Heidi:  Hi, I'm Heidi Burgess, and I'm here with Guy Burgess. We're both with Beyond Intractability. And we're talking today with Walt Roberts and Caleb Christian, who are the co-founders and co-directors, I believe that's the proper title, maybe not, of the Inner-Movement Impact Project, IMIP. Both of you have interesting backgrounds. So before we talk about IMEP, I thought that I'd ask each of you to talk a little bit about where you were before you started working with this. I think it gives an interesting background to what you're doing now. Walt?

Walt: I was hoping Caleb would go first.

Heidi: Okay, Caleb, why don't you go first?

Caleb: Sure. Yeah. I have a little bit of background: lawyer by trade and spent most of my career in the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. And from there, I took a little career pause, got off active duty, and went to seminary and business school. And the combination of all those things helped me realize that communities weren't thriving the way they were supposed to and that it's on us to fix that. And democracy is one of those vehicles for doing so. And combined with the importance of networks and systems. And so that really led me to connecting with Walt. And maybe I'll pass the microphone over at that point.

Walt: My background starts with Buckminster Fuller when I was a teenager and being infected with the idea that we can make the whole planet and everybody on it work a lot better than we can and we have been. So why don't we just do that? So fast forward, my career was blending technology together with large group process. I was an expert at using keypad polling to have everybody in a large group express their opinion or position on something. And basically bring the idea of a high-quality generative conversation to large group settings where lots of different diverse stakeholders are getting together to work out priorities or solve a problem, which had me getting involved in movements. The Natural Step Network founded by Karl Heinrich Robert back 20, 30 years ago, was the main convener for the sustainability movement, which was nascent at the time and a movement of many movements. So I had the privilege of over the course of 10 or 12 years designing and facilitating about as many conferences, about a dozen or 15 that had to do with people coming together and figuring out how to move the idea of sustainability forward, get it imbued, embedded into the corporate world, into governance, etc. So my work has had an element of moving the movements and being sort of a strategic helper when they're coming together for their major conferences or summits, what to talk about, and how those conversations would move the movement forward. So I had an opportunity to work with the sustainability movement. As I just mentioned, I got involved with the Occupy Movement as a volunteer and created something with an ad hoc group called Interoccupy.US, got involved with the transpartisan movement, and I'll keep it short here. I'll just jump right to that.

So in 2009, a conference was designed and facilitated, which was the launch. And I did that with Peggy Holman on behalf of Joseph McCormick. And that was the launch of the Transpartisan Alliance. That was in 2009. The first version of the Transpartisan Alliance lasted for a couple of years. And along the way, Debilyn Molineaux, who became the first director, if you will, of the Bridge Alliance, which was one of the early hub organizations for this ecosystem of many movements. So we became colleagues and worked on the Coffee Party, which was sort of an impromptu movement with Annabelle Park. And we also designed and facilitated or we designed and piloted what is Livingroom Conversations, which is a venerable bridging organization in the bridging field. So in 2017, Debbilyn called me and said, "We need you to come back into the field. I'd taken a hiatus." And so starting in 2017, I came back as a volunteer and doing movement alignment work, mostly with Pearce Godwin as a thinking partner and helping him. He did  99% of the work, but I was sort of a mentor and a thinking partner as he created the Listen First Project, and then the Listen First Coalition, a monthly call, and a place to build community for the bridging field. And he was doing intra-movement organizing. So we worked together for a couple of years.

And then I set out on my own because I could see that intra movement organizing within a movement field is an important thing to do. But I was more interested and concerned about inter-movement organizing. And that brings me to this latest chapter where I happily bumped into Caleb. And we've got a core crew of people who are part of our inner circle of our community that we work with, and people come and go out of that circle. But the whole thing is that there is a movement of many movements, and our work is building a community of connectors, if you will, connecting the connectors that are building bridges between the movements for collective influence and impact organizing. So boy, that was a much longer background, but it perhaps seeds into what we're here to talk about.

Heidi: Great. So talk a little bit about the early days. What was your and Caleb's image of what you wanted to do? Go into more detail than collecting movements. I'm assuming that you had an image of the change that you want to bring about, and you're probably not collecting movements that are working to further racism and destroy democracy. I'm sure that you're going the other direction. So talk a little bit about your vision and goals.

Walt: I'd like to defer to Caleb to get us started.

