What is this?

This is the beginning of a new path forward for the country. A piece of a larger cultrual transformation of how we think about oursevles, each other, and how we want to live in community. A reimagining of our basic social contract in service of a more humane and generative society for all humanity. 

A Generative America is a nonprofit media project to develop and deploy the stories that will help us reshape our society and build a country that is fair, just, and safe, that expects abundance, where our government invests in and supports everyone, and where our systems are designed for the constant renewal of new and better ideas.

This website is an outline for Part 3 of a new book. It represents the blueprint for how an new outlook and social contract might could express itself for our country. The full book is a broader efffort to re-engage our own history (Part 1), to clarify how our principles re-frame our understanding of ourselves, our communities, and our country (Part 2), and then to map out the best version of how our nation and its systems might be redesigned (Part 3).

This an incomplete beginning for our new foundation, and some ideas -- some mine, many not -- of what that direction might reveal if we embraced it.

Who am I?

I was raised just outside of DC by a single mother and was lucky to be a scholarship kid to an exceptional prep school that gave me access to the opportunities inherent to that privilege and an elite education. And as a straight, white, man, achievement was not only expected but often ensured even when I stumbled. Those experiences revealed the possibility of achievement but hid the spiritual deficits of our failing industrial culture.  Over the course of a couple decades of my own personal and spiritual exploration and work in politics, I have seen our culture fraying and our leadership failing to come to terms with what seem to be the most fundamental inequities, unmet needs, and missed opportunities in America. While I feel and see some of the spiritual deficit and pain in America, the ache of futurelessness, there are many gaps in my history and experience that can only be filled by engaging others in this exploration.

I am a world leader in how values, systems, strategy, and technology drive movements and organizations and now senior advisor for strategy and impact at Murmuration working on expanding the power and capacity of community-based civic engagement. I was a student of social ethics and social justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Previously, I was senior strategist and head of community at Harmony Labs where I worked on accelerating media reform and transformation. I founded and was head of mission of Timshel—a social impact technology company and was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I helped lead the Obama for America campaigns as chief integration and innovation officer in 2012 where he oversaw all technology and analytics and as deputy digital director and chief technology officer in 2008.

I wrote For ALL the People -- my first book on the relationship between media, technology, and our civic life. I have served as an advisor and board member to initiatives including the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, I AM ALS, Rhize, Bright Pink, I Am That Girl, and LiveStrong and was named to Crain’s Chicago 40 Under 40 and Tech 50. I graduated from Brown University and currently live in Rhinebeck, New York, with my much more awesome wife, Lydia Hill Slaby.