a clear right and wrong, and you really need consensus in order to be able to move anything forward. And usually, it's in the midst of a fire.

Like, for instance, for Denver's Climate Action Plan, you had a group of advocates saying, "We're going to run a ballot initiative to solve climate change in Denver and raise a bunch of money. Screw you, city government." So then that was the fire that created a, "Oh, no, that's not going to work out very well the way they've designed it. It's not equitable. We're not going to have any control." So that prompted them to create a task force to work on the issue and include them. So their hand was tied. So I guess it's an example of where an advocacy organization forced the hand of government to do the right thing to bring the stakeholders together. 

Heidi: Was that their intention?

Jacob:  It was the compromise they reached with, less the mayor at the time, and more city council. And the mayor's hand was sort of forced by their lobbying of city council. So I think they were fine with it. And that advocacy group wound up adopting our solution that we came up with the task force and advocating for it. And it's the reason why we now have about $40 million going towards climate change in Denver. So I guess when it starts either from the outside and advocates pushing, you need to be strategic, or, as with the Cleveland Tree Coalition, they incorporated government as part of their work, invited them to the table.

But there are some cases where that's not possible, and you really need to force their hand when you're not finding the government to be cooperative and leaning forward. But I would say that in the cases where there's the most success, the government is somehow involved for these big public policy issues where they're needed.

But there's another course that a lot of non-profit communities take, which is how can we, without changing local or state policy or getting the government to do something that they don't want to do, what can we do as a group of diverse folks to carry something forward? So whether that's all the behavioral health providers from prevention to intense care, getting together and saying, "We're going to build this system of care together and find a way to help our clients." Obviously, policy change would be great, but what can we do ourselves for our collective impact? That's another path forward that doesn't necessarily need to involve government.

So there's all sorts of different ways to get true impact on the ground. But in many cases, the government needs to be involved. 

You asked about trust. The good news is that trust at the local level of government is much higher, typically, than at the national level, and state tends to be somewhere in between. So for the water plan, we knew from survey work that the metro area had strong support of state government, and southwest Colorado had really crappy trust in state government.

But the beauty of the roundtables is when you give away power, you get power in return, because all of these local groups didn't trust the state government—they were worried that the state was somehow going to steal their water or whatever it was. They got together in the room. They had to figure it out. I would go down there every few months and check in with them. And they came to really appreciate that there was a direct line to state government, supporting them, funding some of their work, providing some technical support, telling them what was going on. And that greatly improved trust in state government among those stakeholders. So if you set it up right, then you can really start to improve trust, rather than erode it. Yeah. I guess I'll stop there.

Heidi: Makes sense.  Let's switch gears and talk about Better Together America and some of these issues are going to come up again. We've done two newsletters on BTA already about six, nine months ago. I don't remember. I talked to the other two co-founders of BTA, Caleb Christen and Vinay Orekondy. We wrote about this in Newsletter 281, which also has a link to the full interview, which talked about what BTA was and how it got started and what it's doing. And then I've had the privilege of going to the first what you called "Accelerator Workshop" at the beginning of May. And we did a post about that, which was in Newsletter 352. Folks are interested.

But if you're watching this and you haven't looked at those newsletters, give us just a brief introduction of what BTA is, what you're trying to accomplish, and I'll jump ahead and say, "What are civic hubs?" Because that's the core concept of BTA.

Jacob: Yeah. Fantastic. So a little bit of history. So I came up with this concept, Better Together America. Caleb came up with this concept called something else, and Vinay came up with the concept all semi-independently. And then we had a meeting and we said, "Well, this is ridiculous. We're 90% overlapping. Let's just come together." And so we came under Mediators Foundation's arm to have mediators host Better Together America. So that was, I guess, the birth story. And for whatever reason, they said, "Well, Jacob, clearly you're Executive Director." And I said, "Oh, man. I've been trying not to be executive director since my late 20s, but here I am. And now I'm also president of Mediator's Foundation." 

