Dear friends,

Two years ago, Democracy 2076 launched with a big question and a bold goal: What would it take to secure a responsive, effective, and representative democracy for the United States by its 300th birthday in 2076?

Thanks to your support, we’ve moved from planning our answers to putting those plans in action. This year, we’ve grown our organization to a total of five outstanding team members to lead us in this next phase of work. We have brought together a team that represents the challenges and opportunities we see for the future of America across ideology, geography, race, and religion.

In an increasingly complex world we believe having a team trained, both professionally and academically, in a variety of ways to think about systems change is a necessity. To that end, each of our new hires have different academic training from public health to social policy and all have been educated in public colleges and universities. Additionally, all four of our new hires are new to the democracy field and bring unique experience working cross-ideologically to achieve meaningful change. Read on to meet the new team and hear the latest on our work to reimagine democracy for future generations.

You’re Invited

As we shift into this next phase of our work, we will be sharing important updates on all three of our core programs—A Constitution for 2076, Imagining 2076, and Pro-Democracy Political Coalitions for 2076—and we’d love for you to join us. Here are some key dates for your calendar:

• On July 30th at 2pm ET we’re hosting an update on the progress of our research for Imagining 2076 where we will preview the stories that improve various audiences’ attitudes about democracy and get your input on our final round of testing.

• On August 8th at 12pm ET we will be sharing updates and inviting feedback on our Pro-Democracy Political Coalitions for 2076 work. With your input, we have revised scenarios for what the political parties might look like in the future. We have also identified early indicators for each scenario that we’d like your input on.

• On September 30th at 2pm ET we are releasing our report synthesizing the outcomes of our June 2025 Constitution Convening where we revised our strategy to bring about constitutional amendments, identified which partners could hold what part of the strategy, and discussed how to be prepared if opportunities arise to accelerate our strategy in the next 5 years. Save the date and stay tuned!

If you’d like to learn more about what we’ve been up to, read on:

A Constitution for 2076

Over the last year, with such drastic changes to the federal government, the public appetite for substantial structural reform has grown. This opened new doors for A Constitution for 2076—a co-created strategy for amending our constitution to better serve the needs of our democracy. We knew that to have the vibrant democracy we envision, we would need to build partnerships, identify needs for the next 50 years by developing different scenarios and exploring the ways our contexts may shift, and construct shared strategies to secure meaningful and lasting change. To do that, we’ve brought together a cross-ideological and cross-experiential group of experts to answer three foundational questions:

• December 2023: What are the amendments we will need to ensure a representative, responsive, and effective democracy in 2076 in a variety of long-term scenarios?

• June 2024: What activities do we need to undertake to pass amendments on a 15, 30 and 45 year timeline? 

• June 2025: Which of our state and national partners are well-positioned to take on the work that is needed to pass amendments and how do we make sure they have what they need to do so? How do we ensure that we are building a coalition that’s big enough to meet the size of our goals? 

Through this work, we’ve engaged 132 organizers, community leaders, and experts from 47 states and 107 organizations to co-create answers. We hosted replications of our convenings in several different states and with new partner organizations to widen the aperture of perspectives. We built the foundation needed to put the strategy to reform the US Constitution into action.

Anna also served as the first chapter lead at the Harry Potter Alliance (later Fandom Forward). Growing up in Missouri, attending college in Ohio and grad school in North Carolina has given Anna an appreciation for the diversity of the people and places in the United States.

We have already benefited enormously from Anna’s expertise as we have refined the Constitutional reform strategy our partners co-created and developed a phased implementation plan that relies on partners' respective strengths and constituencies. As we begin to put our plan into action, Anna has deepened relationships with our partners to solicit their input, landscape the existing work and progress that’s already being made towards amendments, identify needs, and secure commitments for them to own various pieces of the work. 

These efforts culminated at our third national convening in late June in Denver where, among other things, Anna led us in thinking through how conditions in the next five years could change to create the will for a package of amendments and what we need to do to be prepared for that moment. These efforts and the overall convening resulted in clarity on the shared strategy, each partner’s role in executing it, and the tools they’ll need to meet with success. We will be sharing more of our takeaways, impact, and learnings in our upcoming convening report and related briefing on September 30th.

Imagining 2076: Culture as a Site of Change

In January, we launched our first-of-its-kind research on how democracy has been portrayed in film and TV over the last 30 years and how those portrayals resonate with different audiences. Since then, our Imagining 2076 program has been invited to brief five different sets of stakeholders on our research, attended a gathering with national leaders and influencers on trusted pro-democracy messengers, and wrote about the ways Beyonce is teaching us to fight authoritarianism with the Cowboy Carter tour and why democracy organizations should join the conversation.  