Caleb: Sure. I'll just set the table with what we were seeing at that time. And it was a lot of silos. There was a lot of wonderful efforts out there when it related to civic health and pro-democracy from a nonpartisan, transpartisan kind of perspective. And they weren't talking together, talking to each other, working together as much as they could have been. A lot of inefficiencies, silos, silver bullet mentalities. There's just a lot of meat left on the bone for overall effectiveness. And I think we saw that when we would just talk to people we knew, they would say they had never heard of any of the movements. And I think we could also point to an article by Zach Beauchamp in Vox where he reasonably pointed to the fact that the US needs a pro-democracy movement, and where is it? And so I think that was kind of the impetus for us really getting started.  And with that, Walt, why don't you take it from there?

Walt: Well, based on that article and Caleb's research for his academic pursuits, he came across Rob Stein's work as well. And Rob had written quite a number of pieces thinking about where's the leadership and what is the leadership structure for collective impact work and creating a coalition of coalitions. He had his way of talking about it, but he was pointing to the same phenomenon that these very diverse and siloed movements and the organizations that were hubs for those were not connecting, and there was no structure for doing that. And we needed to have a structure for that. So we started to get clear about the difference between intra-movement organizing, which is relatively straightforward. Bridgers working with bridgers, or racial justice people working with people who are close into the common cause they have. But how do we do inter-movement organizing where the gaps are a little bit broader? And it's not so obvious where there's a shared concern, a shared mission, a shared goal, because the positions are so different.

Anyway, so I'll add to this is one of the key things that Caleb and I got ready for and then did together with the help of Mike Kennig was go to the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers' annual summit coming out of COVID in December of a couple of years ago. And at that conference, right leading up to that is when Rachel Kleinfeld's piece, Five Strategies to Support Democracy. In that, she had strategy number four, which was: "Build a broad-based, multi-stranded, pro-democracy movement around a positive vision concretized in locally rooted action." So Rachel Kleinfeld, who is really one of the brightest and the best, really in one sentence laid out pretty much the whole hologram of what's required. It's diverse. It's multi-stranded. It's a movement of many movements. It's a positive vision. It's got to be rooted, concretized, taken to the ground,  solidified in communities, locally rooted action.

So at the NANR Conference, two things came about. We really adopted Strategy Number Four to be the thing that we were in service to to build that movement of many movements, foster it, help it along, and not in a command and control sort of hierarchical corporate kind of way, but in a community-building kind of way. And then at that conference, we met Vinay and also really got clear about the concretized and local action part. Lots of innovation, lots of change, lots of reforms all have to happen locally. So what's democracy and collaboration and inner movement organizing look like at the hyper-local level, a town, a city, a county, or at the state level, a slightly larger geographic unit of analysis. But what's the local intersections aspect of this work? How do you do inter-movement organizing and community-building above and beyond what's naturally happening in any given community? So that's my contribution to the story for now.

Caleb: Walt, I'm wondering before we keep going, if this might be a good opportunity to speak about the three Bs.

Walt: Indeed.  So we're going to do time travel here. And one of the things I'll say along the way is that my work and our work has been to recognize the importance of summits and big conferences and how they can be utilized to do multiple things. Their main purpose is bringing that particular movement or community together. But also bringing to those conferences the inter-movement conversation and even a delegation and/or identifying people who are from different movements and having a conversation about connectivity that might want to happen. Anyway, so with that in mind, the 22nd Century Initiative was in formulation for a couple of years. And Scott Nakagawa and his crew put that together with James Mum being an important person in that process. They put together their first big conference, and it was called "Forging a People Power Democracy." And their whole premise and thesis was that we needed to block the bad things that are happening and build the kind of democracy, a multiracial, people-powered democracy, and other descriptors were in there too. And I attended that conference, and the block and build sort of framework was important, and that he was calling out that we needed to build or forge a people-powered democracy, gave that movement a focus, a shared focus on generating democracy together that it didn't have before.

So to get to Caleb's question, I came away from that conference really turned on because, wow, there's a whole field that's really put democracy right at the center of their common cause call to action. And in the conversation during the conference, they were talking about, "We need to work together. We need to get over our internal differences, the family squabbles within that particular field of movements." And so there was a lot of talk about working together. In other words, they needed to bridge within the movement and do some bridging to have more friends than enemies outside of the movement. So I and others have added the bridge, block, and build as the 3B model. And as we started to socialize that idea, James Mum and Scott Nakagawa also came to the conclusion that adding bridge to the block and build was a good idea.  So they have Block Bridge and Build. We came up with Bridge, Block and Build, and people are off to the races with that. That's a really interesting way of thinking about what is happening to defend and strengthen and innovate democracy, that we have to work together. We are in this together, and we need to have that consciousness and have energy to reach out and find partnerships. So that bridging part's crucial.

