If you’re catching up on the series, here are links for our posts on: Belonging, Connection, Joy and Meaning, Identity, Change, and the Nation.

Hope can feel difficult to talk honestly about right now. Americans are living through political division, economic pressure, institutional distrust, loneliness, climate anxiety, and constant exposure to crisis. Cynicism often feels safer than optimism.

And yet people continue to hope anyway.

Not always in grand or abstract ways, but in deeply human ones: caring for family, building community, mentoring young people, creating things, helping neighbors, imagining better futures, and continuing to show up for one another even when the future feels uncertain.

Hope is not denial. It is a form of investment in the future, even when the future is unclear.

Hope Lives Closest to Home

Americans are not equally hopeful about everything. They are most hopeful about the parts of the future that feel closest to them. Roughly two-thirds say they feel hopeful about their own lives (66%). A smaller majority feel hopeful about the future of their communities (54%). Hope drops considerably when people think about the future of the United States (38%) and the world (36%).

In some ways, this finding echoes what we found throughout the series. Belonging was local. Connection was local. Change was local. It seems that Americans have not lost hope but they may have relocated it.

When Americans describe hope, they talk about people. Asked which actions best reflect hope for the future, Americans overwhelmingly choose helping someone who needs it (30%) and caring for family and friends (19%). Far fewer point to voting (5%), creating or building something (7%), or showing up for their community (6%).

This local focus is also clear when we ask people to recount a recent experience that gave them hope. There, 21% mention witnessing kindness in their community, 17% mention personal progress, and 16% mention family milestones. Only 15% mention national events, and only 11% say some version of “nothing”.

This finding is easy to overlook because it feels ordinary. But perhaps that is the point. Much of modern political life asks people to think about the future through institutions, elections, and large-scale systems change. Americans, by contrast, seem to experience hope through everyday acts of care and contribution.

But while Americans largely agree on what hope looks like, they do not experience it equally. Again, Americans who are financially comfortable are substantially more likely to feel hopeful about their own lives (83% of Prosperous vs. 38% of Struggling), their communities (68% vs. 37%), the country (67% vs. 24%), and the world (51% vs. 24%). They are also far less likely to identify financial stress as an obstacle to hope (10% vs. 44%).

Those who are struggling financially tell a different story. Financial stress looms larger. Confidence in the future is lower. The future itself can feel less certain and less attainable.

The Future Americans Want

When asked what would make America more successful by 2050, Americans point first to less stressful and more stable lives (32%). Others emphasize stronger communities (20%), more belonging (15%), more time for what matters (13%), and less loneliness (12%). Those who feel hopeful about their own lives are more likely to think stronger and more connected communities are the most important factor in America’s future success, while those who do not feel hopeful emphasize less stress and more stability.

When asked what would make the biggest difference for the country’s future, the most common answer is clear: more people being able to afford a stable and secure life (43%). Americans also point to smaller economic and social divides (18%), better physical and mental health (13%), and more opportunity (12%).

The same pattern appears when people think about democracy itself. Americans say democracy would improve if the government worked better for ordinary people (33%) and if people could disagree without hating one another (30%). But the priorities differ sharply based on how hopeful they feel about the country’s future. Among those who are very hopeful, 41% say the biggest need is learning to disagree without hating one another. Among those who are not at all hopeful, 45% instead point to a government that works better for ordinary people.

Interestingly, when we asked people to describe something they hoped they would see in their lifetime, the most common answers were about political changes. One in five (20%) cited political changes, the most common response. Another 14% mentioned world peace, and 10% described equality and social progress. Fourteen percent described accomplishing personal goals, and another 14% described family milestones.

Final Thoughts

People thrive when they have roots, relationships, and room to pursue what matters. They thrive when they feel recognized, empowered, included, and hopeful about the future. And while the specifics changed from survey to survey, one pattern remained remarkably consistent: the clearest divide in the data was between those with enough stability to participate fully in their lives and communities and those still struggling to secure that foundation.

So we will leave you with a few questions for the next 250 years:

• How do we build communities where more people feel they belong?

• What creates the conditions for people not just to survive, but to participate, contribute, and thrive?

• And how do we ensure that hope is not a privilege reserved for those with the greatest resources and security?

Across seven surveys, the future Americans described was not extraordinary. In many ways, it was remarkably human: more connection, more dignity, more opportunity, more participation, and more hope.

Perhaps the challenge of America’s next 250 years is not imagining a better future. It is creating the conditions that allow more people to experience it.

We are in. Who wants to join us?

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

America has always been an unfinished project.

From the beginning, the country’s ideals have existed alongside exclusion, inequality, and ongoing arguments about who counts, who belongs, and who the nation is ultimately built for. As debates around immigration, citizenship, identity, and democracy intensify, many Americans are asking deeper questions about the identity of the nation itself.

For some, America represents freedom and opportunity. For others, it evokes disappointment, exclusion, or a promise that has never been fully realized. Many Americans feel pride in the country’s diversity, creativity, and democratic ideals while simultaneously feeling disconnected from the national story America tells about itself.

What we found in this data is more complicated than either patriotism or cynicism. Americans remain deeply attached to the idea of America. But many are less certain that America is living up to its promise or that people like them are fully included in its future.

American, But Not Uncritical

Nearly eight in ten Americans identify strongly or completely as American (79%), including a majority who say they identify completely (52%). At first glance, that finding might seem surprising. Public discourse often suggests that national identity itself is becoming fractured. But the data tell a different story. The real divide is not whether people identify as American. It is whether they believe America is living up to its ideals.

Only about half of Americans believe the country is close to being a place where everyone has a fair chance to live freely and with dignity (53%). Many believe America remains far from that aspiration. A plurality believe America is currently mostly built to serve politicians and people in power (28%), and another 26% say it is built to serve wealthy people. Merely 7% say it is built to serve working people, and only 14% say it serves everyone equally.

At the same time, Americans continue to find reasons for pride. When asked what makes them most proud of the country, they point first to freedoms and rights (27%). Others cite America’s diversity (16%) and communities helping one another (14%). What stands out is what people do not mention. Few point to military power, global dominance, or economic strength. And when asked what disappoints them most about America, government dysfunction emerges as the clear leader (37%), far ahead of any other response.

When asked what being an American means to them, people demonstrated a surprising level of agreement, with more than half (51%) writing about freedom and liberty. Another 23% wrote simply about pride and patriotism, and 13% wrote about having responsibility to their communities. We also continue to see that some Americans are more concerned about the country’s current state, with 13% choosing to write in either “nothing” or explicitly describing a challenge the country is facing.

The Nation Americans Want

Despite most people having a strong sense of American identity, far fewer feel included in the story America tells about itself. Only about a quarter say people like them are often or always included in conversations about America’s future (23%). Roughly a third say people like them are rarely or never included (35%).

A similar result is found when people are asked whether their own life fits the American story. Only about a third say their life fits that story very well (31%). The rest say it fits only somewhat, a little, or not at all.

Despite widespread frustration, Americans remain fairly aligned on the values they want the country to embrace moving forward. When asked which value should guide America over the next 250 years, three themes rise to the top: equality (22%), caring for one another (21%), and freedom (18%). Identity has an impact: among those who identify completely as American, 22% chose freedom as the value to guide America moving forward. This compares to 11% of those who somewhat identify as American, or 9% of those who do not identify that way at all.

