Who Owns the Future? Developing the Social and Economic Justice Leaders Project

To Whom Does the Future Belong?

Eleanor Roosevelt is reported to have said, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”¹ In a kind of reply, across generations and very different lived experiences, Malcolm X argued, “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.”²

What do you do when the unthinkable happens? And does it include a commitment to think differently for a change and to create the space to do that different kind of thinking?

A Shocking Presidential Upset

Yes, there were warning signs for those who chose to see them. But few political observers predicted the victory of Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Hilary Clinton, by vote of the Electoral College, in the November 2016 presidential election.

Indeed, with the important exception of Fox News, few in the mainstream news media or political establishment took Trump seriously, over the long months of his unorthodox—to put it mildly—presidential campaign. At least not until he handily defeated much more well-known, establishment-favored candidates for the Republican nomination and attacked not only undocumented immigrants, reproductive rights, and the growing call to reform policing and to value and protect Black lives—but also free trade, hawkishness toward Russia, and other previously unquestioned policy positions for his party.

Trump seemed, even to the most cautious odds makers, to be a very long shot to win the general election. And then he did, with Clinton winning over 66 million votes to Trump’s 63 million in the popular vote, but Trump prevailing in the Electoral College, 304 votes to Clinton’s 227 thanks to the number of battleground states he managed to tip in his favor.

Trump’s upset victory left millions of Clinton supporters—and some of the nation’s foremost champions of voting rights, worker’s rights, reproductive justice, and climate action—with shock, disbelief, and, at least in the immediate aftermath, no small bit of second guessing: What just happened? How did it happen? What should we have done differently? And what do we do next, now that our world has been upended?

But Trump’s upset also got leaders of some of the nation’s largest and most influential civil-society organizations, at least on the center-left of American politics and policy making, thinking: Beyond emergency “resistance” measures—to counter the immediate threats looming to basic rights we’ve fought for over generations—what can we do to make it more likely that we foresee the next “unthinkable” so that we can be much better prepared?

“The Trouble with Social Movements”—and the Value of Foresight

Social movements, and related forms of civic activism that mobilize grassroots constituents to advocate for change, have been described in many ways by supporters and critics:

• • As makers of “good trouble,” in the immortal words of the late Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), a hero of the Civil Rights Movement, generating pressure and confronting society with the gap between espoused values and the current state of the world

• • As a force for “transgressive” politics, in the shorthand of scholars, challenging business as usual and creating new, direct channels for everyday people to act on their values and help bring new ideas, aspirational narratives about society, systems, and rules into being³

• • Conversely, as contentious manipulators or “rabble rousers,” appealing to base instincts and other kindling for populist revolt with dangerous ideas, some antithetical to representative government itself; to pluralism, the separation between church and state; and even to the rule of law

• • As developers of activists and leaders, offering precious schools of democracy to the disaffected, the disengaged, or those simply unaware that collective action can change the world,⁴ perhaps because they have never been encouraged to have that experience firsthand, let alone share that belief and conviction with others, and motivate them to join in common cause—in other words, movements as a force for active and vigilant citizenship in the broad sense

But for all these faces and functions of movement-oriented activism—and the activism, media coverage, and financial support that let them grow—no one has claimed they are steady suppliers of foresight, at least not in the everyday sense of articulating alternative futures, including those that are not aspirational or not desirable at all, and trying to make ready for them. Put another way, activist and advocacy organizations that commit themselves to shaping the future rarely invest much time in considering just how many different directions the future could actually take, what “unknown unknowns” may need to be identified and thought through,ⁱ or how to become more adaptive and resilient to those different futures.

In the early days and weeks that followed the shock of election night in 2016, a group of leaders would contemplate that inconvenient truth, and what it has cost the movement for progressive social change, and resolve to try something new.

Running activist organizations, not to mention coordinating action among them, is famously all-consuming—an almost pure expression of the old saying that “the urgent crowds out the important.” As many executive directors have recounted, one’s gaze becomes foreshortened, so focused on the here and now, and one’s time becomes diffused into little bits of attention spread across the many things that can’t wait—or seemingly can’t.

For one, with the important exception of labor unions or other organizations whose revenues come mainly from dues-paying members, there’s the never-ending fundraising, often from a fairly narrow base of philanthropic donors or patrons who are willing to fund political activism—or even to fund other forms of advocacy, as opposed to service delivery. And some of that outreach goes nowhere, as grant-dependent organizations wait for funders to decide. Wait and wait.

Second, and ideally it comes first, as in foremost, there’s spending time with your grassroots base and listening so that you’re not an out-of-touch manager claiming representation you don’t and can’t offer.

Then there’s the constant media monitoring and preparing and delivering responses in a now-fractured and polarized media landscape, sometimes with a war-room level of intensity, and shielding against hardball attacks—what one playbook for progressive organizations calls “weathering the storms.”⁵

Plus training and informing members, rising leaders in the organization, and other constituents

And, perhaps too rarely, grabbing some time to read and reflect, listen and learn from ideas—outside of everyday news coverage, and ideally beyond thought leaders and other allies who already agree with you.

And debating and adopting policy positions and other bright lines to advocate around.

And the organizing of advocacy itself—in the streets and the halls of government but also showing up at a wide array of “tables” where allies convene, sometimes in formal coalitions and often more loosely—and in some cases organizing litigation and broader public awareness campaigns. And still more fundraising.

Plus answering to a board, and the needs and requests of your staff and leadership teammates.

And remembering to have some life in your work-life balance, and maybe even a plan and routine for vital self-care.

There’s more at stake, in that picture, than the ever-present risk of burnout or of compromising what one person can do in a healthy way, so that they no longer show up as the person they want to be. There’s also the opportunity cost: The incredibly important thinking and action crowded out by those constant, mostly short-term demands.