The bad things that are happening, the bad movements that are working contrary and actually really harming and tearing down our institutions and norms, those really need to be blocked. And how you respond to that, how you counter that, how you diffuse their energy is an important part of the puzzle. And then what we're building together, a people-powered democracy, civic renewal, civic health, civic muscle, all the things that are components of a healthy democracy, all that building work. All three of those things are basically happening simultaneously. Sometimes one aspect is more out in front than the other. And so the bridge block and build became an important framework, but we didn't invent it. We embellished, and we've socialized it, and it's getting traction. And so there's that. 

Guy: We've been talking a lot about the sort of underlying goals of the project and the rationale for it.  What I think people who are listening to this might still be a bit confused about is exactly what is it that you're doing. This is a project that has taken advantage of the Zoom technology that emerged from the great pandemic. But if you could talk for a bit on just what you've done and how you're utilizing Zoom and other kinds of communication measures to actually pull this movement of many movements together.

Walt: Caleb, why don't you start and maybe take a pass or a stab at the snowball conversations?

Caleb: So yeah, happy to. The kind of lead up —and my only hesitation in kicking this part off our conversation — is a lot of this is really just a reflection of Walt's genius of how to build these things. But really, it's a lot of network weaving and relationship-building at first, especially. So over the last number of years, we've engaged in MANY — It's got to be at least 1,000 —conversations, deep, meaningful relationship-building conversations with leaders from across all the different movements. And when I say leader, of course, I mean lower-case l leader because yeah, some have the fancy titles and many are just earnest Americans wanting to make a difference. And through those conversations, we've kind of built — "built" might be the wrong word, but built a network of people that are interested in working together who understand these big-picture concepts that we've been talking about, and that want to find ways that we can really move towards collective impact. And so those conversations have led to, very practically, a series of forums that have been ongoing. And this is probably where I'd turn it over to Walt. But really, it's these generative conversations that are happening one-on-one in the small group, and now are happening as a large group amongst people from all over the many different movements. And those are then moving towards other offshoots and identifying that there's opportunities for working together on specific projects and things along those lines. So, Walt,  let me turn it over to you from there.

Walt: Our website describes the things that we do, so there's more that can be found there. But building on what Caleb said and going back a little bit, the thing that I got hooked on in my career, becoming a large group process designer, was the importance of generative conversations. And the systems thinking world, when I was spending time learning about systems thinking and being involved in that, somebody said, "you know Here's how it works. The quality of our outcomes are based on several things. First, the quality of our thinking. Number two, the quality of our conversations. And three, the quality of our relationships. Those things give the quality of the outcomes or results that we can produce in an organization, in a community, whatever. And so the quality of the conversation, the opportunity to really get clear about what a generative conversation is, basically a creative conversation. Something emerges from it.

So the idea of "generate" is important. And generative forums and a really important element of all the work that we're doing is that it is generative. We've even come up with the name Generate Democracy! as something that embodies this core principle and is a pretty good way of describing what it is that all these movements of many movements are doing together, be it democracy as a verb, what you are as a citizen, how you relate to democracy as a way of life, how you work on your civics. It's an action. It's a way of being, and it's also democracy as a noun. The structures, the norms, the systems that are around the democratic and political processes.

So getting back to it, generative forums and generative conversations and paying attention to what's emerging and trying to be in service of accelerating and empowering what's already emerging and not trying to invent something and say, "We've got a better idea, and here's what it is and forcing it." So I'm spinning a little bit, but the forums, our monthly Generate Democracy,Community Forum is our backbone sort of hub kind of backbone service to the community of many movements. So this is where people come and we talk about things and we mix it up and people make connections. So we have the Zoom technology and kind of a unique way of conducting our forums. So it's highly interactive and lots of people are talking and lots of connections are happening real time. There's some sort of standard formal presentations, but not too many. So using Zoom as a community building tool and a place to make critical connections is really central.

 And more recently, we've developed an online social media space. We're using LinkedIn because everybody who's in this ecosystem, almost everybody is hanging out in LinkedIn and connecting there. So the Generate Democracy! LinkedIn group is the companion to and complement of our monthly forum. And so you know we're up to about 400 people who are connected there. And with a little bit of work, we can get it up to 1,000 in a couple more months. And so there's an opportunity to exchange information and do some sort of asynchronous connecting and commenting and liking what one another is doing. So almost done. So we've got snowball conversations, individual conversations, helping people understand how to come into our community or how they might fit more purposefully and symbiotically in the ecosystem.