In fact, when we asked what today’s kids should be taught about America, the most common answer (25%) was about character and values, followed by what can be achieved with hard work (17%). Again, mentions of freedom and sacrifice (17%) were common, as was the importance of kindness and respect (15%). Five percent mentioned civic participation. But here too, people voice concern about the country, with 11% saying we should warn kids of a potential America in decline, or that the country used to be better.

That said, the data also point to more optimism than headlines might suggest. Most Americans express at least some confidence that the country can build a better future for the next generation (76%). While relatively few are very confident, outright pessimism remains a minority view.

Who Feels Included?

Across this series, financial comfort has repeatedly emerged as one of the strongest predictors of how Americans experience their lives. But the differences in this data on nationhood are among the largest we’ve seen.

Americans who are financially comfortable are dramatically more likely to feel that people like them are included in conversations about America’s future (25% of Prosperous vs. 4% of Struggling). They are more likely to say their life fits the American story (56% vs. 18%). They are more likely to believe everyone can live freely and with dignity (43% vs. 15%). And they are substantially more confident that America can build a better future for the next generation (84% vs. 57%).

Those who are struggling financially tell a different story. Many are less likely to see themselves reflected in the nation’s future, less likely to believe the American promise applies equally to everyone, and less confident that the next generation will inherit something better.

Final Thoughts

One of the most striking findings in this survey is that Americans have not abandoned the idea of America. Most still identify strongly as American. Most still find reasons for pride. Americans remain deeply attached to the country’s ideals. What many are questioning is whether those ideals are being realized in practice and whether people like them are fully included in the future being built.

Beneath these findings lies a deeper set of questions:

• What helps people feel represented in conversations about the country’s future?

• Why do so many Americans identify strongly as American while simultaneously feeling disconnected from the national story?

• And what does it take for people to believe that the promise of America applies to them too?

Six posts into this series, here is what we know: People need roots, relationships, room to pursue what matters, recognition, agency, and a sense that they belong not only in their communities, but in the broader story of the country itself.

For all of our disagreements about politics, policy, and culture, most Americans still seem to share a common aspiration: a country where people are free, treated fairly, cared for by one another, and able to contribute to something larger than themselves.

America is still being written.

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Many Americans look around and see reasons for concern. Rising costs, political division, loneliness, declining trust in institutions, and a sense that many of the systems meant to support people are not working as well as they should. Given that backdrop, it is not surprising that many are uncertain about the country’s direction.

The deeper question is what happens next. When people see problems that feel larger than themselves, do they believe change is possible? And if so, who do they believe is responsible for making it happen? These questions matter because agency sits at the heart of civic life.

What we found in this survey is more hopeful than the national mood might suggest. Americans remain deeply frustrated by many of the challenges they face. Yet they have not given up on change. Instead, they appear to be rethinking where change comes from and what meaningful action looks like. Rather than looking exclusively to national leaders or institutions, many place their faith closer to home—in local communities, personal relationships, and the belief that small actions can still add up to something larger.

Ordinary People Matter Most

For all the discussion about cynicism and distrust, Americans still believe in the power of ordinary people. More than nine-in-ten say ordinary people can help change things in their communities at least somewhat (92%). More than half believe ordinary people can make a difference “a lot” or “a great deal” (52%). Most Americans also report having at least some control over the direction of their own lives (91%), with a majority saying they have “a lot” or “a great deal” of control (51%).

What makes this finding particularly striking is how little disagreement exists. Across age groups, educational backgrounds, races, and political affiliations, Americans are remarkably aligned in believing that ordinary people make a difference.

That faith stands in sharp contrast to how Americans view those currently in power. Asked what future generations are most likely to say we got wrong, the most common answer is political leadership (23%). Here, too, we see remarkable unanimity. Across age, education, parental status, race, income, and gender, Americans most often point to today’s political leaders, followed by lost values and connections (16%) and division and hatred (13%).

This frustration is mirrored when we ask people what they wish they had the ability to influence in America. A plurality point to politics and government (26%), the very area they expect to regret most, while another 12% name social division and civility.

The data also suggest Americans have not entirely lost faith in solving big problems. When asked which challenge seems most realistic to address, respondents pointed first to the cost of living (22%), followed by government accountability (14%), healthcare (12%), housing affordability (9%), and education (9%). Notably, relatively few selected political division (6%). The issues people believe can be solved are often the ones they can see, experience, and influence directly.

By now, this won’t surprise you: the strongest divide in the data is financial comfort. Americans who are financially comfortable are far more likely to feel they have a great deal of control over the direction of their own lives (52% of Prosperous vs. 13% of Struggling). They are also more likely to believe ordinary people can help change things a great deal in their communities (47% vs. 26%) and to have taken action locally in the past year (55% vs. 33%).

The opposite is also true. Americans who are struggling financially are more likely to feel little or no control over their own lives, less likely to have acted in their communities, and more likely to say they wanted to get involved but have not yet done so.

Making Change Local

When asked where real change happens in America, no single institution dominates. Americans are divided among ordinary people and local communities (20%), elected leaders and government (18%), social movements (17%), and major crises or hard times (18%).

But when we look at how people personally define meaningful action, a much clearer picture emerges. The most meaningful action, according to Americans, is helping someone directly (33%). Volunteering (19%) and voting (19%) tie for second. Far fewer point to joining organizations, contacting elected officials, donating money, or speaking publicly.

When Americans think about change, they tend to imagine it at a human scale. A neighbor helping a neighbor. A volunteer showing up consistently. A community solving a local problem. A person deciding to get involved.

The behavioral data tell a similar story. More than four in ten Americans say they have taken action to improve something in their local community during the past year (41%). Another nearly three-in-ten say they have wanted to but have not yet taken action (29%). Belief in how much ordinary people can change things has an impact on how often Americans take action in their own communities. A majority (56%) of those who believe ordinary people can change things a great deal have taken action at least once in the past year, compared to those who don’t think people can change things at all (21%).

The data also reveal something encouraging about how Americans connect across differences. Most report having meaningful conversations with people from a different generation at least sometimes (77%), including a substantial share who do so very often (29%).

Final Thoughts

While trust in institutions may be strained, belief in people remains remarkably resilient. Americans still believe ordinary people can make a difference. They still see value in helping neighbors, volunteering, showing up for their communities, and investing in the places closest to them. For many, change feels less like something delivered from above and more like something built from the ground up.

The data have us wondering about what strengthens civic agency:

• What helps people believe that change is possible in the first place?

• What helps people move from wanting to make a difference to actually taking action?

• How can communities create more opportunities for people to participate in meaningful ways close to home?

This data mirrors a pattern we’ve seen throughout this series. Whether we are talking about belonging, connection, joy, identity, or change, Americans consistently place their faith in things that are personal, local, and relational. The strongest forces in civic life often begin not with institutions, but with people.

Democracy starts close to home.

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Identity has always shaped American life: who belongs, who is seen, who is valued, and who has access to power and opportunity. But identity is also deeply personal, shaped by family, community, culture, work, memory, and experience.

Most Americans are still in the process of becoming themselves.

In a culture that prizes certainty and self-definition, that may sound surprising. Yet our data suggest that identity is less a destination than an ongoing process. People are continually adapting, balancing different roles, and reconciling who they are with who they hope to become.

The result is a portrait of Americans that is both hopeful and complicated: people who are largely proud of who they are, yet still evolving; who often feel accepted, yet still feel pressure to fit in; and who are searching not just for belonging, but for the freedom to become themselves.