What if there were space to look further ahead, to do more than play defense when defense is very much required here and now, and to make ready in the company of other leaders? Of people in similar, overextended professional roles who share your values, share your sense that everything is on the line now, and who also sense that there must be a better way to foresee and make ready for what has not yet happened but could? Not to get training, executive coaching, or other leadership development to support yourself, or add a chief of staff or another co-pilot, though that could be valuable too, but to do a different kind of thinking in the company of highly motivated leaders or fellow activists acting as your partners—outside your main cause or issue space or “silo”—who helping you see more than you can see on your own? While you try, as part of that compact, to do the same for them.

It was that proposition that became the Social and Economic Justice Leaders Project (SEJ). “I think the need for what SEJ offers is perennial, the value evergreen,” observes Deepak Bhargava, then CEO of Community Change and one of SEJ’s founding members, “because the short-term pressures are always there. That value holds even if the focus shifts, from ‘what can we gain’ in a governing moment to ‘what do we have to defend or push back against.’”⁶

The urgency of forming SEJ was sparked by Trump’s upset win. But operationalizing it would demand an extraordinary commitment from some of the progressive movement’s busiest and highest profile leaders, not to mention a series of hard choices, unfamiliar practices, trust-building amid crisis, donors with an appetite for betting on something very new, and a few unforeseen but fortuitous developments too—silver-lining opportunities in the series of crises that rocked the nation.

We’re in a New World, and We Didn’t Prepare for It

Back to election night 2016: “It felt like a Hilary funeral,” one of SEJ’s founders recalls.⁷ And beyond the defeat itself, the worst effect was the shock of it among progressives. Like the mainstream news media and its legions of political analysts, few in the progressive movement had allowed for the possibility of a Trump victory, let alone developed a Trump-wins scenario and set of readiness plans to address it. To make matters worse for the Democrats and their civil society allies, down-ballot Republican victories enabled the party to retain control of both the House and Senate, making it harder to challenge Republican policies or even exercise congressional oversight.

As Ken Zimmerman, then head of U.S. programs for Open Society Foundations (OSF), a major donor for progressive activism, policy advocacy, and public-interest litigation, recalls of that election cycle: “We had done some scenario planning along those lines, but it felt like an intellectual exercise, not an emotional one.” And OSF’s effort was an outlier. So were the unheeded warnings of those who reported on the momentum and turnout for Trump that were swelling, especially among white working-class voters, over the course of the Republican primaries and, after the party conventions, into the fall.

So late on election night, as the meaning of Trump’s staggering upset began to sink in, on a shared train ride from New York City back to Washington, DC, a handful of leaders were starting a new conversation. And it would soon spotlight an important gap in the “infrastructure” available to support movements and activism:

Yes, they agreed they had to quickly understand how this election result happened and why it caught them so off guard and use those insights to anticipate the most significant threats that had not yet emerged. They had to do this even as they prepared, and supported allies preparing, rapid responses to the immediate threats now facing immigrants, women struggling to access reproductive health, and other vulnerable groups. But they couldn’t simply react to each new threat. They needed a way to make sense of things that didn’t yet make sense, including things that had not yet happened but could, to think up new approaches that might be needed, to consider what could matter most at different points in the future—and from there develop strategy together.

That last insight revealed a critical and long-standing gap and, in the months that followed, pointed to the need to address it at last.

America’s social sector, including the parts focused on advocacy and constituency-based activism in the center and left of the political spectrum, is sprawling, often seen as a fragmented universe of issue-specific causes and groups, many of them locally rooted and locally focused, some enduring, some more short lived. Unlike the multi-level labor and community-based civil-society networks in some other democracies, this sprawl struggles to “federate” power from the grassroots level up to state and national policy contests and also to forge durable alliances across those constituency-specific, issue-specific causes, too often competing for the same limited public attention and limited pots of financial support.⁸

But the ad hoc election night group—whose collaborative work would produce SEJ and more over the following weeks and months—included, by any measure, some major pillars in that center-left ecosystem: national organizations with significant membership rolls and reach across constituencies and, by the standards of the nonprofit sector, large operating budgets and Get Out The Vote operations. A center of gravity, perhaps, and a shared recognition of the need to bridge divides in that sprawling and uneven universe of organizations.

Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—with roughly two million members and some of the most innovative campaigns in the American labor movement—and her chief of staff were part of the impromptu dialogue that night. So was Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, a lead not only for the pro-choice movement but for the women’s movement as a whole, with its national network of reproductive health clinics and a savvy 501(c)4 electoral organizing and lobbying arm. And so were Deepak Bhargava and Dorian Warren, the executive director and board chair of Community Change, a multi-issue national network of grassroots organizations and policy advocates with a long track record of effective antipoverty and immigrant rights work.

In the weeks that followed, two developments helped define the shared project that, a year later, became SEJ. First, coming out of that preliminary election night after-action dialogue, Henry and Richards co-organized calls enabling leaders across the progressive advocacy universe to begin making sense of the election outcome and strategizing together. Soon, the conversation grew to include other influential civil-society groups, such as Color of Change, MoveOn, and Dēmos.

In addition, that outreach, by two widely respected political heavyweights, would soon include two of the largest progressive donors—the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations (OSF)—and, by the summer, produce a core group of leaders ready to create something new.

Bhargava remembers: “The Trump madness showed us that we had to become better prepared for scenarios that weren’t necessarily high probability but that posed high risk. And that none of us had the capacity inside our organizations to do this. The ‘how’ was not totally clear to me, but the need was. And this was a part of being accountable to our constituencies: doing more than firefighting.”⁹

The second development was the rapid shift in policy and the political climate, as was expected. Following a shambolic presidential transition process between the election in November and inauguration in January, the Trump administration moved quickly, starting in late January 2017, to use executive orders and other actions to deliver on the president’s campaign promises.