We're often, as a sidebar, helping folks get a clearer picture of the ecosystem that they're in, so that they don't make mistakes and reinvent things that are already happening and know who to connect with a little bit more than they did before.

Heidi: Let me stop you for a second. I know you're having an open house that's coming up quite soon. That's a way for people to get involved. But knowing how stacked up we are, this video probably won't be out until after the open house, and people are going to watch it. So if people are watching it a month or two months, hence, and are interested in getting involved, how would they do it?

Walt: Best way to do it is to, if you are using LinkedIn, go to LinkedIn and just type in generate democracy exclamation point at the end and join that group. And there'll be information there and my information there and how to get involved. So the things that a person might need to be able to connect and then get onto our invite list so that you're basically on our mailing list and get invited to the forums. But the LinkedIn site is a good place to go at any time. And that goes throughout. As people are coming and appreciating the Inter-Movement Impact Project and the Generate Democracy! community that's developing, they can always invite people to join that LinkedIn group as a way to kind of get their foot in the door and then get more connected on our distribution list from there.

Heidi: So there is information on Generate Democracy! on how to get involved in the forums? 

Caleb: Yes. And they can always contact us too. We're always happy to talk to them and plug them in where it makes sense.

Guy: Well, we can certainly facilitate that through this article and the video. I had a professor years ago who talked about this process of "thingification." Like the word "thing" and add "-ification" to it. What it is is how you create things. And he gave a lecture about how there are all these diffuse things happening, and nobody quite sees them because they're all sort of small. But if you bring them together, then all of a sudden, in this case, there's a movement, an inter-movement. And I think what's exciting about what you've done is that you've been able to bring together so many people. And every time we come to one of these sessions, we're really blown away with how many different organizations representing how many different local efforts are doing how many different things. Your meetings are an hour and a half of one person telling a story after another after another. And the other thing that I've really been impressed by is the power of chat and Google Docs. Not only do we have these Zooms, which have been fascinating, but if you follow the chat, people keep adding more and more stuff. And there are links, and you can actually follow through and find out that what is a brief presentation in the Zoom is backed up by an awful lot of underlying effort.

I also like the way that you use Google Docs to have the whole community create this giant document that, again, provides something of a permanent record of all of this. But what you've done is exemplary. You know we have this theory of massively parallel approaches to democracy building. And what you've demonstrated to us, anyway, is that it, in fact, exists. And the more you start working to pull it together, the bigger you discover that it already is.

Heidi: And backing up a little bit on what Guy said, one of the things that really strikes me is I think we've been coming to your forums for a little over a year, maybe 16 months. And when we first started coming, I think there were, oh, maybe about 20 people on the call. Now, I don't know what there are, 70, 80 people on the call, but it's just growing. And some of those folks like Kristina Becvar, who's now the head of the Bridge Alliance. The Bridge Alliance is already an alliance of lots of other organizations. And the Listen First Coalition is an alliance of lots of other organizations. So you've got people who are representing big organizations that are representing lots of other organizations. If you really counted the number of people that were involved in what you're doing that way, it's got to be thousands, if not tens of thousands.

Guy: I think closer to millions.

Heidi: Well, maybe. Anyway. 

Walt: How many degrees of separation?

Heidi: Yeah. You talk about snowball conversations. I see what you're doing as a snowball process. A snowball rolling machine. And the thing that I'm saying a lot and I realized when I was writing a blog post the other day that I haven't written a blog post about hope. I thought I had. I have to do it. But what you're doing, I think, is generating hope because so many of the people that I talk to, people not in this movement, not on your Zooms, but in the outside world, at least before a week ago, things have, of course, massively changed in the last week. But everybody was feeling hopeless. They felt like democracy in the United States was going to hell in a handbasket, and we are in some projects with people from around the world. And it's not just a United States problem. It's a very much global problem that democracy for all sorts of reasons is on the ropes. And I talked to so many people who have said, "I've just given up. I'm just tending my garden and playing with my kids because I might as well enjoy what little time is left. We're doomed." And if you've got that attitude, it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And by creating this thing and the more you and we and lots of other people can get people to know that there is a movement out there that really is effectively counteracting all of the bad stuff, as you put it. We talk about bad faith actors too. That gives people hope and reason to get on the snowball. So I think what you're doing is critically important because we've just got to get people involved. We've got to get people to realize that there is a better way and the better way is only going to work if they're involved. So very, very excited about what you've done and where it's going.