A Work in Progress

The first thing that stands out in the data is how few Americans believe they are finished becoming who they are. Two-thirds say they are still growing or changing as a person, either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” (66%). Only a small share says they are no longer changing at all (4%). Even among older Americans, many continue to describe themselves as evolving.

When people describe who they are today, they rarely offer fixed labels. Instead, they talk about themselves as people navigating life, balancing responsibilities, and continuing to become. As one 21-year-old woman from Texas put it, she is “an open-minded Hispanic woman trying to navigate the changes in this country.” A 38-year-old man from South Carolina described himself as “a motivated professional who values family and community.” Others defined themselves through everyday passions and aspirations: “I am a simple person. I love punk rock and beer. I love helping people,” wrote a 47-year-old man from Louisiana, while a 59-year-old woman from California summed herself up as “an American citizen just trying to live the American dream.”

At the same time, Americans see their identities as deeply rooted in the people and places that shaped them. Seven in ten say their upbringing influences who they are today either “a lot” or “almost entirely” (70%). When asked who had the biggest influence on who they became, the answers were remarkably grounded. Parents topped the list (27%), followed by spouses and partners (18%). Far fewer pointed to public figures, books, media, or cultural leaders. In an era often defined by influencers and algorithms, the strongest influences on identity remain the people closest to us. This finding also challenges the popular notion that identity is purely individual. Only about one in five Americans say they mostly figured out who they are on their own (21%).

The Many Selves We Carry

Most Americans report being able to be their true selves in daily life. Roughly two-thirds say they can do so always or often (67%). Most also say they feel respected and appreciated by the people around them (72%), and more than half say they often or always feel proud of who they are (56%).

But another set of numbers tells a different story. Large majorities say they feel pressure to act a certain way because of what others expect, at least sometimes (68%). Similar numbers say they feel pulled between different parts of their identity—between different roles, values, obligations, or expectations (68%). These pressures don’t fall only on people who often struggle to be themselves. Even among people who say they are always able to be themselves, half (50%) still feel pulled between different parts of their identity at least sometimes, and 44% feel pressured to act in a certain way at least sometimes.

The data suggest that the challenge facing many Americans is not hiding who they are. It is reconciling the many versions of themselves they are asked to be. Parent and employee. Caregiver and individual. Neighbor and newcomer. Ambitious and exhausted. Independent and responsible to others.

At the same time, those experiences are not distributed equally. Compared to people who perceive themselves as more “normal” in their communities, people who perceive themselves as more “different” are far more likely to say they often or always feel pressure to act a certain way (40% vs 23%). They are also less likely to say they can always be themselves (24% vs 42%), and more likely to say they often or always feel pulled between different parts of their identity (41% vs 22%).

And, as we’ve seen many times now, financial comfort also seems to play a role. Americans who are financially comfortable are significantly more likely to say they can be their true selves. They are more likely to feel proud of who they are. More likely to feel respected and appreciated by the people around them. More likely to see a meaningful role for themselves in their communities.

Those who are struggling financially report a very different experience. They are less likely to feel authentic, recognized, or valued, and more likely to feel different from the people around them.

That does not mean identity is reducible to economics. It isn’t. But it does suggest that authenticity may be easier when people have enough stability to take social, professional, and personal risks. The conditions of daily life shape more than material well-being. They shape whether people feel free enough to fully be themselves.

Final Thoughts

Most Americans are still growing into themselves, navigating the competing roles and expectations of modern life. That may be truer than ever in a world where people move between communities and identities at increasing speed.

At the same time, most want something remarkably simple: to feel seen, respected, and accepted for who they are. The findings leave us with a set of deeper questions about identity and self-expression:

• Why do so many Americans feel different from the people around them?

• What helps people navigate the competing roles and expectations they carry?

• What conditions allow people not only to belong, but to fully and confidently become themselves?

Becoming yourself is not something people do alone. It depends, in part, on whether the people and communities around them create space to be seen, accepted, and valued for who they are.

We are all still becoming.

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Much of modern American life feels organized around survival: paying bills, keeping up, staying productive, managing stress. For many people, finding joy has become something squeezed into whatever time remains after work, caregiving, financial pressure, and exhaustion.

Despite how difficult it is to prioritize, joy matters. A flourishing society depends on more than economic growth or political participation. It depends on whether people have the ability to experience meaning, connection, creativity, rest, and pleasure in their everyday lives. Whether they have something to look forward to. Whether they feel their lives are aligned with what matters most to them.

When we asked Americans about joy, we found something both encouraging and revealing. Most people feel like they know what makes a good life. The issue is whether they have enough room in their lives to experience it.

If Time Were Ours

The first thing that stands out in the data is that Americans are not nearly as unhappy as public discourse often suggests. A majority describe themselves as very or mostly happy (57%). Most have at least a few close friends or family members who bring them joy (91%). Nearly six in ten say they are often or always able to be fully present and enjoy positive moments when they happen (59%). And almost nine in ten have something to look forward to at least sometimes, with nearly one in five saying they always do.

What appears to matter most, however, is not simply whether people are doing enjoyable things. It is whether they have something to look forward to. Among Americans who describe themselves as very happy, 85% say they always or often have something to look forward to. By comparison, 76% say they do something for enjoyment daily or a few times a week. Overall, 57% of Americans report making time for enjoyable activities at least a few times a week. But for many Americans, that time is constrained. Half say finances often or always prevent them from doing things they enjoy (50%). Four in ten say stress and responsibilities often or always get in the way (40%).

When we ask Americans how they would spend their time if money and responsibilities were not constraints, their answers tell us a great deal about what people believe is missing from modern life. Half say they would choose a slower-paced life (50%). More than four in ten would spend more time learning new things (42%). Similar shares would spend more time outdoors (40%). Others would devote more time to creative pursuits (36%), building or making things (32%), caring for loved ones (31%), or helping in their communities (31%). Only a relatively small share says they would spend more time working or pursuing entrepreneurial projects (19%).

And what may be one of the most hopeful findings in the data: Most Americans say they find joy in close relationships, hobbies, personal interests, and time spent with family and friends. Many are actively learning something new. Nearly three-quarters report making, fixing, growing, or building something they were proud of in the past year (72%).

Between Living and Thriving

While most Americans report being generally happy, far fewer say their lives are completely aligned with their values, priorities, and sense of purpose. Only a small share describe their lives as fully aligned (7%), while many more say they are only somewhat aligned (51%). Those who say they are “very happy” lately are the only ones who feel that their life is either completely or very aligned with what matters most to them (71%). Even among Americans who are “mostly happy”, just 41% say their lives are completely or very aligned.

Moreover, people can be happy and still feel constrained. They can have moments of joy while sensing that the life they are living is not quite the life they would choose. And, just as we found in our recent analysis on belonging and connection, financial comfort plays an important role.

Americans who are financially comfortable are significantly more likely to report happiness, a sense of alignment, things to look forward to, and the ability to be present and enjoy life’s positive moments. They are more likely to pursue hobbies, spend time learning, engage in creative activities, and feel that their lives reflect what matters most to them.

Those who are struggling financially report a very different experience. They are substantially more likely to say finances prevent them from doing things they enjoy. They are less likely to have something to look forward to, less likely to feel aligned with their priorities, and less likely to experience the everyday conditions that support joy. Notably, financial constraints appear to weigh more heavily on happiness than stress or responsibilities alone. Among Americans who say they have been very unhappy lately, 62% report that money is always preventing them from doing things they enjoy, compared with 49% who say the same about stress and responsibilities.