Taken together with Trump’s consistently threatening campaign rhetoric, the moment drew “organic energy,” Peter Colavito, then at SEIU, recalls, into the picture. Deliberation among leaders was important, to be sure, but at the grassroots, resistance to Trump was intensifying quickly. Everyday people were on the move, some drawn into nonelectoral political engagement—and direct action specifically—for the first time in their lives.

This began with the Women’s March, a large-scale, coordinated set of demonstrations in Washington, DC, and other cities across the country on Jan. 21, just one day after Trump’s inauguration. Then, on Jan. 27, the president issued an executive order restricting the number of refugees the U.S. would admit and limiting access to all immigrants, even those with visas in hand, from a handful of mostly Muslim countries in the Middle East and central Asia—places that Trump had labeled threats to America. The “Muslim Ban,” as critics labeled it, quickly drove people into the streets and into airports to protest and drew a host of effective challenges in court, forcing Trump to issue a modified order by March.¹⁰

But that standoff, and the suddenly popular frame of “resistance” politics, also set off a media firestorm. Trump’s immediate attempts to reverse the policies of Barack Obama, his predecessor—including the Affordable Care Act, a signature achievement of progressive advocates and elected allies—together with the combative tone on all sides, left no doubt that a new era had begun in American politics. It was one of “illiberal democracy,” some observed, with parallels in Eastern Europe, Asia, and other regions. Or stated more gravely, of looming authoritarian populism,¹¹ spearheaded for now not by some fringe insurgency but by an unprincipled and unpredictable American president willing to weaponize the tools at his disposal and, what’s more, to scoff at the rule of law, congressional oversight, and other checks on presidential power.

In the early spring, several civil-society leaders, including a few who had shared that train ride on election night, turned to Ford and OSF. Ford, like OSF, was confronting the illiberal threat, direct attacks on basic rights, and civil society dissent in its work across the globe. Bring us together, these leaders proposed, on behalf of a larger group across the sector, not for a fundraising pitch, but to make sense of what we face and to think about what’s needed now.

At the same moment, other efforts were emerging, through and alongside these organizations, such as:

• • The Fight Back Table, where dozens of groups, many of them local and informal (not staffed by full-time professionals), came together to strategize resistance and make commitments, initially in a rapid-response mode

• • Indivisible, launched by former congressional staffers who set out to build local chapters nationwide and equip grassroots members to more effectively pressure their representatives in Washington

Some institutional donors soon began to back those efforts too, as did large- and small-dollar individual donations from across the country.

Back to the national conversation: Progressive civil-society leaders organized their big-tent gathering, with Ford and OSF, in March 2017. These donors’ long history and sizable support for progressive organizations put them in a relatively unique relationship with a cross section of activist groups and networks, and with allies in the public-interest law and related fields, including less-well-known ones such as social change communications. Indeed, Ford and OSF had seed funded a number of these organizations and—decades earlier, in the case of public-interest law—new fields of ideas, organizations, and approaches to social change.¹² It didn’t hurt that there were also close working relationships, friendships, and trust between the program teams of the two foundations as well as board ties between these donors and civil society groups.

But contrary to the image of the donor orchestrating a top-down strategy and driving collaboration to execute it—in the worst cases of philanthropic giving, so-called forced marriages among their grantees—Ford, OSF, and other funders of activism tried to offer something else, something more than the valuable networks, access, and financial support, including the validating effect that support could have under the right conditions. In the social justice universe, donors can bring a unique perspective from working across the sprawl of the progressive sector to achieve shared outcomes. At their best, and without overstating it, donors can develop and share the insights that come from investing in a portfolio of change makers and also in shared operating infrastructure, or “utilities” for the field, that support more than one organization. It was just this sort of shared space and crosscutting perspective, plus support for shared tools, that some leaders of progressive organizations were hungry for now.

But the funders chose not to propose any specific initiative. “What I think we [the seed funders of SEJ] did best in that moment,” says Zimmerman, then of OSF, “was invite leaders to think about what they faced rather than imposing a set of answers. That allowed two things to happen. One, it catalyzed many concrete things alongside SEJ, such as joint scans of litigation needs and capacity. And two, it kicked off a creative design process to figure out what else that moment demanded.”ⁱⁱ

Getting Concrete

Between the spring and summer of 2017, over the course of short phone calls and larger meetings—some with as many as two dozen major organizations encompassing workers’ rights and the women’s movement as well as the climate movement and multi-issue, progressive faith networks—three things made the prospect of SEJ more and more concrete: 1) the core group of prospective partners took shape to consider launching a joint venture, 2) a basic approach to the project’s potential value-add emerged, and tied to that, 3) new players, from beyond the world of activism, entered the picture to advise and support the startup.

First, the core group: Four member-based organizations (with grassroots constituents and/or member groups organizing at the grassroots)—Community Change, Color Of Change, Planned Parenthood, and SEIU—showed a willingness to build something new and personally engage their leaders (principals) in making it work. Other organizations were very interested too, but some were in leadership transitions and not in a position to make that commitment while others did only limited organizing and political advocacy work. The four groups, whose leaders, crucially, had preexisting, trusting working relationships with each other, invited a fifth organization, the Leadership Conference for Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), a DC-based group connecting over 100 member organizations, not individuals, to join.

The rationale for this combination was that the new shared utility should be responsive to constituency-based organizing and mobilizing, across a reasonable range of the major progressive constituencies, with the interpersonal trust among principals to allow for deep collective strategy work, but also have, in its brain trust and its reach, litigation capacity and a deep bench of legal expertise and credibility. The nature of the threats from the Trump administration and its allies seemed to demand that, as the surge in court challenges, and related fights between the administration and congressional Democrats—not just over policy but basic access to information from the executive branch—were showing on a daily basis. Plus, adding LCCHR could signal that organization’s interest in relating to and partnering with the broader progressive ecosystem, beyond the civil rights litigation universe, especially with grassroots activists driven by community and labor leaders. And as an organization composed of diverse member organizations, LCCHR could also make it more likely that a wider range of efforts and leaders in the progressive universe participated, even if initially, at least, through LCCHR.