Walt: Well, thank you for that. And let me just make two points to build on things that you've said. So yes, the snowball rolling metaphor is where we started in this conversation. A snowball conversation is an individual conversation, and we have lots of those. And we have our core principles and ideas and theories of change. And we roll the snowball and have conversations. And literally, it's a community building, a snowball rolling phenomenon. And as the snowball rolls, if you really did that as a kid, like I did, you know that the core has to be solid. The ideas, the compelling call to action, the validity of it, not just a brilliant idea that doesn't really get grounded. But we have to work together to get stuff done is a pretty basic wisdom. And that's at the heart of our philosophy and theory of change, of inner movement organizing. So anyway, just wanted to riff a little bit more on, yes, indeed, the snowball rolling metaphor is alive and well with community-building work that we're doing.

And then to the hope part. I think it's true is that we try not to get too far into the doom and gloom conversation and being motivated by getting ready for the worst of it. And I don't spend a whole lot of time being overly rosy about things and having grandiose visions of how it's all going to magically get turned around. So I personally try to say comfortably numb about what's going on in a positive and healthy way. You know, It's just day present. But the hope I will bring forth is this distinction too, two things about it.

Caleb and I have focused most of our attention, like 90% of it, on the ecosystem of many movements and the practitioners and the active citizens and volunteers and players and communicators and influencers who are working on generating democracy, fixing what's broken about our political stuff, etc. So there's a community to build out of the folks that are already in the ecosystem and spending a good part of their time working on those things.

And then there's the rest of the world. There's everybody else who really doesn't even know that these literally more than 10,000 organizations that are all somewhat nonpartisan, cross-partisan, transpartisan are working on all these different sort of dimensions of fixing what's broken and strengthening what's good. And so how to get that word out? We're not newsworthy. We're not sensational. So the normal mainstream media and/or whatever the media channels are that are out there, they make a lot more money with things that sizzle and burn and are controversial and hateful and what have you. And so the good news about all this good work just does not get out. So how do you get that out? And so we're working on that.

And the quick thing to put on the table is the idea of democracy, Vox, and meshwork. What is the voice of democracy?  What is this story that's being told but not heard? And how do you get that story out? And what's the meshwork of all the various websites and media channel properties and social media sites that can carry this message and get it out to the folks who aren't hearing about it and who would like to. So carrying that message of hope that there's a whole ecosystem of 10,000-plus organizations working hard to save the day and make things a brighter future for our country is important. People get excited about that when they hear about it. And then the problem is how to plug into it. And if we have time, we can talk about groups like Braver Angels and Starts with Us, Citizen Connect, Bridge Alliance, and the pathways and the welcome rooms or the entryways into being connected with this ecosystem in a meaningful way. That's an important part of the puzzle that's still got some development to be done. But things are happening.

Caleb: If I could add just maybe one additional metaphor to this conversation about how do we get people to notice all the amazing things that all these 10,000-plus organizations are doing? I was thinking of the metaphor of just like a bee. If you're outside and maybe you have a couple of bees floating around, you might notice them. You might not. But if you got a whole hive there, well, there's a whole lot greater likelihood that you're going to notice that hive. And I think that's really what we're building towards. And I think there's a lot of beauty in that metaphor as well because with the forums that Walt hosts and Generate Democracy! LinkedIn Group, it is all building this kind of collective intelligence as well as the individual organizations are driving a lot of value from connecting with each other and finding synergistic opportunities, but then having this whole hive that's developing that are all connected to each other, moving in the same direction. Not only do you notice it, but there's a lot greater impact that can come from all these different organizations working together.

Guy: One of the things that we've been talking about a lot over the last several months is something that we call society's "learning engine." It's kind of a social or a democracy writ large, not just Democratic Party version of Adam Smith's invisible hand.  And it's basically the principle that all problems create opportunities for people who can solve them. And what's so exciting about this project is that it consists of lots of different groups of people who have seen some problem in this larger context of dysfunctional democracy and figured out something that they can do to help solve it. And it's a lot of very different things. They're sort of in parallel, but sometimes there's some pretty significant disagreements. Some folks approach things largely from a left-leaning progressive perspective and are working toward the center. Other folks are approaching it from a more conservative perspective. And then there are folks that approach it from a sort of centrist, transpartisan perspective. Somewhere, I have a PowerPoint slide that I've used often showing that there are lots of different ways to build bridges. And that's what's happening. And I think one of the real strengths of this is that it really does promote a wide variety of efforts and provide a home for people with a wide diversity of views about how to solve this. And instead of getting caught up in this endless debate over who's got the right answer, the truth is it's an all of the above answer.