Three posts into this series, the pattern is becoming difficult to ignore. Financial comfort is shaping more than material well-being. It appears to dramatically influence whether people have the freedom to pursue the relationships, activities, and experiences that make life feel meaningful.

Final Thoughts

Much of the American story is built around the pursuit of happiness. Yet these findings suggest that what people are seeking may be something slightly different.

What many Americans appear to want is the ability to spend more of their lives doing the things that matter to them. To learn. To create. To care for others. To contribute. To spend time with people they love. To feel that their daily lives reflect their values and priorities.

The findings leave us with fundamental questions about what it means to flourish in modern America:

• If Americans know what brings them joy, what keeps them from pursuing it?

• What would change if more people had the time, stability, and resources to live in closer alignment with what matters most?

• And what kind of society are we building if joy becomes something reserved for the moments left over after everything else is done?

Belonging, connection, and joy are often treated as personal choices or personality traits. But the data increasingly suggest they are also shaped by material conditions. People need more than good intentions to thrive. They need enough stability to put down roots, enough connection to feel supported, and enough time and opportunity to fully participate in their own lives.

A good life should feel good, too.

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

The desire for connection remains everywhere. People still long for the kinds of relationships and routines that make life feel shared: the friend you call first with good news, the familiar faces at a local coffee shop, the weekly ritual that gives shape to your life, the neighbor who notices when you’re gone.

What we found in our new data is more complicated than the conventional story of isolation. Americans are not as disconnected as often claimed. Most still have people they can rely on, places they gather, and neighbors they help. At the same time, many worry that the communities around them are becoming more fragmented, withdrawn, and divided.

The challenge facing America may not simply be a lack of connection. It may reflect a difference between the connections people experience firsthand and the social fabric they believe exists around them.

The Connections We Still Have

For all the concern about loneliness, the data reveal a country that remains surprisingly connected in everyday ways.

Most Americans report having meaningful conversations with someone outside of work or family at least a few times a week (54%). More than half say they have about the right amount of connection in their lives (53%). When asked how many people in their community they could rely on if they needed help, only a small share said they have no one at all (13%). Most can identify at least a few people they could turn to in a time of need.

When asked who they first tell good news to, 44% named a partner or spouse, 17% a parent, 11% a child, and 10% a friend. Only 3% said they tell no one. Of course, life stage changes these connections. Among Gen Z, a third named a parent, while only 8% of those 55+ did so. Those older adults most often name partners (48%) or children (18%).

A majority of Americans also seem to have social rituals they enjoy. Roughly two-thirds of people described at least one ritual, including shared meals (18%), get-togethers with friends (18%), outdoor activities (13%), among others.

Perhaps most strikingly, nearly seven in ten Americans say they helped a neighbor or someone nearby in the past month (69%). Many report doing so multiple times. These aren’t grand gestures. They are favors, errands, check-ins, rides, meals, and moments of support. And they’re even more common among those who say they completely trust their neighbors (81%). Among those who say they don’t trust or only somewhat trust their neighbors, those numbers are lower: 52% and 65%, respectively. We can’t say for certain which comes first, but trust and neighborly acts of support clearly go hand in hand. Communities where people help one another tend to be more trusting, and that trust may encourage even more helping in return.

The data also suggest that connection is tied to place. Most Americans say they have at least a few places in their community—outside of home and work—where they enjoy being around other people (72%). Most spend time in these spaces at least a few times each month (78%).

Whether it’s a church, library, coffee shop, park, volunteer organization, community center, or local business, these third spaces create opportunities for the repeated interactions that allow relationships to form.

Alone Together?

While Americans generally describe their own relationships positively, they are far less positive when describing the broader communities around them. Most people say they have the right amount of connection in their lives. Most people have people they can rely on. Most people have meaningful conversations and regularly help others.

Yet only about a third describe the people in their communities as connected (35%). Similar shares describe their communities as cohesive (33%) or engaged (38%). Large numbers instead see their communities as isolated, divided, or withdrawn.

This discrepancy appears throughout the data. Americans seem considerably more confident about their own relationships than they are about the connections and cohesion within their communities. But here again, we see a critical role for interpersonal trust to play. Among those who completely trust their neighbors, 55% see their broader communities as connected, 47% as cohesive, and 55% as engaged, rates that are +39pp, +34pp, and +40pp higher than those who say they don’t trust their neighbors.

Connection Has an Economic Gradient

Just as financial comfort shaped whether people felt rooted in our belonging data, it also appears to shape whether people feel connected.

Across nearly every measure, financially comfortable Americans report being more likely to trust the people who live near them (63% of Prosperous vs. 34% of Struggling). They are more likely to report daily meaningful conversations outside of work and family (41% vs. 18%). They are more likely to feel they have the right amount of connection in their lives (66% vs. 34%). They are also more likely to have places in their community where they enjoy spending time around other people (81% vs. 55%), more likely to have multiple people they could rely on for help (89% vs. 70%), and more likely to feel confident they could build new relationships if they needed to start over (66% vs. 30%).

The same pattern appears when people evaluate their communities. Americans who are financially comfortable are substantially more likely to describe their communities as connected, cohesive, and engaged. Those who are struggling are far more likely to describe them as isolated, divided, and withdrawn.

Final Thoughts

The story in these data is not that connection has disappeared. Americans are still helping neighbors, relying on one another, and finding places where community can take root. But those connections are not as secure or widely shared as we might hope.

Throughout the data, a paradox emerges: people remain confident in their own relationships while believing the broader social fabric is fraying around them. Many continue to build trust and connection in their daily lives while worrying that those same bonds are weakening in society at large.

And, much like belonging, these perceptions are closely tied to financial stability. Americans who feel financially secure are more likely to describe their communities as connected, trustworthy, and engaged, while those facing financial strain are more likely to experience disconnection—not just in their own lives, but in the places around them.

The findings point to several tensions worth exploring:

• Why do Americans remain confident in their own relationships while losing confidence in the social fabric around them?

• What conditions help transform individual relationships into a broader sense of community trust and cohesion?

• As more of life moves online, what kinds of places and experiences still create the shared bonds that hold place-based communities together?

Our findings on belonging and connection suggest that community is not a single feeling. It is a web of relationships, routines, and opportunities that help people feel rooted in both the places they call home and the people around them.

Community doesn’t happen by accident.

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Most Americans are not spending their days thinking about semiquincentennials or constitutional originalism. They’re thinking about whether they belong where they live. Whether they can build a meaningful life. Whether they feel connected to other people. Whether joy, dignity, purpose, safety, and hope still feel attainable. Whether democracy can still deliver something human.

Over the coming weeks, in this seven-part series, we’ll explore the themes that lie beneath politics, yet shape civic life every day: belonging, connection, joy, identity, change, nationhood, and hope.

Together, these questions point toward something larger. What are the conditions that allow people not just to survive, but to thrive? What helps people build meaningful lives, contribute to their communities, and imagine a better future?

Welcome to America 251.

Americans move more than almost anyone else in the world. We leave hometowns for opportunity, reinvent ourselves in new places, and often build lives far from the people and communities that raised us. Mobility has long been celebrated as a hallmark of freedom and success. But it comes with a tradeoff: many people are left searching for a sense of belonging.

