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American Future: Preparing to meet you

American Future: Preparing to meet you
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Debilyn Molineaux
By Debilyn MolineauxNov 06, 2023
Debilyn Molineaux

Debilyn Molineaux serves as the catalyst for the American Future project to help everyday Americans discover and believe in a future that will be "worth it" to work together for the sake of our nation.

Debilyn brings a passion to her work that is contagious to all around her. Hailing from a conservative, agricultural community, Debilyn started her career as a small business owner, working with community businesses to promote and grow their own operations through advertising and marketing. After engaging other women business leaders, Debilyn was inspired to become more active in the political process. Her own personal experiences -- as a small business owner, a local candidate for office, and an elected president of a national organization -- have given her enormous insight into the challenges facing citizens who want to get involved and organizations that want to scale their impact.

Debilyn is a serial entrepreneur, co-founding many organizations and transpartisan projects over her 20+ year career in establishing the democracy ecosystem. She has co-founded the Bridge Alliance, Living Room Conversations and the National Week of Conversation. She formerly was co-publisher of The Fulcrum and continues as advisor for Citizen Connect, Listen First Project, AllSides and other organizations, individuals within the democracy ecosystem.

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Debilyn Molineaux serves as the catalyst for the American Future project to help everyday Americans discover and believe in a future that will be "worth it" to work together for the sake of our nation.

My new weekly column, American Future, will report on the desired future of everyday Americans as I interview a few people each week from across the nation. The four week journey begins on November 9, 2023. Zoom interviews will be ongoing.

For a few years now, I’ve been wondering about the future of our nation. With alarm, I have experienced friends and family look at the same situation and come away with vastly different interpretations. As I flip through cable news channels or scroll through social media feeds, it’s like we are sharing the planet and only taking in dystopian possibilities. Are we heading towards fascism or socialism? Are we heading towards chaos or order? Will our elected officials ever work together again? (No, says the media.)

At the same time our divisions have (seemingly) deepened, I have witnessed an exponential increase in the number of people concerned about and working on our nation’s future. The Bridge Alliance was formed in 2015 with 30 organizational members and grew to 110 in 2022. A new project called Healthy Democracy Ecosystem has cataloged organizations working on democracy across the nation and identified over 6,000. In other words, Americans are already at work to correct or heal what ails the nation.

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As I see levels of despair, resignation and tuning out amongst my friends and family, I also see amazing people doing extraordinary work. How then, can my friends and family, or any everyday American, get connected? And why would they want to? That is what the American Future project is all about. Helping people connect to what they want for their own future and consider steps they can take personally and in their community to make it happen. This is my thesis about how we co-create a better future for all of us.

First of course, we, the everyday people, need to know what we want, and what future will be “worth it” to work for it.

As I prepare to meet you and other everyday Americans, I’ve been conducting practice interviews. I’ve created and ordered some information cards to “leave behind.” I’ve set up an online interview tool. The AmericanFuture.us website is constantly being updated. I’m writing nearly every day.

Where I feel unready for this adventure is in how I will tell your stories. Should each person have their own story? Should I do composites? What form will it take - written, video, audio? How would videos and audio stories get produced? Who can help? What is the right balance of fixed locations yet allowing time for spontaneous and synchronistic meetings? How will I ask people to spend 30-45 minutes with me? Will there be too much background noise to record? And of course, how will this project be supported, financially?

I share these open questions with you, for the sake of transparency about my own insecurities. I’m as scared to take this journey as I am excited to meet you. Preparing for the journey is as daunting as the journey itself. I think you are worth it.

Let’s roll.

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Following Jefferson: Promoting Intergenerational Understanding Through Constitution-Making

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Towards the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson became fatalistic. The prince and poet of the American Revolution brooded—about the future of the country he birthed, to be sure; but also about his health, his finances, his farm, his family, and, perhaps most poignantly, his legacy. “[W]hen all our faculties have left…” he wrote to John Adams in 1822, “[when] every avenue of pleasing sensation is closed, and athumy, debility, and malaise [is] left in their places, when the friends of our youth are all gone, and a generation is risen around us whom we know not, is death an evil?”

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In November 2024, Elon Musk posted on social media, “There should be no need for [Freedom of Information Act] requests. All government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” His statement reignited discussions on the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, a federal law enacted in 1966 that requires federal executive branch agencies to disclose information in specific ways. Since its original passage in 1966, FOIA has been updated three times to tighten agency compliance, account for digital records, and allow citizens to request records online. Under FOIA, government agencies must disclose information by:

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