Walt: In the written piece that you put with this, the Venn diagram with six circles is telling and kind of points to how many different perspectives there are. And six is not the magic number. It could be anywhere from 12, depending on how you get to it. Yeah. So your point exactly, and that Venn diagram depicts it.

And it also, by being a Venn diagram, points to the intersection of all of those things at the center. And at the center, you can put anything, but in this case, it's our political system and our democracy and our civic health. It's all at the center, and all those various circles and movements and different things have that in common. So that's just to say plus one to what you said and say that there's a graphic that helps to see that.

And if I could, I'd really like to just say you know as quickly as I can,  the most recent thing that we're very proud of is how the Braver Angels organization and community has been growing and developing since its inception in 2016 and their conference. And then another interesting person, Harry Boyt, who has, as a young person, was working in the civil rights movement. He's a thought leader in the area of civic renewal and citizenship and is very active and got involved with Braver Angels, got involved with us. So this intersection of a really important and unifying idea has gotten clarified in the last three months in a way that's super important.  I'll just say that the Braver Angels National Convention, their purpose statement is that this is a call to citizenship. Harry Boyt talks about a return to citizen and civic renewal being at the heart of things. So it's not the only thing that's going on, but it's a big part of the equation. Democracy is a verb. Democracy is a way of life. Being a citizen in this country and breaking out of citizen as consumer. I like this. I don't like that. Maybe I'll vote. Maybe I won't. You know That multiple dimensionality of a full-blown generative citizen is now what's on the table as something to work on and to sort of combine our energies on. And that's happening in a big way between Braver Angels, a lot of the work that Caleb and others are doing about how to do local organizing that brings inner movement sort of sensibilities to that and how that really is. In a community, people are showing up as citizens and doing things that are civic, and that's a renewal thing.

And similarly, in that mix, there's one other person that makes a big connection, and that's David Eisner. David Eisner is a very important leader in the bridging field. He was pretty much the main leader of creating the Bridging Movement Alignment Council and a very big champion of the role of bridging in the greater field of things. He's a conservative, and he's involved in all of this and went to the Braver Angels Convention and is helping to bring these new distinctions or clarity around the idea that it's about developing citizens, about developing a new kind of citizen.

And that bridging work is not just for the experience of finding common ground, but it's for building the capacities and strengths and sensibilities that a generative or transpartisan or principled citizen, this new kind of full-blown, more multi-dimensional, not just citizen as consumer. So I wax poetic, but that's really an important thing that has emerged. And our forums and connectivity have been central to some of that magic happening. We didn't cause that to happen, but we helped that happen.

Heidi: So is that changing the direction that you see yourselves going, or is it just one spin-off of many?

Walt: It's one of several. We've talked about "key lever endeavors." So Caleb and I are in the ecosystem. We talk to people. We sense and see things happening. And then we discern, or at least I discern, that, "Oh, Braver Angels has grown up to a certain extent. They are playing nice in the ecosystem. So to your question, we are always sensing what the important endeavor is. And we don't have full visibility, but from what we see and where we go and what we survey, this nexus, this intersection of citizens, civic renewal, bridging, Braver Angels, a place to belong. They do everything red and blue. So they have a formula and magic sauce about everything is politically and ideologically balanced from the get-go.Not that everybody has to do that, but that's a special thing that they do that's really timely for the moment that we're in, and given that our polarization is a lot political identity-based. But anyway, I think I've made my point.

We don't do much about this right now, but what is the new conservative movement going to look like? And who's going to generate that? What is the role of business in defending and strengthening democracy? And how does business for America and leadership now and the American Bar Association and the rotary community fit in? How are they all contributing to how business sort of changes its tune and perspective and attitude about their role in that?

The last thing I'll say is one of the more important things that I think is central to all of this is communication. How can we network together all the communication networks that there are and start to have a more coherent and cohesive message and/or, I mean, central themes that have multiple ways you can talk about those things into the multiple channels, but pretty much in harmony and not out of harmony and doesn't hurt your ears when you hear it from two different places kind of thing. So the idea of knitting together a large meshwork of media and communications and narratives is another important place where we're going to go to work on that. So I'll stop there.