Belonging is more than identity. It is rootedness—a feeling that you know a place, are known by others, and matter to the community around you. Yet many Americans describe their communities as fragmented, transient, or isolating. Third places are disappearing, housing instability disrupts roots, and more interactions are taking place online than they are in person.

As America approaches its 250th anniversary, belonging is not just a personal question. It is a civic one. Democracy depends not only on institutions but on people feeling connected to the places and communities they call home.

Belonging Starts With Stability

Americans often talk about belonging as a feeling. But our data suggest it may begin with something more concrete: stability.

Most Americans say they feel at least some sense of belonging where they live, and many have lived in the same community for years. Yet beneath those toplines, belonging looks very different depending on whether people feel financially secure.

As shown above, those who are financially comfortable are far more likely to report strong roots in their communities than those who are struggling. They are also dramatically more likely to say they completely belong where they live, know many of their neighbors by name, and feel they have a lot in common with the people around them.

The pattern extends beyond relationships. Financially secure Americans are more likely to say the place they live is “very important” to their identity (42% of Prosperous, 18% of Struggling), that their community provides outdoor spaces “very well” (57% versus 30%), and that “all or most” of the things they need in daily life are located nearby (72% versus 44%). Those who are struggling are more likely to say they have no roots at all (30%) and know few or none of their neighbors (73%).

But stability alone does not appear to create belonging. Relationships also play a big role. Among those who say they completely belong where they live, 70% report having a lot in common with their neighbors. Among those who do not feel they belong at all, that number falls to just 5%. Similarly, people who feel they belong are much more likely to know their neighbors by name. More than half know most or all of their neighbors, compared with just 16% of those who do not feel they belong.

We Stay for People, Not Places

When we asked people why they live where they do—and why they would stay—the answers were remarkably consistent.

The most common reason Americans live where they do is simple: family (30%). Another large share say they remain where they grew up (22%). Fewer cite lifestyle (18%), work (14%), or affordability (11%) as their primary reason for being there.

And when looking toward the future, relationships become even more important. The leading reason people would choose to stay in their community long-term is that family and friends are there (31%).

That connection to place matters more than it might seem. Among Americans with strong roots in their communities, nearly four in ten say they live where they do because it is where they grew up. Among those with no roots at all, only 8% say the same. The importance of social ties becomes even clearer when we look at who feels most rooted. Among Americans with strong roots in their community, 44% say family and friends are the primary reason they would stay long-term. Among those with no roots at all, that figure falls to just 16%.

Interestingly, people who feel a strong sense of belonging are also more likely to say they stay because they value the lifestyle or environment where they live. Those who do not belong are much more likely to say they stay because they lack better options elsewhere.

Final Thoughts

For generations, mobility has been one of America’s defining features. We celebrate the freedom to move, reinvent ourselves, and pursue opportunity wherever it leads. But belonging asks something different of us. It asks us to stay long enough to know our neighbors, build relationships, and become part of a shared story.

What this data makes clear is that belonging is not evenly distributed. Some people feel deeply rooted in the places they call home, while others feel disconnected from the communities around them. The biggest differences are not about who people are. They are about the conditions of their lives: whether they feel financially secure, know their neighbors, have roots in a place, and see themselves as part of a community.

That raises important questions about the future of civic life.

• If financial security is one of the strongest predictors of feeling rooted, what does that mean for communities facing rising housing costs, displacement, and economic uncertainty?

• As families become more geographically dispersed, where will future generations find the relationships that anchor them to place?

• And what does belonging look like in an era when finding connection may be broader than ever, but less deeply rooted?

The challenge is that belonging depends on conditions that feel increasingly fragile: stable housing, economic security, welcoming public spaces, and strong social ties. When those foundations are present, people put down roots. They invest in their neighborhoods, build relationships, and see themselves as part of something larger than themselves.

When those foundations are absent, community can begin to feel temporary—even when people never leave.

Find your place. Find your people.

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As America marks its 250th anniversary, this seven-part State of Us series looks beyond nostalgia and national myth toward the future we still have the chance to build—one grounded in belonging, connection, dignity, and the everyday realities of American life.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

That uncertainty puts enormous pressure on schools. People aren’t just asking what children should learn. They’re asking what young people will need to survive—economically, socially, emotionally, and civically—in a world that feels like it keeps changing faster than institutions can keep up.

So this month, we asked Americans a series of forced-choice questions about what K-12 schools should prioritize. What emerged was not a simple preference for career preparation or civic education, individual growth or collective responsibility. Instead, Americans seem to want schools to do something much harder: prepare young people to navigate instability without losing their capacity to shape the world around them.

Schools and the Future

When Americans are forced to choose what schools should prioritize most, the results reveal both broad consensus and deep tension about what young people need from education today:

Challenge vs. stability. When forced to choose between preparing young people to challenge and improve society or maintaining order and stability, Americans overwhelmingly favored improvement. Eight in ten (80%) said schools should prepare young people to challenge and improve society, while just 16% prioritized stability.

Jobs vs. community participation. At the same time, Americans remain highly pragmatic about economic survival. More than two-thirds (68%) said schools should prioritize practical skills for jobs and careers over preparing students to be active participants in their communities (28%).

Individual values vs. shared values. The data also suggests Americans are deeply conflicted about values themselves. A slight majority (56%) said schools should encourage students to form their own values, while 38% preferred teaching a common set of shared values.

Personal success vs. community contribution. When asked whether schools should prioritize helping students achieve personal success or teaching them to contribute to their communities, Americans leaned toward personal success (55%), though community contribution remained strong (41%).

Political engagement vs. neutrality. Finally, Americans were more divided on whether schools should stay neutral on social and political issues or actively help students engage with them. A narrow majority (54%) supported schools helping students engage with social and political issues, while 39% preferred neutrality. But this question has the largest partisan split of the five: 69% of Democrats want engagement, while 50% of Republicans prefer neutrality.

Taken together, the five tradeoffs reveal a shared civic aspiration. Americans want schools to prepare young people to improve the world around them, but agreement begins to break down when it comes to how that should happen. While there is broad support for helping students challenge and improve society, there is far less consensus around the civic capacities, shared values, and political engagement that might make that possible.

Gen Z’s Tradeoffs

The clearest generational divide in the data emerged around what schools are for in the first place. Younger Americans are not asking schools to simply educate students. They are asking schools to function as a kind of civic and emotional infrastructure: a place where young people can develop their own values, learn how to engage with difficult social and political realities, and still build practical skills for an uncertain future.

The sharpest generational divide is on values. Nationally, 56% of Americans say schools should encourage individuals to form their own values rather than teach a common set of shared ones. Among Gen Z, that number jumps to 66%. Among adults aged 61 or older, it falls to 49%. And within Gen Z, the youngest cohort (those 18 to 23) lands at 69%.

That could read as individualism, and in one sense it is. But pair it with this: Gen Z is also more likely than any other generation to want schools to actively help students engage with social and political issues. Sixty percent of 18-to-30-year-olds want that engagement, compared to 53% of 31-to-45-year-olds and 52% of those 61 and older.

So the Gen Z picture isn’t disengagement or apathy. It’s something more specific: Let me form my own values, and help me learn how to engage with the world aligned with my beliefs.

