For the past year or so, in my spare time, I have been quietly working on a new initiative with the intention of launching it soon after the election, whatever the outcome.
Throughout my professional and volunteer career, I’ve worked in various ways on issues of exclusion – exclusion from political systems, from economic opportunity, from justice, from progress.
I’m ready now to shift from researching social change to making it happen. Last month, I submitted most of the paperwork needed to form a new nonprofit organization dedicated to building a more civil, peaceful, and inclusive world at home and abroad.
The Foundation for Inclusion is not a political or a partisan organization. When working here in the United States, we’ll work to try to understand the real drivers of (structural, systemic) marginalization, resentment, polarization, and incivility, without letting politics distort our discovery of the paths toward (structural, systemic) inclusion. Globally, we’ll work on the sources of social conflict in all its forms, whether the conflict is already violent or merely dangerously uncivil. Worldwide, we’ll work on civil disengagement, finding ways to help people solve hard problems collaboratively, finding areas of good-enough agreement to make living together possible.
I’ve spent much of the past 25 years studying social conflict and social change, and I have learned that the peace, stability, and civility we all need to thrive cannot be the responsibility of governments alone: across the political spectrum, common people, civil organizations, and businesses all have contributions to make as well. For that reason, our main partners will be business leaders, investors, and civil organizations (as well as governments, when policy engagement is needed) and our job will be to make them more effective at contributing to structural inclusion and positive social change more generally.
See https://foundationforinclusion.org for more information. The first fundraising campaign will be launched in the next few weeks, but we already have several partners and initiatives under way. I welcome feedback and any support you all want to give — and we’ll work with anyone who is willing to engage with us in a spirit of civility and a desire to solve real problems.