Network Building

Across nearly every major public issue, the pattern is familiar. Immigration debates harden into absolutes. Education reform fractures into camps. Public health swings between total trust and total rejection. Climate conversations collapse into purity tests or outright denial. Infrastructure, housing, and affordability follow the same script. Positions sharpen, identities lock in, and forward motion slows…

On a recent trip to Ghana, two Netcentric Campaigns staffers, and several local colleagues found themselves together in a truck sinking deeper into mud on a rural road. Tires spinning, shoes off, they struggled with some new local friends to push, heave, and improvise their way back onto solid ground. It could have been simply…

Democracy doesn’t just thrive when people vote together; it thrives when people build together. Decades of civic engagement and democracy work increasingly feel like we focused on the wrong output indicators. Democracy works when we all own it. We can get people to vote by enraging and fragmenting them, but that doesn’t mean we’re moving…

In moments of crisis, we instinctively reach for the tools closest at hand; new laws, better platforms, stricter oversight, louder campaigns. These responses matter. They can slow the damage or redirect attention. But they rarely last. The patchwork keeps tearing. The deeper problem is not that we lack ideas. It’s that our civic infrastructure no…

The experience of looking for work has always carried its share of frustration, but what millions of job seekers face today is something much different. The hiring process has been largely stripped of its human dimension, reduced to an endless loop of online forms, automated rejections, and silence. It is not just discouraging for individuals;…

Not long ago, I was invited to record a short video about the value of networks for a program named the Global Environmental Education Partnership (GEEP). The North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) is the Secretariat for this program. They’ve been running a learning network for more than a decade, connecting leaders in environmental…

In every network, there are people sitting on treasures. It may not be flashy or well-publicized. It might not show up in a press release, a social post, or a white paper. But it’s there. It’s the deep, practical expertise that comes from lived experience, community fights, regulatory battles, and years of working through complex…

Social movements are experiencing a fundamental inversion. For decades, the bottleneck was information production. For most of my career, our campaigns and NGOs were desperate for more research capacity, writing skills, policy reviews, resources to process public information, and institutional knowledge. Access to those precious resources determined which voices could participate meaningfully in policy debates.…

Across the political spectrum, a strange paradox is unfolding. Many of us agree that some of our most powerful institutions are not serving the public well. We can all think of many examples of government agencies, media outlets, banks, tech companies and corporate monopolies. We’ve seen corruption, inefficiency, and gridlock. We’ve seen systems designed for…