Heidi: If you were to zoom ahead five years, what would you like IMIP to be or be doing at that point? What's your long-term vision or goal?

Walt: Caleb, do you want to take a stab at that?

Caleb: Yeah.  In our purely theoretical perfect world, the inter movement impact project would cease to exist because all the connective tissue would be so strong and so effective that there is this thriving inter-movement community that had led to massive social movements or systems change. And we would have checked all the boxes and have a thriving democracy, thriving country. But as we all know, community-building, which kind of is at the root of what we're doing. We're building this community amongst all the organizations and movements. Of course, community building is one of those things that never truly ends.  So I'll pause there with my theoretical comments and pass it off to Walter, who is, perhaps, more practical.

Walt: Well, I've been doing this work, and lucky I can, pro bono since 2017. I have a little nest egg, so I don't have to make money at this. And so as I'm 67 and let's say you know by the time I'm 75, what am I doing? Sitting back and really marveling at how nicely the backbone has developed. So what's happened in five or seven years is that the backbone kind of forum and connecting space that Caleb and I have developed has matured and others can hold that space and work with that apparatus and champion that important part of it, so that I can do some other things and not have to be sort of like the main host or facilitator of the monthly meeting. So some of the things you pointed to, how we work with the documents, how we work with recording and feeding back that material to the people who participated. We didn't even talk about using the recording and the notes from that to become content that goes out into the field, that becomes really raw, yummy, amazing, fresh stuff.

So the forum and all those things that are supportive of it, the document using AI, recording, feeding that back, that that has matured and people have learned how to do that so that it doesn't have to be a Caleb or a Walt doing it anymore. There's a host of people who can step into that and hold that convening and hosting and community-building connectivity space.

Caleb: I would add the challenge —where I struggled with your question was the five-year timeline. Because really, at the end of the day, in my mind, at least, what we're really trying to do is get the inner movement community, this movement of many movements, prepared and ready to be able to work together for collective impact.

Heidi: Yeah, five years would be totally arbitrary.

Caleb: Absolutely. But just reading the tea leaves of what's coming down the pipe, I don't know that we have five years to prepare and just slowly get ready. And so I would love to say by five years, we're way past the point, we were ready past tense, and we continue being ready. And hopefully, we did something meaningful as a collective in the meantime.

Heidi:  As I was thinking about that question, the alternative formulations were after November, because I think a lot of us are looking ahead to November and saying it really doesn't matter — well, it matters who wins. But no matter who wins, there is going to be a lot of tension over the election. There's going to be at least a third, maybe half of the country, who's going to be very unhappy. And there's going to be a great need for projects like this that start to heal the wounds and bring people back together. So one version of that question is, well, what are you going to do in December? And another version was, what are you going to do in 10 years? And I compromised on 5. But anyway, I think the image is great. The last question I would have is, is there something that you wish that I would have asked about and I didn't? Something that you really would like our viewers and readers to know about the project or its offshoots or what you guys are doing or anything. Did I miss something important?

Caleb: Can I take a second just to brag on Walt for a minute? Guy, I think you had asked a question earlier that had kind of alluded to this. And I just wanted to maybe add a little bit. You had kind of pointed to there's this kind of diversity of different movements that are all related to democracy and civic health and inherent to whether you get a group of family members together, an organization with different people, or a movement, or in this case, movement of many movements together, there's going to be there's going to be points of friction. And so one thing I want to tip my hat to Walt to, is he's been very intentional about creating a space for turning any potential conflict or disagreement into a constructive or generative type conversations where different groups, different movements can come together in a safe place, in a facilitated kind of setting and be able to work through those points of tension in ways that really get everyone moving more towards a unity of purpose. So I wanted to name that as an important thing that's been done and will continue being done. 

Walt: So not that you didn't ask this, but what I find myself wanting to speak to is the bigger picture of things, is that what's at the root of our discontent and lack of harmony. And there are huge, wicked, systemic problems, how we practice capitalism, how that plays with politics. And that's a huge thing, and that's not being talked about very much, and it needs to be addressed. And that's going to take decades to transform that and/or adjust it ,so it's a little bit more just and equitable, etc.  And in a way, the part of what we're doing that's not spoken out loud, but Duncan Autrey put it well in a forum a couple of forums ago. He said that, "Oh, I get it. What we're doing, what the Inter-Movement Impact Project is doing, what Generate Democracy! is doing is we're we're working on the wicked problem of how do we solve wicked problems together?" And that's really it. Democracy, if it's not functioning, then we can't really generate the policies. We can't respond to the needs of the people and the discontent that's come from decades of lack of performance by our political system to produce sustainable, reasonable results and policies around things that are challenging, both kitchen table issues, economy taxes, getting along.

