Our democracy, media, and social systems are in urgent need of brave reformation. To secure a vibrant future for our planet and its people, we need to leverage the insights of science and history, the power of creative works, and the wisdom of collective, community-led imagination.

I intend to do whatever I can, with everyone else who’s trying, to cultivate a healthy civic culture where ideas, imagination, and collective power can thrive.

A thriving democracy depends on a healthy civic culture.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve synthesized insights across neuroscience, complex systems, community organizing, creative sensemaking, and cultural experience design. Alongside brilliant, like-hearted collaborators, I’ve crafted and tested a series of frameworks and experiments to support civic flourishing.

This site is an invitation for those looking to co-create, collaborate, or support this work.

Foundational Model

Conditions for a Healthy Civic Culture

Civic Knowledge: Is relevant information about the issues and ideas shaping our lives culturally and psychologically explorable across communities?
Civic Imagination: Do permission structures and opportunities exist for people to practice informed imagining and co-creation beyond the status quo?
Civic Agency: Do people believe – and does evidence exist to support – that their actions and intentions can have an impact on civic outcomes?
Civic Relationships: Is there effective social infrastructure to support meaningful relationship- and trust-building both within and across communities?

✦ Guiding Pillars

Collective Future-Building

Society offers few opportunities to practice informed civic imagining, let alone explore the visions held by others across our communities and country. Through carefully crafted experiences, we can build replicable infrastructure for individual reflection, collective co-creation, and vision exchange — surfacing where our futures overlap and where they diverge — and channel those insights into civic action, policy, and collective power.
Storytelling & Creative Sensemaking

Information rarely moves people to act — meaning does. Critical insights about the ideas and issues shaping our futures need to be synthesized through vibrant experiences that invite active exploration over passive consumption. Through multisensory engagement infused with art, music, story, reflection, and joy, we can unlock collective knowledge while supporting the next era of creatives as sense- and meaning-makers.
Intentional Civic Gatherings

The cultural dimensions of democracy require thoughtfully designed in-person spaces and containers. We need inspiring, exploratory gatherings that are neither transactional (like a vote or town hall), nor prescriptive. We need civic third spaces that support charming, generous, and soulful gatherings for people across perspective and generation to critique, experiment, connect, imagine, and dance (literally) together.
Philanthropy & Capital Remodelling

Most philanthropic and capital models default to a reductive metrics-driven model that undermines cultural and systems change; centering resources in ways that incentivize competition among people working toward the same purpose. By reprioritizing models that put purpose at the center, incentivize collaboration, and align full-stack capital around shared goals, initiatives can co-design toward shared purpose beyond silos.
Connective & Ergosystem Design

For myriad reasons, collectives rarely form across communities and sectors, or secure the resources to invest in the connective tissue that scaffolds progress. We need to craft connective tools and relational infrastructure to support the formation of intentional, coordinated ergosystems: purpose-aligned cooperative groups that exchange resources, align efforts, coordinate power, and prioritize conditions for systems-wide flourishing.
Field Architecture & Legibility

Despite its potent role across this nation’s history, civic culture isn't widely recognized or invested in as its own field, outcome, or ecosystem. Through research, mapping, synthesis, and coordinated narrative, we can co-create the sustainable infrastructure and community of practice that this fragmented, under-resourced field needs to collectively thrive.

✦ Active & Recent Projects

The Plenary Clubhouse: A Civic Imagination Hub

A civic third space built for imagination, connection, and experiment.
Located at Pier 70 in San Francisco, the Clubhouse is a physical home for The Plenary's work: hosting exhibitions, gatherings, and explorations of civic culture designed to make the exploration of worldshaping ideas feel generous, soulful, and inspiring.

Explore the SF Clubhouse
Nationwide 250th Civic Imagination Tour

A yearlong initiative to surface community's visions of the futures they actually want to live in.
Traveling to over 50 cities across 30 states — from Sitka, Alaska to St. Augustine, Florida — The Plenary, Co. hosted community conversations, speculative worldbuilding sessions, and field listening with philanthropists, technologists, and civic builders to collect over 1,000 visions of the future, now anchoring Future of Us.

Click Here
Future of Us Festival

A 10-day civic imagination festival launched on the nation's 250th.
Launched on July 4, 2026, Future of Us brought together over 10,000 people across 100+ creative civic gatherings, large scale civic art and science storytelling exhibitions, musical showcases, and neighborhood pop-ups to shift the focus of US’s 250th towards the people’s visions of what could be.

Explore the Festival
Future Culture Collective

An investment in San Francisco's grassroots civic dreamers and visionaries.
Selected from an overwhelming response to an open call, the 2026 Future Culture Fellows are creatives, grassroots builders, and community leaders carrying visions for a more vibrant civic life across the city. The Fellowship is the entry point into an ongoing Collective: ongoing relationship-building, community support, and an incubator and brokerage model that connects and aligns resources behind a wide range of grassroots visions for civic life.

Meet the 2026 Fellows
SF Futures: Civic Leaders Collective

Building the civic connective tissue for San Francisco’s common agenda.
In partnership with the Commonwealth Club and MIT Presencing Institute, I lead the adaptation of The Plenary, Co.’s frameworks and theory of change for a citywide initiative bringing cross-sector leaders together to build San Francisco's relational and narrative civic infrastructure.
Public site coming soon.
Ecosystem for Civic Culture, Health & Opportunity

Exploring a collaborative model for investing in civic culture.
Built from a year of research and 150+ interviews with practitioners, funders, and community leaders nationwide, ECCHO is an emerging theory and architecture for how civic culture gets resourced — designed to incentivize collaboration over competition. It debuted at the 2026 Global Philanthropy Forum Leaders Summit. More details coming soon.
Illuminations Showcase

Civic art and science exhibition on sustainable and equitable futures.
The Plenary, Co. team worked with dozens of artists, designers, experts, and community partners to produce a 6000 sq ft interactive showcase in San Francisco, CA. Thousands of participants explored social, environmental, and scientific issues together.

Virtual Showcase
I Am a Scientist Program

Storytelling Initiative to Break STEM Stereotypes & Barriers
My co-creator Dr. Nabiha Saklayen and I produced the “I Am a Scientist” program: a series of toolkits designed to introduce students to the stories, science, and career pathways of multidimensional researchers that counter pop narratives. It will be distributed to 1500+ classrooms this year.

See the Site
It's Only Human Exhibition

Interactive Art & Science Exhibition
on Human Bias
In collaboration with 25+ artists, educators, and scientists, I created an educational experience for members of the public to explore everyday biases at the individual and societal level. The event laid the foundation for The Plenary, Co., a 501(c)3 committed to reimagining how we learn about the things that matter most.

Learn More

WRITING PROJECTS

Civic Being

Civic Being is a collection of essays for people choosing civic hope. It’s a place to explore the stories, science, and strategies that can help us build a new kind of civic culture, and a love letter to what could be.