We define pluralism as the energetic engagement with diversity, active seeking of understanding across lines of difference, and the nurturing of constructive dialogue that contributes to a deep sense of belonging. In a pluralist society, people of different beliefs and backgrounds can participate equally, coexist peacefully, and thrive together.
Tiny Publics: Small Groups and Civil Society
It has been conventional to conceptualize civic life through one of two core images: the citizen as lone individualist or the citizen as joiner. Drawing on analyses of the historical development of the public sphere, we propose an alternative analytical framework for civic engagement based on small-group interaction. By embracing this micro-level approach, we contribute to the debate on civil society in three ways. By emphasizing local interaction contexts-the microfoundations of civil society-we treat small groups as a cause, context, and consequence of civic engagement. First, through framing and motivating, groups encourage individuals to participate in public discourse and civic projects. Second, they provide the place and support for that involvement. Third, civic engagement feeds back into the creation of additional groups. A small-groups perspective suggests how civil society can thrive even if formal and institutional associations decline. Instead of indicating a decline in civil society, a proliferation of small groups represents a healthy development in democratic societies, creating cross-cutting networks of affiliation.
Home
Intergen.Family is where true stewardship is cultivated. Within our high-trust community, leaders can transform private wealth into a source of public trust, aligning their family legacy with planetary and human flourishing. This is the foundation upon which our offerings for individuals, organizations, and patrons are built.
Home
Solidarity Infrastructures is a class that brings together creative practitioners from respective communities to investigate, strategize, upskill, and dream toward alternative socio-technological systems.
Home - Participant
A pioneer of socially conscious storytelling, Participant drives real-world impact and awareness around today's most vital issues.
Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World: Kinship, Interconnection, and Spirituality in the Metacrisis - The Great Simplification
Over the past decade, the world has become increasingly chaotic and uncertain – and so, too, has our cultural vision for the future. While the events we face now may feel unprecedented, they are rooted in much deeper patterns, which humanity has been playing out for millennia. If we take the time to understand past trends, we can also employ practices and philosophies that might counteract them – such as focusing on kinship, intimacy, and resilience – to help pave the way for a better future. How might we nurture the foundations of a different kind of society, even while the end of our current civilization plays out around us?
Pluralistic: Market participation is exhausting (30 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
We're a diverse species, cognitively speaking – different ways of thinking come more easily to some of us than others. I'm good at a lot of things, but I have terrible spatial sense. I can't parallel park or catch a ball, and I get lost so easily it's almost comical (it's a running joke in my family).
a church of interbeing – Reconnecting to Self, Other, & the Whole in Dialogue & Ritual
HowGathering each week to meditate, sing, move, and dialogue together, in a place of reverence, inquiry, intention and community.
Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm | David Bollier
Every so often I am invited to write a piece that in effect answers the question, “Why the commons?” I invariably find new answers to that question each time that I re-engage with it. My latest attempt is an essay, “Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm,” which I wrote for the Next System Project as part of its series of proposals for systemic alternatives.
Projects – discover our non-empty spaces
Fostering spaces for growth is an important part of our trajectory. We seek to harness the combined power of practice, critical inquiry and creativity to address some of the issues of our times - health, environmental awareness, social equality and multilingual, trans-cultural collaborations.
Collective Flourishing
Our tools for navigating the future haven't kept pace with its growing complexity. Creating new systems that integrate a deep understanding of people, profound advances in modelling and foresight, and expressive interfaces could help us see, reason, and choose a better future together.
Scale deep — The Systems Sanctuary
The world calls us to shift our mindsets and values from outdated ways of being and doing rooted in dominance, hierarchy and harmful systems, towards new ways rooted in relationship, collaboration and innovation.
Pluralistic: The online community trilemma (16 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech:
Pluralistic: Post-political (09 Jul 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."
When we lose shared experiences, we lose humanity Isolationism is the number one issue Isolationism leads to ignorance, ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate
Sam Clemente
People are biking by and slowing down as they pass, others walking by stop for a moment to listen, the kids are running around while a big family sits down to dinner The people in cars are oblivious to the purest human experience happening as they drive by