There’s one more place where Gen Z differs slightly from older Americans. On the jobs versus community participation question—where the national number is 68% jobs, 28% community—Gen Z shifts to 64% jobs, 33% community. Older generations skew even harder toward job skills: 73% of those 61 and older chose career preparation. Gen Z is the group most willing to say that preparing students to be active community participants is part of what schools should do.

What does this add up to? Gen Z has a distinct civic orientation that doesn’t fit cleanly into older frameworks of either engagement or disengagement. They want schools to help them engage with political and social reality. They want to form their own values in the process. And they’re somewhat more willing than older generations to say that becoming an active community participant is itself a legitimate goal of education and not just a nice-to-have after career prep is done.

Final Thoughts

What struck me most about these findings is that Americans are not simply debating education policy. They are debating what kind of future feels possible for young people and what schools are responsible for preparing them to navigate.

At the same time, the data suggests Americans still see schools as one of the few institutions capable of shaping something larger than individual achievement. Even amid disagreement, there remains a shared hope that schools can help young people build lives that are not only economically secure but also meaningful, connected, and engaged with the world around them. Gen Z’s responses, in particular, suggest a generation looking not for answers handed down, but for the tools to participate, question, and define their own place in society.

The questions underneath these findings are ultimately much bigger than education itself:

• What should schools prepare young people for in a world changing this quickly?

• What values, if any, still feel shared enough to teach collectively?

• Can schools realistically prepare students for both economic survival and democratic participation?

Schools have become a container for much larger anxieties about instability, belonging, trust, economic survival, and whether democracy itself still feels cohesive. And Gen Z sits at the center of many of those fears.

Class adjourned.

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This research was supported by the Walton Family Foundation, which has funded Murmuration’s Gen Z research efforts since 2021. Learn more about our ongoing research partnership and findings on the youngest generation of voters here.

Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Murmuration’s Chief Marketing and Operating Officer, Michael Slaby, sat down with Spencer Overton, Law Professor at George Washington University Law School, for The Exchange, our interview series featuring influential thought leaders, organizers, advocates, and others who are shaping the future of civic life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Michael Slaby: Thanks so much for joining today and taking the time to talk to us about your work, especially at this incredibly complex moment around the idea of political power and enfranchisement in this country. Can you tell me a bit more about how you came to focus on race and democracy?

Spencer Overton: I initially came to democracy work through concerns about money and politics. Early in my career, I was focused on campaign finance and the ways concentrated wealth distorted democratic accountability. Some of that was about the unequal distribution of resources in terms of race, but it was broadly an issue of fairness.

In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore in 2000, it really became impossible to ignore how rules about voting itself, voter identification laws, felony disenfranchisement, and purges were shaping who had political power in America. That led to my book Stealing Democracy, which examined how politicians manipulate electoral rules to maintain power. What struck me over time is that these tactics were rarely isolated. Redistricting, access to the ballot—all these different mechanisms served the same objective, basically deciding in advance whose voices will matter politically.

In about 2014, I stepped away for about five years and ran a Black think tank. We focused on economic issues, but I came back to the issue of politicians manipulating electoral rules to maintain power through a technological lens around 2019. Between 2019 and now, a lot of my work has focused on democracy and technology.

Michael Slaby: You’ve talked about the expressions of political power in the context of the Callais decision and the undermining of section two of the Voting Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act was really about ensuring that communities that had been actively oppressed and denied political rights could actually build and exercise political power and ultimately access institutional power in the form of representation in our government. I think we lose sight of the role that drawing maps played in ensuring communities had power.

We’re in a world now where, apparently, redistricting is becoming more common, and I don’t expect that to be a political tool that anybody is willing to set down readily. If we’re constantly remapping, the relationship between political power and place is challenged, complicated, or even distorted.

Spencer Overton: When I started my book Stealing Democracy, the first chapter dealt with democratic gerrymandering in California. I wanted to say the broader issue is politicians manipulating rules to predetermine outcomes here, and that’s a fundamental issue. When race becomes intertwined with these systems, the harms are especially durable because they can lock communities out of meaningful political power for generations. We think about the best political systems being ones where different factions can form, but they can also reshape, and they can create new coalitions in the future to respond to new problems. But when things are fixed because of racial polarization, that’s an issue. I think that’s a problem here that is unique.

We’re seeing all of these different cases coming together—the Callais decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Brnovich case, and Rucho putting a green light on partisan gerrymandering. And as a result, we’re in a fundamentally different place. But the fact that we’re in this different place can hopefully open us up to some completely different systems that transcend our existing systems.

Michael Slaby: I think the Callais decision is rooted in a misunderstanding of the purpose of the Voting Rights Act. It was not just enfranchisement, but actually empowerment, literally the ability to exercise political and sustain institutional power for communities. But because that was not clear in the legislation, it’s easy to say things like colorblindness and wave away the injustice and inequity of failing to share power more effectively with communities. What emerging innovations do you see that may allow us to re-engage this question of sharing power?

Spencer Overton: A representative democracy means that people who share interests and experiences can translate their political participation into meaningful representation and meaningful governing power. In our current system of winner-take-all elections, large portions of the electorate routinely end up with no representation that reflects their views. Gerrymandering intensifies that problem, and as a result, there are millions of people who feel like their ballot doesn’t count.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve become increasingly interested in proportional representation. Under proportional systems, groups receive representation roughly proportional to their share of the vote. If a group makes up 30% of the votes and they vote cohesively, they should be able to elect roughly 30% of the legislative body. It helps communities of color secure representation without requiring race-conscious district lines, which are viewed skeptically after Callais, but it’s not just about race. It can improve ideological diversity when we think about a place like Massachusetts, which is about a third Republican, but has no Republican congressional members. The reverse is true in Tennessee, particularly after the recent gerrymander there.

Michael Slaby: At the time of recording this, in the last forty-eight hours, there have been other maps challenged—Alabama and South Carolina, for example. The idea that maps are no longer stable representations of our political landscape is becoming a destabilizing fact for people.

Spencer Overton: I think about how we can develop a system where voters choose the groupings and the outcomes rather than politicians. I also think that people do not have the same confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court that they once did. Instead of a system that’s based on judicial intervention, we need to set up systems where voters select the groups—and then those groups might change from election to election. And then obviously, we’ve got some other issues like money in politics, which is significant. And then there’s our system of primaries, where basically 8% of the population selects 82% of the U.S. House, because of a combination of gerrymandering and low turnout primaries. And the Senate just has so much power in terms of its confirmation power, and it doesn’t reflect the diversity of our country. There are many different structural issues that we have to acknowledge and address.

Michael Slaby: Naming that there is a multiplicity of challenges is important. I think there are moments when we think about democracy reform and innovation, and we get precious about a particular answer, rather than recognizing the multiplicity of solutions that might exist. There are many different dysfunctions. It’s not one dysfunction. So we probably need more than one answer.

Spencer Overton: I think that’s right. There’s not just one silver bullet here that’s going to solve everything. This is a complex system, and there are a variety of things we’ve got to deal with.

Michael Slaby: I’m curious about how you see reform also as an engine of rebuilding trust. That at some level, democracy is a system of faith, and if we don’t believe that our power is being shared, if we don’t believe that our agency has value, we’re not likely to use it, and then we’re unlikely to participate. And then we’re unlikely to trust it, and then the results become questionable. Today, the rule of law is under pressure because we don’t feel like there are any stable or consistent rules. Where do you see opportunities to address this?