Our research unearthed gaps in understanding about what kind of content will move different audience segments. For those who deeply value authority, we struggled to find existing story arcs that help them see democracy as under threat and think about the possibilities for a positive future. And for those who more strongly value  autonomy, we hadn’t yet pinpointed which stories spark their sense of agency over these issues. 

In phase 2 of this research, we have identified precisely the types of stories that close these crucial gaps. On August 7th at 2pm, we will share an update on our preliminary findings on the types of content that orient various audiences towards democracy.

Melody brings a decade of experience working at the intersection of Hollywood and social impact with Participant Media, where she led measurement and evaluation. Melody’s experience as an Iranian American has taught her first-hand that democracy is bigger than just political acts; it is the cultural fabric of who we are and how we relate to each other.

This fall, Melody will engage a cohort of creatives to align on recommendations and serve as validators and champions of those recommendations within their peer communities. In 2026, we’ll host a series of events with partner advocacy organizations in LA to reach their unique communities and test ways to share and activate our findings. We have begun conversations with production companies and studios about how they can research the impact of their media on audiences’ perceptions of democracy themselves and are excited to deepen those discussions as we launch our second report in the new year.

Pro-Democracy Political Coalitions for 2076: Shaping the Next Realignment

While much of the discourse of the last decade has focused on the future of the Republican Party, we’re now seeing similar questions emerge about the Democratic Party—most recently with the mayoral race in New York City. We view this as a signal of the impending political realignment. Books like Identity Crisis, published in 2018, traced the shift of white non-college voters out of the Democratic Party based on their racial attitudes dating back to 2010. As the concept of “political realignment”—the idea that there are seismic shifts in what a political party stands for, the wedge issues that divide the parties, and who participates in which political party—became more discussed in the democracy field in the early 2020s, we began to wonder about the missed opportunities of the last decade. Our Pro-Democracy Political Coalitions for 2076 Program is exploring the drivers of political realignment to understand how the political parties might realign over the next 30 years. 

Learning from the past, this program examines what can be done now to ensure that all viable political parties in the future are pro-democracy. Over the last 6 months, we have brought together a community of 15 leaders of membership-based organizations, trackers of violent extremism, and scholars to grapple with this question. We started by surveying them on their existing insights, interviewing other ideologically diverse experts, and conducting a thorough set of background research. This foundational study surfaced 18 new spectra of political division that don’t easily map onto traditional left/right axes. Our 15 leaders then participated in a process of horizon-scanning to identify early signals of change emerging from their unique vantage points and communities—signals that won’t yet show up in polling data and audience research by people who are further removed from these communities. Together this background laid the groundwork for five scenarios of the future, and helped us explore what factors may contribute to each scenario becoming a reality, and begin building a roadmap to prevent or encourage various elements. 

Join us for our August 8 stakeholder update to share your feedback on the early indicators we identified for different scenarios of how the parties might realign over the next 30 years!

Ade is proud that every piece of legislation she worked on as a lobbyist was bipartisan—her approach to coalition-building is rooted in the belief that we don’t have to agree on everything to win together. 

Ade will spearhead efforts to move from this foundational qualitative work to more quantitative analysis of the 18 emerging spectra and build a strategy for identifying and leveraging opportunities for intervention to steer our course away from authoritarianism and toward a thriving democracy.

Ensuring Organizational Resiliency

Finally, in order to ensure ongoing future resiliency of our organization and our staff, we’re thrilled to announce Cecili Wake has joined as Deputy Director.

Cecili brings over two decades of experience in change strategy, campaign organizing, and organizational development.

Cecili has served as the founding Executive Director of a start-up advocacy organization and, as founder and chief strategist of We Divine Water, developed a change strategy methodology that is used by a variety of organizations and serves as the foundation of her graduate seminar at the Maryland Institute College of Arts Center for Social Design. Cecili has represented the US abroad as both the child of a diplomat and a professional in UN settings and deeply understands what is at stake not just in the US, but globally, when US democracy is at risk. 

In addition to managing our organizational development, strategy planning, and communications work, Cecili will be helping to coordinate Democracy 2076’s preparations for the 250th anniversary in 2026. She is also undertaking an assessment of current work in the US that will help us move toward meaningful implementation of the UN Declaration for Future Generations. 

I hope you join me in welcoming these phenomenal team members to Democracy 2076. I am so thankful to all of you for being the team I relied on for thought partnership, guidance, and support prior to hiring staff. I am excited for you to meet and build with our new staff as well. 

Thank you for being with us these first two years.We are delighted to be moving into this new phase with more expertise, capacity, and perspectives on board. 

We’re excited for what’s next—and we hope you’ll stay in the loop, join us at a briefing, and help us shape a democracy worthy of its people.

With gratitude,

Aditi Juneja and the Democracy 2076 Team

P.S. Missed any of our past updates? Find our previous emails here.