Second, the approach. The partners began to think that it could initially center on a joint project, not a new organization, to do very concrete scenario planning or the combination of (a) well-informed and plausible, spelled-out futures; and (b) discussions of their strategy implications on the other. The first element asks, “What could happen that really matters for what we’re trying to achieve or prevent?” The second asks, “So what? What would it look like to make ready for that, to be prepared for that if and when it actually happens?”¹³

For Richards and Planned Parenthood, looking ahead and preparing had become essential to survival, given the sustained attacks on the organization. So too had collective efforts, going back more than a decade, to build “shared infrastructure” across the progressive universe: for example, gathering organizations across constituencies and issue priorities to coordinate on voter engagement (America Votes was created in 2003 to be the hub for this purpose) or, likewise, banding together to create a new organization to counter disinformation in the media, on a wide range of issues (Media Matters for America, founded in 2004). Or simply gathering a broad cross section of groups at Planned Parenthood to coordinate efforts to defend the landmark Affordable Care Act.

Creating those hubs, both formal and more informal, both made it easier to mobilize donor resources for such shared utilities and, in turn, gave donors the shared experience of aligning their support to make that possible—not quite a habit, perhaps, but some muscle memory when it came to coordinating across their often-disparate funding priorities. Collective action and shared achievements and for shared benefit.

Longtime observers have argued that America’s conservative movement has focused intensively and effectively on movement infrastructure since the 1960s while liberals and progressives and their funders have largely invested in issue-driven campaigns and organizations. SEJ, like some of the other infrastructure actors, could represent one more counterweight to that issue bias. And crucially, it would seek to be defined and driven by members with grassroots constituencies, not by funders.

Back to the approach: at the outset of the Trump presidency, in early 2017, scenario planning per se—for that matter, any kind of long-range planning—remained rare in the social sector overall and virtually unheard of in progressive activism. And there was certainly no hub where that kind of thinking and capacity was on offer or its value broadly recognized by progressive organizations.

The national security and defense community had pioneered the use of scenario planning decades earlier, in “tabletop” planning sessions, war games, and other simulations—even in a little-known effort to model a world severely impacted by climate change, a classified project the intelligence community took on, first at the request of President Johnson, in the 1960s.

Big business had also adopted scenario planning as a strategic tool. Large, multinational companies had used the tool for decades to inform their strategies and make their companies more resilient and adaptive.ⁱⁱⁱ

The fact that civil society movement and advocacy groups had no comparable familiarity with these practices wasn’t just a problem in the context of threats, like those suddenly posed by Trump’s election. The SEJ players realized that gap had significant costs for the progressive movement in moments of opportunity too. Looking back at the Democrats’ response to the foreclosure crisis and start of the Great Recession (2008-2009), as one insider recalls, “by the time the progressive advocacy groups were coming … with policy ideas, the deals were already cut and contours of the legislative plan were baked.”¹⁴ What if civil society could better prepare proposals for such high-stakes opportunity moments?

Third in the set of developments that focused the design process, new players came into the picture to support startup, including exercises to try out that unfamiliar scenario-planning approach.

By early summer, OSF and Ford commissioned Mona Sutphen to help. A few years earlier, Sutphen had served as deputy chief of staff for policy to President Obama, a key role encompassing both foreign and domestic policy and political analysis within the White House. She also brought a professional background in national security and foreign affairs, and she now helped lead an advisory firm that specialized in helping companies and other clients to use scenario planning and other analytic tools.

But this application of their skills—to the environment facing progressive organizations—was something new. In a new series of convenings, Sutphen and her team began to introduce progressive leaders to the basic methods of the scenarios approach. No presentations, no pitch. They did it experientially, starting with tabletop exercises that began with deceptively simple hypotheticals—like “The government has just done X, so what should we do?”—and then complicated and shifted the plot in real time. In a single, 90-minute tabletop, for example, a small workgroup of experienced executive directors and senior colleagues, together with funder partners, might be given four to five new pieces of information, each a new development, in the evolving hypothetical situation, gaming out what it could look like to respond, talking through how to reinforce one another’s efforts in those hypothetical situations, and then debriefing to share their takeaways from the exercise.

“It blew our minds,” recalls Dorian Warren, one early participant.¹⁵ Scenario planning required a fundamentally new kind of thinking, beyond the reactive or the aspirational into the realm of plausible but-what-if-X-really-happened. Because it could, because the warning signs were all around by the summer of 2017. “We need something that does this for a living,” said another participant.

But beyond making real and immediate what a new, shared capacity for looking ahead could yield in the way of new insights and preparedness, the experience underlined just how much leaders of very different organizations could learn from each other, and from the very different conditions they faced in their work and issue silos, if they invested the time and had the right space and support to do so. And if they considered new challenges they might have to confront.

Warren, then the board chair and now the co-president of Community Change (formerly known as the Center for Community Change), recalls, “I’m sitting there doing one of these exercises with Cecile Richards. I had never seen national organizations engage in that kind of thing before. And Cecile says, ‘We are forced at Planned Parenthood to do this all the time.’ And I realize, whoa, they are constantly under threat, so they do this. So how do the rest of us catch up?”

So far, though, the meetings were exploratory: There had been no explicit commitment to launch a shared project.

Every Day a New Crisis: Are We Doing This or Not?

As the summer turned to fall, and the wide-ranging effort to respond to reactionary threats demanded time and attention, the very pressures foreseen by that election night group pressed hard. And begged a question: Are we going to try something new here, and are we going to commit principals’ time to a scenario-planning facility specifically, or not?