Spencer Overton: I think the first step is recognizing that much of the distrust is rational. Americans are responding to real structural problems, such as gerrymandering and politicians who are insulated from accountability. We talked about the Senate. We talked about the Supreme Court. Obviously, campaign spending creates some understandable perceptions that wealthy interests dominate here. So, rebuilding trust cannot rely exclusively on messaging, right? It really requires substantive institutional reform. We talked about how to manage gerrymandering with things like proportional representation. Concerning our Senate piece, that’s really complex because some interpretations of Article V suggest that the U.S. Constitution cannot be amended to base the voting power of U.S. Senators on population, but there could be some intermediate steps, like DC statehood, that give more influence to historically underrepresented communities. And there are some other things that one could possibly do, like Supreme Court ethics reform, shadow docket reform, and obviously campaign finance reform. A lot of the distrust comes when people feel like their participation doesn’t matter.

The book The Turnout Gap by Bernard Fraga proposes that a lot of the racial gaps in participation aren’t due to socioeconomic issues, but due to gerrymandering and people feeling like their vote doesn’t really make a difference. Feeling like you’re making a difference is important. I also think that sometimes reformers ignore deep-seated cultural issues. People feel cultural anxiety. The country is changing from a demographic standpoint, and that creates tension because people are not necessarily ready to share power or feel a threat to their status. How do we recognize that and address it as opposed to simply calling it racist or simply pretending that it doesn’t exist? How do we acknowledge that and make a space that’s respected for people and figure out a way for some of those folks to have trust in a very diverse democracy here?

Michael Slaby: I think at times a failure of imagination keeps allied groups around democracy reform and the voting rights space from cooperating and co-organizing to build collective power. But when we look at younger people, I feel a sense of hope that new justice movements or new reforms might be possible.

Spencer Overton: I’m excited about the fact that younger reformers, and I think younger generations generally, are not just focused on the status quo. Many young people want something that is truly transformative rather than simply kind of nibbling around the edges. The fact that people don’t want to just rely on what has existed before, and are open to and willing to do some different things, gives me hope.

One of the things that concerns me is the evolution of technology and its role in terms of expression, speech, the economy, displacement in terms of jobs, and our ability to govern. I don’t know that we’re going to be able to effectively allow government to ensure that technology works for human beings if we don’t get our democratic institutions right. I don’t know that the government can effectively, for example, regulate technology in light of our current campaign finance rules, gerrymandering, and some of the other incentives. I really feel like we’ve got to get these basic democracy issues together to collectively confront some of these larger challenges of our time.

Michael Slaby: We never proactively laid out what we wanted social media tools to make possible for the community, for engagement, for civic life. I think we’re similarly missing an opportunity to talk about what we want from AI and talking about them too much as a set of things that are happening to us with an inevitability that implies we have no agency. We need to create a powerful public conversation to get what we want explicitly from tools that are meant to elevate humanity and elevate the way society thinks and functions, to create bridges and creativity that don’t exist, but our current systems don’t lend themselves to that type of activity.

Spencer Overton: I think that the first challenge that we have there is that so often we’re reactive in terms of here’s what the problems are, as opposed to proactively describing a vision. Many different people are going to have different visions, but that’s part of the work in terms of having that conversation and working through it. If you haven’t been talking about it and you haven’t kind of worked it through, you’re not going to be able to advance a new vision in the finite window that we have to implement that change.

I think that it is important to have those conversations now and not feel vulnerable, “like it’s inevitable, the machines are definitely going to take over,” or the opposite, right? Like the abundance culture of it’s all just going to get better because AI is great and is going to save us. Recognizing that we have agency both in terms of the technologies as well as laws, and that we have to exercise that agency and figure out what it is that we really want.

Michael Slaby: Do you see places where you would guide people to using that agency, either in that conversation or in the voting rights conversation right now?

Spencer Overton: I have gotten a lot out of looking overseas. For example, in Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement allowed almost warring factions, in terms of the British settlers who are largely Protestant and the native Irish who are largely Catholic, to have an agreement, to share power and work together using proportional representation there. These are tools that have allowed people to share power and make decisions together in times of cultural conflict.

Michael Slaby: I appreciate that focus on looking to relationship and community and the ability to share power in ways that feel just and creative as the driver—not cleverness. In democracy reform conversations, sometimes there are moments where we lose contact with a moral and ethical orientation toward healthy, vibrant relationships and community. And I think to our detriment, because we come off as technocratic and clever in a way that is misleading for what’s really at stake.

Spencer Overton: Some people would say, “let’s just be colorblind,” or “let’s tone it down” in terms of concerns about justice and policing, because we see the backlash that comes from it, so we just all need to be in the middle, and that’s the solution to making everything better.

My concern with that is that it doesn’t account for the pluralism of who we are as a country. I think that some marginalized folks experience that sentiment as similar to the mandated assimilation that we saw in terms of Indian boarding schools, or Black women having to straighten their hair to keep their job, or schoolchildren being prohibited from speaking Spanish at recess. It feeds into a kind of conquest. I think we should reject that and recognize some of the value of pluralism is that we can all share power, and we all can win.

Michael Slaby: More diverse groups are more creative. More diverse groups are more adaptive and adaptable. We flatten the engine of creativity in society if we choose safety or similarity, or assimilation instead of real integration. It’s an incredible missed opportunity in addition to being unjust. On another note, what’s giving you hope for the future right now?

Spencer Overton: I am a law professor, and it’s so neat to work with young minds and their excitement about the future. Younger folks give me hope. History also gives me hope. Many of the periods we now romanticize were experienced at that time as moments of profound crisis. When we think about Bloody Sunday and Selma, many people thought American democracy was and would be fundamentally broken. But that period produced the Voting Rights Act. Watergate exposed serious corruption and abuse of power, but it also generated major campaign finance and ethics reform. Democratic progress in the United States often emerges from periods of intense conflict and institutional failure. And for me, the question is, when the window opens up after this crisis, will we be prepared to kind of usher in a new and better system where different groups are able to share power, and we can move forward?

Michael Slaby: We have to confront and take care of people who are under threat, but we also have to be prepared for the moment when change is possible. We have to do both.

Spencer Overton: We have an opportunity, and we can’t lose hope. We can’t get pessimistic about each other. The founders were not perfect, and there were a lot of flaws. But what we have inherited in terms of a superpower of a nation—there’s so much good we can do in the world if we really focus right now in terms of getting these systems right so that we can share power. Don’t get discouraged. Go out and vote. Be engaged. All those things are really critical at this moment. The future of the nation, and I would say that the future of the world, hangs in the balance in terms of our engagement around democracy issues over the course of the next decade.

About Spencer Overton
Spencer Overton is a tenured professor and the founder and faculty director of the Multiracial Democracy Project at GW Law School. The Project is currently working on proportional representation and other alternatives to our current electoral system as a strategy to preserve representation for communities of color in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Spencer is the author of the book Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression and numerous law review articles on democracy, race, and technology. He has also worked on race and democracy issues as a senior policy official in the Obama Administration and as president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies—America’s Black think tank.

About Michael Slaby
Michael Slaby is a leader in how values, systems, strategy, and technology drive movements and organizations. At Murmuration, he leads marketing, fundraising, network engagement, and culture. Before joining Murmuration, he was a senior strategist and head of community at Harmony Labs where he worked on accelerating media reform and transformation. He 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. Michael helped lead the Obama for America campaign 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.