Heidi: Oh, I've forgotten about that. Congratulations! 

Jacob: So Better Together America is working to stitch together the network of place-based [collaborative] efforts across the country. There's plenty of existing networks. So how do we leverage those existing networks and independent efforts to have a more all-in approach to addressing community well-being and resilience?  [Their answer was Civic Hubs.] So civic hubs tend to focus on three things: community building, collaborative solution generation around issues important to them and their community or state. And then lastly, implementation of those efforts.

So whether that's advocacy or that collective action type of work that I was talking about, or working cooperatively with government, there's all sorts of ways to implement or do any of these different pieces. So, in the ideal sense, civic hubs are a coalition of local efforts that come together to do that work, to really understand what the community needs are and to collaboratively figure out ways to address those various needs and move forward with implementing solutions.

Heidi: In the accelerator workshop, you had people from various hubs give five-minute talks about what they were doing. And the impression that I had was that most, as I'm remembering, maybe even all, were started outside of government, that they were all civil society organizations. One of the questions that got discussed on towards the end was what the role of government should be. Should you bring them in at the beginning? Should you bring them in later? Should you not bring them in at all? And of course, the answer has to be," it depends." But am I correct in remembering that all of these started independent of government?

Jacob: Yeah. Boston University may be an arm of the government, but essentially independent of the government.

Heidi:  So that's a very different model from your water roundtable. 

Jacob: From the water work, yes. Although we definitely spread what it meant to be associated with a government network. But as I said, with groups like the Cleveland Tree Coalition, there's opportunities to figure out how you want to engender this. And I highly suggest that people deeply think about how connected they are to their local or state government depending on the scale. And in the ideal case, government would be involved. But we can't wait for government to be ready, because government hasn't traditionally been ready in the past. This is something that needs to happen for every community to be more resilient and solve their problems and be more nimble than they have been in the past. 

Heidi: So the story that I heard from several of the hub presenters was that they set up various processes to bring people together. And I think one interesting question is, again, how do you get people who distrust each other, polarized, hate each other to come together, but somehow they did. And then they decided after they came together, what were the pressing issues they wanted to work on? I can see where you can say water's really important. We've got to come together and work on this.  How do you get folks together if you haven't identified first what you're going to work on? 

Jacob: Yeah. That's a great question. And I think that in some cases, you need to pick something that you just know, based off of survey data or community data, that is very important to the community. So there is the opportunity to start with something like, for instance, affordable housing.  We know in many parts of the country, it's the, if not the top issue, it is one of the top issues that people are facing. So you can pick a topic. And I do think the way to bring diverse folks with diverse perspectives into the room is to have an issue that they galvanize around.

That being said, we have a history of understanding that if you ask the community to help envision the future of their community and identify the challenges that are in the way of achieving that vision, that people diverse people from across the demographic, political, and power dimensions will come together and want to inform what the future of their community looks like and what the challenges are that get in the way of that. So I think it's still around something, right? It's around who are we going to be in 2040 or whatever the timeframe is. And that can be really powerful to engage people. And then from there, you're like, "Oh, well, one of the big things is affordable housing or flooding along this creek or whatever the challenge is. And then you start to create collaborative processes around each of those and a roadmap for how to navigate each of those challenges and find ways to solve them.

Heidi: Makes sense. I was involved in one of those years and years ago. And it strikes me that it's another one of those situations where people want to be involved because they don't want to be left out. 

Jacob: That's right. 

Heidi: They don't want the community to go off in a direction that's opposite from what they want because they didn't bother to be involved. So, in that sense, it's the same as the water project. 

Jacob: Yeah 

Heidi: If you want to have your input heard, you've got to participate.

Jacob: That's right. 

Heidi:  I remember Montrose did civic assembly and other places did deliberative processes of one kind or another, not civic assemblies. And they came up with ideas that about affordable housing or homelessness. Well, those two are related. I'm trying to remember some of the other topics that were addressed.

Jacob: Child care. 

Heidi: Childcare, right. And education.  But can these ideas be implemented without government involvement? 