The founding members felt it was important to start with the core group of five organizations to build on the trust and mutual respect.^iv It wasn’t a question of the value of the project in principle. But leaders would be asked to keep the shared space safe and candid, to consider possibilities outside of the everyday. The hope was that the new facility or utility, if it proved itself, could then evolve to serve the progressive sector and engage other organizations and networks.

So a grant proposal was developed and sent to Ford and OSF. The proposal included

• • a commitment to principal-level engagement;

• • the group’s shared objectives (at a high level) growing out of the past year of exploratory conversations, including the tabletop exercises, with Sutphen and her team as a primary service provider and thought partner;

• • and, for now, a sketch of the kinds of scenarios the new project might tackle first.

In the summary, the partners proposed to “identify and implement aligned advocacy responses to strategic opportunities and challenges.”

By the spring of 2018, the venture—dubbed the Social and Economic Justice Leaders Project, or SEJ—had secured (c)3 grants from Ford and OSF, plus a (c)4 grant from the Open Society Policy Center (OSF’s c4 counterpart) to allow for a wider range of political engagement as needed, to provide flexible support for the first two years of operation. Notably, neither funder provided the funds through their existing, issue-driven program structures (typical of philanthropy) but as part of pooled innovation funds meant to deal with the new, post-election context. The funding for SEJ went to a fiscal agent, Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund, which acted as host of the project, with the five partner organizations actively steering it and Peter Colavito as the first dedicated staff member.¹⁶

Colavito’s task now was to focus on starting up effectively and proving to five of the most in-demand chief executives in the country that they should keep prioritizing this—to make it work, first for their own organizations and then, somehow, for the wider progressive universe of organizations and networks.

Starting Up and Deciding How to Decide

Much of the startup phase, Colavito recalls, involved spending time with each CEO and figuring out how this uncommon “partnership among principals” should work in practice. Uncommon in that it would not take the familiar form of a coalition or campaign table but instead create that precious missing space for longer-range thinking.

But how far out should that horizon be? At which point did such thinking become impractical or useless conjecture? What should SEJ focus on first, in terms of problems or specific scenarios, and why? And how exactly would SEJ enable participating organizations to “bring the thinking back inside” each organization, i.e., support the collective work among the leaders, make this their safe and productive space, but make sure the value did not stop with their thinking alone?

It was not lost on Colavito or any of the participating CEOs that they ran very different kinds of organizations—different in scale, working style or organizational culture, approaches to internal decision-making, sources and size of operating budget, constituents they worked to be accountable to, histories and habits of collaborating in particular ways, and more. As one illustration, Planned Parenthood, with its advocacy chapters and reproductive health clinics across the nation, had been around for nearly a century, while Color of Change was a small, decade-old organization.

This diversity, an intentional feature of the mix of organizations that came together to launch SEJ, and one the seed funders strongly supported, now created some very immediate pressures. SEJ worked with the principals, and key members of their staffs, to manage them.

The first major test would be deciding what to work on, which scenario projects to focus on first. But that posed an even more immediate test: Deciding how to decide that focus.

It would not be easy. The principals could—and did—imagine any number of futures that might merit strategic conversation. But having a credibly neutral third party in the effort—Sutphen, as SEJ’s main consultant and scenario-planning expert who had faced the same sort of question with other clients—helped. The partners agreed to generate a pool of ideas for potential scenario projects but also to align on the criteria for judging how much each potential project, any of which would be very labor intensive, was both right and ready for everyone’s limited time and attention.

Colavito and Sutphen surveyed the principals on potential projects and then proposed a three-way test for evaluating each idea:

A. How broad an impact was the scenario (if it came to pass) likely to have across constituencies? The principals agreed to favor scenarios with broader, more widely felt impacts, cutting across issue areas and constituencies, over those with narrower impacts.

B. How likely was the scenario to be a major, as opposed to a minor, concern? The group would focus on relatively higher-stakes scenarios, not the many lower-stakes potential developments that could pose threats, or create opportunities, in the future.

C. How much work, by what range of players, was already going into preparing for the scenario, anywhere on the landscape of organizations out there? The group would look to be as additive as possible, to address important gaps in the readiness of the progressive ecosystem and minimize duplication of effort.

For example, a failed decennial census—a real possibility with Trump in the White House, proposing changes to census taking—would be a disaster with widely felt consequences and many kinds of lasting, negative, and significant ripple effects. The census not only allocates political representation through reapportionment, as required by the U.S. Constitution, but it also shapes the distribution of hundreds of billions of dollars each year in federal funding alone—not to mention major public debates about demographic change and its implications for the country. And while a small group of donors was already working, by 2018, to expand and coordinate philanthropic funding to protect the 2020 census, progressive groups had not yet fleshed out in detail what a failure would look like, in spite of those protective efforts, or how exactly to prepare for that unwanted future.

Now that the group had a “target-picking framework,” they agreed to launch three scenario projects as the trial runs for SEJ:

• • Census 2020 Threats and Failure: for the reasons outlined above

• • Alternate Outcomes for the 2018 Midterm Election: for multiple reasons, including the potential to work with elected allies, e.g., should the governing dynamics shift, to propose new legislation, focus Congressional oversight in strategic ways, or both

• • Next Recession: reflecting the conviction that progressive movement builders and advocates had been ill prepared for the Great Recession and that while the timing or trigger of the next one could not be forecast, it would come at some point, creating inequitable hardships and other risks as well as potential opportunities, e.g., to introduce progressive reforms to the safety net or new federal investments to create a more inclusive and climate-resilient economy.

Launching the projects was a boon in a number of ways, both more and less expected. It not only focused conversations among the principals, at last on the substance of “scanning the horizon,” but—less expected—now gave the SEJ team a straightforward way to broaden participation in the effort. A wide array of organizations and individuals, including those rarely in progressive advocacy circles, could now be engaged, and in a variety of ways, in joining working meetings to simply discussing with the team or as part of background prep, research, advocacy, or other work out in the field that might be relevant to understanding a given scenario and how to be more prepared for it. And many others could simply be asked for referrals—and so made to feel a part of making this new infrastructure for the field exactly that, a shared good, if still a very experimental and unproven one.