So anyway, at the heart of it, how we do capitalism and how we actually have the mechanism and the incentives and the structures and processes to solve wicked problems together is a really important part of what we're doing. And I want to give a tip of the hat to Saul Erdman and his Grand Bargain Project, which is all part of the warp and weave of what we're working on. A couple of our colleagues are now on board with him in making things happen. But the idea of a whole basket full of six major sort of policy issue areas and a whole deliberative process and putting that package together and saying, "Pass this as a package of six major things or not." He is actually spearheading and prototyping a process and an approach to handling big policy issues in a way that could be the future.  His is the first time ever. This has been, well, the first iteration of this. But I can look 10 years ahead and say, "Oh, it sure was great that Saul had that idea, and it was halfway successful back in the 2024 timeframe, because now we're getting much better at it, and we're actually passing stuff, solving problems that really matter to we, the people."

Heidi: Great!

Guy: Listening to this conversation, I have one other hopeful thought.  We're worried a lot about how our society is sliding down this slippery slope toward authoritarianism. And I was thinking back on a lot of friends and colleagues we've had who, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that they went to these places to try to help people who had spent their lives living under authoritarian regimes make the transition to democracy. And what they found was that the people who have lived in those societies had no sense of what democracy was. Before, if you thought about politics, that was a really dangerous thing. So nobody did. And nobody had any image of what civic involvement was. And it was very, very hard to teach them that. That's not the case in the West. It's not the case in the United States. You look at this enormous amount of activity. People do care. They are involved. They do think civically. It's a pretty chaotic, sometimes, a  mess that sometimes borders on political fibrillation. But there's something very hopeful about it. And all of these different efforts to make it work are very, very different from what life is like in a society where nobody dares think about politics.

Walt: I think the difference here, to parse that a little bit ,is that most of us are bedazzled because the political, industrial, polarization complex wants us to be bedazzled by the big fight of the political gladiators going at it. So in this country, we think a lot about politics, and we get democracy confused with politics. And democracy as a philosophy, as a structure, as a way of being, as a way of being a citizen and responsible and engaged, etc.in important. We would do well to do this. What we are doing is helping to discern that democracy is a conversation unto itself and politics is connected to that, but it's not the same. It's different. And if we get that distinction clarified, it'll help create an awareness and a shared sensibility so we can work on democracy and not get bogged down in all the incentives we're given to disagree and hate one another and be vicious and violent and all that sort of stuff.

And I did want to just say that, Heidi, to your point and to Caleb's point, a lot of what we do now in making the connections that we're making now is in service to what is going to happen leading up to November, what happens immediately after the November election, and kind of the first half of 2025. We're just trying to make as many connections and bringing attention to, "Are you ready for the tsunami of badness that might be coming? Will you join the tsunami of interested people who want to make a difference and do something to be on the right side of this? Are you ready to welcome people who want to come rushing to the movement?  And are you ready for the big opportunities that lend themselves, that emerge, that are like really positive things that if you can jump on them and have collective support for something, it can actually be brought forth, rather than be something that just went by as a possibility we couldn't grab and really bring to fruition or get that seed planted or act on that?" So that preparedness aspect of things and having connections and relationships and having talked to one another leaders and people from all kinds of leadership positions from all the different movements. So in a way, a good third of our work is about being ready for this next, call it eight-month period and the preparedness and having these connections in hand before we need them is part of what we're doing.

Heidi: Well, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to do this. I'm noticing we're 10 minutes over, so I have lots of things I want to say, but I'm going to cut here.I really appreciate your taking the time to do this and really appreciate the project that you're running and the role that you're playing. It's really important. I think it's going to be increasingly needed over the next months and years. I don't see it going away in five years as nice as that would be to think it might. This is going to be a long-term project, and we may not be involved in it, but it's going to be needed. And hopefully, there'll be lots of people following in your footsteps and ours.

Walt: Well, as long as the two of you and me are on the planet, we'll be working on this together because your work with Beyond Intractability is part and parcel of the mesh work and your participation on the calls and your perspective on things has been valuable and will continue to be valuable. And so look forward to continuing the dance.

Heidi: Sounds good. Thank you. Thanks, Caleb, too.

Caleb: Yeah. Thank you both. This has been great.