Jacob: Yeah. It depends on the idea. So let's take childcare, for instance, in Montrose. So in that case, they have a lot of challenges in terms of capacity and sharing resources. A big part of the solution had nothing to do with government. It had to do with the childcare providers coordinating. What they couldn't do without government and probably government at the state level, is solve the problem of how much providers were paid, how much certain policies got in the way of credentialing childcare providers. Those types of challenges are government-related. And so in a way, it depends on the scale of the problem you're trying to solve and what the likely solutions are. Some problems necessitate the involvement of government, and you might not have a government that's cooperative. So that's where one of the things about Better Together America is the whole field of community building like service projects or even understanding right and left perspectives, the whole field of dialogue and deliberation, and the whole field of structural reform can come together, because when you don't have collaborative governance, but you need it to solve a specific problem like affordable housing, then you can connect the dots and say, "We can't solve affordable housing because our government is not being accountable to the people. So let's get money out of politics. Let's fix gerrymandering. Let's put in ranked-choice voting, whatever the solution is." And then all of a sudden, instead of being this theoretical thing, if we change this, then it will impact people's lives, the people that we care about. So it changes it from being so abstract, which much of the field is, to actually happening where it's needed and affecting people's lives directly.

So I don't know if that fully answered your question, but the short answer is "it depends," as you said. But a large set of solutions needs to involve government in some way, and you might have to find alternative means to advocate for structural reforms in order to get a government that can help. 

Heidi: Well, the story you just told seemed to me to be very parallel to the story that you told about the— I don't remember whether it was —Denver, I think it was Denver Climate Action Group, that came up with their plan that pushed the issue that then got Denver City involved.  What you just described sounds like another version of the same thing. So it's a way to work around, to —I hesitate to use the word—but to co-opt the government to get involved. 

Tell us a little bit more about what your hopes are for Better Together America. You've had one accelerator workshop that had about 50 folks there, few people who didn't have hubs like Guy and myself, but most of the folks were involved with hubs. It's my understanding. There's currently what, about 25 hubs that you're working with. I know the goal is to get thousands of hubs all over the country. How do you scale up from where you are?

Jacob: Yeah, it's a great question. So if you add up those 25, 30 hubs and the numbers aren't exact because we have a certain number that are in the current learning cohort and went to the workshop. And then we're launching a virtual workshop here in July, actually. Yeah. So there's a whole another suite of folks being involved. 

I think about scale all the time, Heidi. The current hubs theoretically have a service area of about 10% of the US population. 

Heidi: That's pretty good!

Jacob: So goal one is to really show that we can actually serve those populations. Because, right now, that's sort of a number in theory. Some of the hubs are really serving their community, but many of the hubs are just getting started and you can't quite say that they're serving that many people. So the first goal is to help and support those hubs in being successful. We don't own hubs. They might be a Braver Angels chapter or More Perfect Union brickyard or a community mediation center, but to support them in this all-in approach and help them support each other. We're not building a bridge. We're building a highway system.

And then the next piece getting more people involved. We already have so many folks coming to us who want to do this work. So the next piece is really making sure that we have the staff capacity to actually support folks. And we calculate that if we get, just using the current numbers, if we got to 250 hubs, which is about 30 hubs every six months over the next few years, that we would be able to cover 50% of the US population. Now, that's scale, right? 

Heidi: Yeah. That's scale!

Jacob: But we can't be at the center of all of this. Every movement can't have one organization at the center of everything. So part of what we need to think about is how are we empowering, whether it's a train the trainer model, allowing hubs to self facilitate the learning cohorts. We're looking for all sorts of opportunities to ensure that it can self-perpetuate whether or not we get the funding that we think is really ideally needed to launch this. We're thinking about how we can give the tools and the structure for this to live on in perpetuity. So there's a lot there, but in the two and a half minutes we have, maybe I'll let you have another question.

Heidi: Well, my last question is always, "what have I not asked that I should have asked?"