But doing the work also showed the growing pains in organizational “muscle building,” as some participants called it: Discussing the future and its implications in a meeting with other leaders is one thing. Bringing it back into your organization is another. Going so far as to ask colleagues, board members, or grassroots or other partners to invest time and energy in doing the same kind of thinking and to consider doing new work to build readiness for different futures—that was yet another level of demand. It might require doing less of something, say a signature policy campaign, that a leader has already “revved up,” as one put it, for funders, constituents, and others.

And inevitably, the principals, some long tenured and others new in their roles, experienced the shared space of the SEJ-curated discussions in different ways.

“For me, it was the space to think longer term,” Warren remembers, “and to learn from the other leaders, especially in my first year as president. I learned so much from seeing how they think ‘not in public.’”¹⁷

The principals’ different strengths—their superpowers, so to speak—were energizing to be around. Warren quickly brought the scenario-planning exercises and content to his board and staff and later to grassroots affiliate organizations too. “It was hard,” he acknowledges, “for example, some staff wanted more on the so-what-do-we-do part. But the thinking was new and healthy for us. The board felt it too. For example, we were much more ready, as an organization with many grassroots local partners in different states, for the 2018 midterm results.”¹⁸

New Facts, New Signals: The 2018 Midterm Elections

That November, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democrats took back the House of Representatives, making Pelosi the speaker once again. The SEJ partner organizations, thanks to their intensive discussions in the midterm scenarios project, were ready in a very new way: They had grappled with the realities of making proposals in the opposition, i.e., in divided government in which they would probably not be able to see their proposals enacted. They had gauged the pros and cons of “messaging bills” that are largely that and the pressure elected leaders come under to introduce such bills.

The SEJ partners, who were now extending the horizon for gauging results, decided to focus on building more enduring power to shape policy. They opted to invest considerable energy into congressional oversight by working with House allies, whose control brought them subpoena power and agenda-setting authority for committee hearings, to focus on abuses of the Trump administration and spotlighting other issues the administration and congressional Republicans might want to avoid.

But there was a much grimmer side to the 2018 races, consistent with the rule-breaking that marked the alarming 2016 election: Clear signs of a sustained, and in fact intensified effort by the right wing to challenge free and fair elections in every possible way—and to wage a nonstop war of disinformation with every tool of the digital age.

“The congressional races were one thing,” Peter Colavito recalls, “but we really saw this threat in the gubernatorial races, for example in Georgia and Florida.” Popular Democratic Party candidates, including a rising star in Georgia named Stacey Abrams, lost in both states, with Republican winners claiming office under a cloud of voter suppression and disenfranchisement—not to mention escalating false claims about Democrats trying to steal the election.¹⁹

In 2019, while continuing the work to protect the 2020 census, SEJ’s focus would intensify in two areas:

1. 4. Elections, now framed and developed as contested elections—an enduring threat—rather than focused solely on a single midterm election’s potential outcomes

2. 5. The economy, with the work on recessionary risks and opportunities now connecting SEJ and its movement base to an unusually broad cross section of economic thinkers and advocates—broader perhaps than even the founders or funders had thought possible so quickly

By late 2019, new relationships and cross-pollination of ideas were starting to emerge. The economy work, while still centered on understanding and preparing for the next big economic shock, engaged the SEJ member organizations not only with a range of progressive policy think tanks—for example, the Roosevelt Institute, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Dēmos, the Center for American Progress, and others—but with former policy officials who had come under significant criticism for what the Obama administration, or earlier presidencies, had failed to accomplish. These policy insiders, some with no history of ongoing engagement with activism, were now looking ahead to the 2020 presidential election and wondering what could be imagined, and more importantly done, differently. The massive job and wealth losses of the Great Recession, born disproportionately by people of color, poor people, and the working class—and more specifically, the inadequate federal policy response to that shock—were all in recent memory.

Added to that, philanthropic donors and other supporters, alarmed by the challenges of reversing the steady growth of economic inequality, had been investing in a body of “new economic thinking” to go “beyond neoliberalism.”^v Donors were backing ideas and their champions to find new windows of policy opportunity while also seeking to shift dominant paradigms and public narratives about the economy for the longer haul. These efforts sought to enable major reforms with real promise of reducing inequality, promoting shared prosperity, and shifting the U.S. economy to a more environmentally sustainable growth path.

Likewise, the Trump victory had put a spotlight on the lack of resources committed to state and local civic organizing at scale, let alone the kinds of connections across those levels that can be critical to advancing policy change at the federal level.

Some of these efforts reflected a determination to connect scholars, policy insiders, and thought leaders to grassroots movements in more meaningful and mutually reinforcing ways. Perhaps for the first time in decades, at least on the center-left of American politics, conversations about big policy ideas were connecting in real time to conversations about the need for power building and mass mobilization to win the change.

All in all, the signs were that SEJ was starting to matter. And the generational upheaval that 2020 would bring, much of it unforeseeable but some of it previewed in SEJ’s early scenarios work, would make the project matter far more. For one thing, even with a variety of planning efforts underway, across civil society and party politics, there was still nothing else around quite like this space for leaders and their collective work to prepare for threats and opportunities, including the ones that come with new crises.

A Perfect Storm: The 2020 Election Year and a Global Pandemic

At the start of 2020, with no single heir apparent for the Democratic Party nomination, it seemed that every Democrat with national name recognition, and some without much, was running for president: a total of 29 declared candidates, the largest primary field for any political party since 1972.²⁰

Meanwhile, in and around the SEJ partner organizations, there had already been a series of key leadership changes—at Planned Parenthood and Community Change, for starters. These changes meant SEJ, a cooperative startup of five very different organizations, was continuously incorporating new leaders and working hard to prove its value to them. It also saw some of the founding groups drawn more deeply into SEJ’s work and approach while others drew back, given other priorities.^vi

A new group also joined the five founding members: MoveOn, which helped pioneer mass action through digital campaigns in the late 1990s.^vii MoveOn had played a significant role in the resistance to Trump, across a wide array of issues, and also in voter engagement for the 2018 Midterms.

SEJ’s next principals meeting would be one of the most sobering yet: The group did its first scenario exercise on how the 2020 election could be threatened and what it could take for a range of civic organizations, voting rights attorneys, communications firms, and others to be prepared to respond in effective ways. With a hands-on gaming out of just how bad things could get, from voter suppression to contested voting results—including social media-fueled lies and other disinformation campaigns seeking to overturn election outcomes up and down the ballot—the threats got everyone’s attention.

But soon, so did something else entirely. In January, news stories began to circulate about the outbreak of a deadly new strain of coronavirus, linked to a produce market in China. By February, cases of coronavirus were detected in the U.S. and other countries, and soon, public health authorities would confirm that local and international travel, indoor “superspreader” events, and other developments had created very rapid community spread. Cities in the U.S. began to issue shutdown orders for public transit, restaurants, and other facilities and encouraged everyone who could stay at home and work from home to do so.

The world was about to experience the worst pandemic in a century, one that led to mass quarantining, “social distancing” and other terms entering the lexicon, new partisan conflict in America—over mask wearing and other preventive measures—and rapid shifts in all types of electoral campaigning and other civic engagement, to reduce door-to-door canvassing and other social contact. The presidential primaries continued on schedule but under a cloud.

But the civic impact of coronavirus did not stop there. The pandemic also left civic organizations straining to address the safety of their employees and get helpful and trustworthy information to members while sustaining a watchdog function at a time when policy makers at all levels of government were making high-stakes decisions under tremendous uncertainty. A “COVID Recession” began and the press began to warn of compounded crises, with rapid economic dislocation and its stresses triggered by a highly contagious threat for which there were no known vaccines.

“So now every movement group is overtaken with COVID,” remembers Colavito, “but SEJ is not. We have the space. And we refuse to become a rapid-response table.”²¹

Consistent with the founding proposition for SEJ, the intensive but confusing pandemic response nationwide enabled SEJ to send a new set of signals to civic groups about what it would and would not do. But would this make the project irrelevant amid such urgent, compounding crises—in another high-stakes election year no less?

On the contrary, the pandemic and recession turned out to be very generative, creating new opportunities to demonstrate SEJ’s value to a wider set of civic actors, donors, and policy influencers.

First, in spring 2020, the economy work stream launched a weekly Friday morning phone call to keep progressive economic thinkers in touch with each other and also to connect leaders in the large and decentralized world of grassroots organizing networks. For one, it was critical to grapple together with how different a sudden, pandemic-triggered economic downturn was from a more typical recession. Those exchanges facilitated a coordinated response to a sudden and unexpected window of policy opportunity for activists: helping to shape and win large-scale federal relief, through a series of bipartisan congressional bills, over the course of the year. In effect, this provided an opportunity to put the “next recession” scenario plans to work and expand on them.

Second, SEJ’s contested elections work proved itself further by catalyzing, beyond the insights from the scenario exercises, an unprecedented level of coordinated and focused action across the civic landscape by the fall and after the November election—action made all the more critical late in 2020 when, for the first time in modern memory, the incumbent and loser, President Trump, denied and fiercely contested the official results. Just as scenario planners had warned he might.

Just as the founders of SEJ had hoped, even if they could not foresee the specific crisis, scanning the horizon made progressive leaders better prepared and, from there, SEJ could help them spin off new and innovative responses that made sense—whether or not the small core staff played a role in operating those innovations. Part scenario builder, part innovation lab.

Colavito reflects:

The contested elections work was game changing for us. We went from a small project that mostly serviced our six partners to a real movement-wide utility that spring, summer, and fall. We were hosting scenario-planning sessions across organizations and distinct issue-driven movements, presenting to large groups of funders, showing up at board meetings, convening key players who were driving the strategy. We helped birth the Democracy Defense Coalition at the large Fight Back Table. We became a known quantity for many folks for the first time ever because we were deep in the highest-stakes scenario everyone was facing. And it was our first “proof of concept.” We took a planning process, and it produced results in the real world. We raised money from funders other than the two seed funders—OSF and Ford—for the first time through that process. In some ways, the evolution of the project in 2021 was facilitated by our growth—financially, with a wider set of partners, and brand-wise—in 2020.²²

Before fall 2020, and before yet another crisis hit—the caught-on-video murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer in late May 2020, triggering the largest mass protests in the nation’s history that summer—SEJ hired its first full-time executive director: Connie Razza, an experienced community and labor organizer.

Starting on the job in April 2020, Razza launched and ran the Friday Morning Group to make sense of the economic challenges and opportunities and then spun out a public health jobs campaign. And she spearheaded the Path Forward convening, which brought together more than 100 leaders from state and national organizing, advocacy, academic, and philanthropic groups to make sense of the combined, complex threats: the pandemic, the rise of an armed far right in American politics, the call for racial reckoning led by the movement for Black lives, ongoing threats to conducting a fair and accurate 2020 census, and contested elections.

In the summer, as another expression of its function as a lab, SEJ also launched a project on governing power, led by Bhargava and Alex Hertel-Fernandez, a political scientist, seeking to apply decades of scholarly research and more recent advocacy strategy thinking on the potential of policy “feedback loops” to build the power of workers, women, people of color, poor people, and other historically disadvantaged groups.^viii Policy as power shaping and power building, in structural ways that can endure well beyond elections. Related projects were not sponsored by SEJ but were drawn into its orbit, canvassing the partners and sharing new ideas on strategy, such as through research on progressive movements’ “readiness to govern” if their allies reclaimed the White House and on the two-way need for more effective “cogoverning” between social movements and allies in government.