Jacob: That's always my last question! I think you asked a lot of great questions. Maybe the question is, how do national organizations show up as part of this, who don't have local infrastructure? And I would say, so many times, these national organizations are in search of local organizations or local communities that are willing to do their thing and the national organizations are coming in and saying, "Would you do this thing?" What we're trying to do is flip the model on its head, and have the communities identify what they need. We need rank-choice voting because our government is not being cooperative.  "Hey, rank the vote. Can you help us figure out how we could run a campaign here?" As opposed to them coming and looking for opportunity, we're trying to identify local need and having that bubble up to have national resources come down to support localities when and where they need it. 

Heidi: Well can I flip that question and take another couple of minutes?

Jacob: Sure.

Heidi: One of the things that I've been asking other folks and myself a lot, I've been saying that our national governance is obviously totally messed up. But there are great things happening at the local and state level. I just told somebody this this morning that everybody's despairing that democracy in America is dying.  But at the local level, there's a lot of reason to believe that it's doing well and has the potential to do better. 

Jacob: Yeah

Heidi: Is there hope of scaling up this model so that it could work at the national level? Not having 250 hubs, but actually working with Congress and the executive branch at the national level?

Jacob: I'll answer that in two ways. In the original drafting of What Better Together America could be, I always envisioned a national body where local hubs within a region would appoint a couple of  representatives...

Heidi: it sounds like the water plan.

Jacob:  Yeah So we'd have representation from all over the country, big cities, rural towns, states, communities that could really say, "Here is the national strategy for how to do this work.  And maybe what needs to happen in the southeast of this country is different than the northeast or the southwest. And so what is the actual strategy? There's so much work. Everybody has a home, but maybe not everywhere and every place all at once, right?

 I do think that the mission of Mediators Foundation is to have a more coherent, impactful, and innovative civic ecosystem, though that idea is not yet fully adopted by the board. That's my draft that I will bring. to the board.  

So there is an opportunity for Better Together America to create that highway system that's interconnected and for us to understand how, for example, transportation needs in different parts of the country are different, and it's the same with our civic infrastructure and civic needs. And then that national group would have the infrastructure to be able to have stories from all across the country and people to galvanize to help support that. So that's one way to create a more integrated, impactful story as to what's needed and to help be an organizing force, potentially, for the field. 

The second way is —and we don't even have to do anything about this—When people get involved in this type of work locally, we've already seen this happen, leaders emerge. And some of those leaders want to be elected. And so instead of starting and so many groups do this from the top, we need bridgers. We're going to go and look for bridgers who want to be elected.  We're building the constituency first. And out of the constituency, leaders will emerge. And then they'll have a constituency who says, "You know what? Heidi Burgess was just so helpful in solving this challenge." She really demonstrated so much leadership. She has my support because we built trust with Heidi. 

So we have the constituency to support leaders, as opposed to the other way around. And then those leaders, whether elected at the local, state, or national level, can carry that forward. Now, depending on your level of crisis point, this is going to happen more slowly than many people would like. That's not going to happen by 2026. That's a 2029 project, maybe.

Heidi: Oh, that sounds optimistic.

Jacob: Okay. I said at best, right? So I don't think we at BTA have really thought about the natural consequences of what that means. But we're starting to think about that. And what are partners that, if that starts to emerge, we could work with to help stitch together both the constituency and the emerging leaders into a force.  But starting at the ground first rather than the top is the philosophy. 

Heidi: Yeah. Well, I'll be very interested to see how this develops over time, but I've been really excited to see what has happened over the first year. Guy and I both came away from the workshop saying, "Wow, this has really grown and got much more sophisticated than it was! We got involved with Caleb with his iteration, the Local Intersections Project." And it was really it was interesting, but it was really amorphous and has grown greatly with this iteration. So we're really excited about it.

 I want to thank you so much for taking the time to do this. And we'll look forward to talking more.

Jacob: Wonderful. Thanks so much, Heidi, and wishing you and Guy the best.