Steady Core, New Directions

In a sector where many civic organizations are under intense pressure to focus on the short term, often in advocacy campaign mode, and in the context of a presidency that served up constant threats to intensify that “firefighting” focus, SEJ’s first few years demonstrated the project’s unique value. Inevitably, the early years also raised questions about whether and how the range and function of the effort might begin to evolve, from candid, trust-based conversations centered on the five principals—their space for forward-looking collective strategy work, across issue silos and constituencies—to broader engagement of a very decentralized and diverse ecosystem of other organizations and potential partners.

In the context of a tremendous stress test for American democracy and a pandemic that exposed every fault line linked to enduring racism and the dramatic growth of economic inequality, the project had proven that it could combine a disciplined focus on “scanning the horizon” for future threats and new opportunities with near-term impact (“bring it back to action now”).

By the start of the Biden presidency in January 2021, SEJ was in fact much more than a scenario builder. It was also the innovation lab its founders hoped it could become. In addition to the election integrity and economic policy projects, for example, SEJ had catalyzed a major public health jobs campaign and the largest grassroots-based progressive coalition, Real Recovery Now, to coordinate advocacy around the Biden administration’s proposal for large-scale spending and recovery legislation, the Build Back Better package.

Within a few months, as the president scored his first major legislative win with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, a number of key changes were underway for SEJ. First, turnover in the principals group continued: Vanita Gupta stepped down as president of LCCHR to take a senior post in the Biden administration at the U.S. Department of Justice. And second, SEJ launched a formal strategy process with the aim of canvassing founders, funders, and other stakeholders, rethinking the project’s role and identity, and identifying forward priorities and an operating and governance structure that would align to serve them best.

Razza and her team decided to shift SEJ from a partner-centered collaboration to an independent movement utility, still hosted by the New Venture Fund (a nonprofit fiscal agent for progressive causes) with a small advisory board. Of the original founding organizations and participating principals, only Dorian Warren, co-president of Community Change, retained a governance role as part of that advisory board. Another founder, Bhargava, now serving as cochair and cofounder of a new, university-based leadership center for democracy and social justice, also stayed connected, helping SEJ to further develop specific projects, such as a major effort to understand and creatively counter authoritarian threats to American democracy.

Half a decade on from the first meetings to imagine the innovative function that would become SEJ, a number of lessons stood out. First, as Bhargava had observed, the need for SEJ’s founding function—to do mid- to longer-term planning—is arguably evergreen and its value high, even if the specific targets and contributions are very different in moments of crisis and threat (requiring defense) as opposed to major policy opportunity (governing moments).ix In any period, this function only works, as Peter Colavito put it, if we “isolate talent and time away from the day-to-day grind of running organizations and campaigns.”²⁵

Second, SEJ has shown that leaders deepen vital relationships as they develop shared strategies to tackle challenges bigger than any one organization or issue agenda and, conversely, that doing that collective work is also a powerful mechanism for building new, less insular, and farther-reaching relationships. The expansive “next recession” and contested elections projects were both cases in point.

Third, for some, another clear lesson of SEJ is that shared projects, or joint ventures, need committed and effective sponsors who are thinking beyond their own institutions. That’s very demanding, and it’s important for funders and other key supporters to recognize.

The Work Continues

After SEJ restructured, both seed funders, the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, renewed their support. New donors also engaged SEJ, in some cases building on working relationships that formed in the election protection or economic policy work of 2020 and endured well beyond it.

“SEJ really is distinct,” said a new donor, “with very broad reach and the ability to work with many kinds of players, including some who are critical to the larger goals but don’t even think of themselves as doing democracy work. So SEJ has that and a keen sense of the division of labor you need out in the field, combined with being a trusted, neutral player in those conversations.”26

Now an independent utility, no longer a partnership of particular organizations, SEJ continued to refine its program strategy-making. The founding partners, in 2018, aligned on a framework to choose the priority scenarios for early attention and grew projects, such as contested elections, from the insights and strategic goals generated through that scenario-based planning. Scenarios first, specific goals and actions followed. Now, while lessons from scenario work continued to be foundational, SEJ nested distinct but connected projects, some with near-time horizons and others under broad, multi-year goals, such as Countering Threats to Democracy.

The team also launched new, long-horizon efforts, such as the Bridges Project, to explore new ways to think and talk about American identity, including race, and the Horizons Project, “to engage movement leaders in diagnosing the capacities, skills, and relationships we need to achieve our audacious long-term goals, like winning our worldview into the mainstream common sense that drives the decisions and policies we make and practices of the future.”²⁷

This range of projects then got mapped against crosscutting goals, such as power building, that have come to be widely shared by many players in the world of progressive activism and advocacy, to check for consistency and mutual reinforcement.

With the nation facing a range of immediate challenges, including persistent denial of legitimate election results, technologically sophisticated disinformation campaigns, aggressive voter suppression and gerrymandering, and other serious ongoing threats to democratic norms and institutions—plus other complex challenges, such as growing impacts of climate change and risks linked to “generative AI” (artificial intelligence), looming on the horizon—the potential for the SEJ approach will continue to be tested.

Thus far, the project has proven valuable as a new space for forward thinking and adaptive strategy, both of which are critical to the success of civic activism and advocacy in an era of tremendous disruptions and uncertainty.

In that vein, as the nation entered another pivotal presidential election year, in January 2024, SEJ announced a name change and strategy refresh, reflecting further evolution beyond the original joint venture by a handful of civic leaders. Still focused on strengthening the progressive movement’s ability to strategize for crisis and opportunity, SEJ, Connie Razza announced in an email to supporters, “is now Future Currents.” She added, “Right now is the time to not just plan for this year, but to push beyond the visible horizon and plan for the unknown.”