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Murmuration is a nonprofit working to transform America into a nation where everyone can thrive. We organize a network of community-focused partners and equip them with the insights, tools, and services they need to help communities build and activate power more effectively. murmuration.org

It’s a useful way to understand not just what people need or want, but what they feel they’re missing. Across more than 6,500 respondents, the answers at $10K were almost uniformly categorized as “necessities”—responses like “Pay off loans,” “get my teeth fixed,” or “A car and groceries.” What’s surprising is that even at $100K, the dominant responses remain practical rather than extravagant. People start to think a bit bigger, but the first instinct is still stability, security, and catching up on basic needs.

In the above chart, we display the single best label for each person’s open-ended response. Respondents who mentioned multiple uses for the money (for example, paying bills while also taking a vacation or helping family) were grouped into the mixed category.

A Stable Foundation

But people’s answers were often much richer (no pun intended) than a single category could capture. Many respondents described layered priorities in the same necessities response: paying bills or loans, repairing a car, or putting a little money into savings.

So while the previous chart shows the single best label for each response, the next analysis allows for multi-label classification, capturing all of the themes embedded in what people shared. When viewed this way, a striking pattern emerges: across gender, race, party, education, and income, between 85–89% of Americans said they would spend at least some portion of a hypothetical financial windfall on a core life necessity.

The largest share pointed to paying down debt: credit cards, student loans, mortgages (42% at $10K; 40% at $100K). Others focused on paying utility bills (13% at $10K; 8% at $100K). A third group mentioned maintenance and upkeep: fixing or replacing a broken vehicle (11% at $10K; 14% at $100K), or repairing something in the home (7% at $10K; 8% at $100K).

This is not aspirational—it’s stabilizing. Even the differences between Americans at different levels of financial security are narrower than might be expected. With $10,000, those who are not at all financially comfortable overwhelmingly mention necessities (94%, compared to 9% discretionary). But even among the most comfortable, 78% still prioritize necessities, compared to 16% who would use the money for something discretionary. The pattern is the same at $100,000: the share using the money for necessities goes from 90% among the least comfortable Americans to 77% among the most comfortable.

If necessity versus discretion is one axis, there’s another that matters just as much: time horizon. Some necessities are about right now: a bill that’s overdue, a car that won’t start, a roof that’s leaking. Others stretch years or decades into the future: retirement savings, college tuition, home ownership.

At $10,000, a majority of the least financially comfortable Americans (59%) focus on immediate needs, compared to just 16% of the most comfortable. In contrast, the prevalence of long-term thinking increases from just 5% among the least comfortable to 24% among the most comfortable. The same pattern appears at $100,000. The focus on immediate needs declines from 40% to 10% at the highest comfort level, while long-horizon thinking expands from 14% to 36%.

Building Toward the Future

The single largest shift in Americans’ thinking when imagining the jump from a $10,000 to a $100,000 windfall is the desire for owning a home. At $10,000, just 3% of Americans say they would use the money to help buy a home. At $100,000, that number rises to 16%—more than a fivefold increase. The increase in home-buying responses is greatest among those with the least financial comfort: from 6% at $10,000 to 23% at $100,000. Among those who are already comfortable, mentions of homeownership rise from 3% to 10%. The further someone is from homeownership today, the more powerfully they reach for it when it feels even remotely attainable.

But homeownership is only part of a broader pattern. When Americans imagine having some financial breathing room, they are most often describing investment: in stability, in opportunity, and in the future they want to build. Many mention putting money into savings vehicles like CDs, retirement accounts, or high-yield savings. Others take a more active approach: more than a hundred respondents explicitly say they would start a business.

That same instinct extends outward. Giving increases as the windfall grows: 6% of respondents mention donating or helping others at $10,000, rising to 10% at $100,000. The recipients are often close to home—churches, children, parents, neighbors. But many also point to broader needs: dozens explicitly mention helping people experiencing homelessness. Some responses are deeply personal. One person describes housing a homeless brother. Two others talk about helping house their own children.

An extra $100,000 doesn’t guarantee a home, a business, or long-term security. But for many, it at least makes those things imaginable and once that hypothetical door opens, people move from patching what’s broken to imagining what could be built.

Final Thoughts

We asked this question to understand what people might want with fewer constraints. What we heard back wasn’t extravagance. It was steadiness. Yes, people want vacations. Yes, they want to treat themselves. But that isn’t the center of the dream. The dream is closer to home: opportunity, growth, and a sense of safety and security.

And that raises a different set of questions, not about what people want, but about what makes that possible:

• Why does something as fundamental as homeownership still sit just out of reach for so many and what would it take to change that?

• How much untapped potential—entrepreneurial, civic, relational—is sitting dormant simply because people don’t have the margin to act on it?

• And what would our communities look like if more people had not just enough to get by, but enough to look ahead?

Because for most Americans, the dream isn’t more. It’s finally having enough to exist comfortably or move forward with more confidence.

Just stable enough to build from.

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Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

It shows up in arguments about redistricting and campaign finance. In debates over lobbying, insider trading, and political donations. In reaction to local decisions—zoning changes, school board fights, contracts awarded behind closed doors. It’s used to describe everything from clear ethical violations to outcomes people simply don’t agree with.

The word carries weight. But it’s also doing a lot of work. Because when people think everything can be deemed corruption, it raises a more basic question: what do people actually mean when they use the word?

What emerges is a clearer picture of how people are interpreting power and fairness—what feels compromised, what feels functional, and how they’re deciding whether the system is working at all.

Seeing Corruption

Corruption shows up in headlines and political debates, but it also takes shape through the specific examples people carry with them—the stories they hear, the patterns they notice, the moments that confirm a broader suspicion about how the government works.

When we asked what people had seen or heard recently that made them think, “this is what government corruption looks like,” the responses were varied but often concrete: abuse of political power (11%), foreign wars (10%), or simply “everything” feeling corrupt (8%), alongside concerns about economic issues like inflation (7%), welfare fraud (6%), the Epstein files (6%), partisan blame toward Democrats (5%), abuse of enforcement power (5%), and election or voting issues (2%) or media retaliation (2%). A significant share explicitly mention Trump (26%).

These perceptions are widespread. A majority of people say corruption is very common (67%), with more describing it as somewhat common (27%). But views differ on where it shows up most. Some point to national politics (35%), where stakes and visibility are highest, while others see it as distributed across all levels of government (48%), though few believe it concentrates at the local government (only 3%).

What stands out is how people define the harm. It’s not just about illegal behavior, but about a sense that the system is not working as intended—whether that’s abuse of power (32%), leaders putting their own interests ahead of the public (28%), misuse of funds (15%), or influence from donors (11%). And when asked who is most likely to be involved, responsibility doesn’t fall in just one place. People point to elected officials (28%), political parties (22%), wealthy actors (17%), and corporations (9%)—suggesting that corruption is understood as something systemic, not isolated.

For many, concern about corruption isn’t abstract. A majority (51%) say it strongly influences their views today (another 34% say it has some influence), reinforcing skepticism and shaping expectations about what is possible. This concern also feels widely shared: 51% believe others are just as concerned about government corruption as they are.

When Government Works

At the same time, people aren’t only noticing what’s broken. Alongside concerns about corruption in government are moments—albeit less frequent—where the government appears to function as it should.

When we asked what people had seen or experienced that made them think government can work, many struggled to point to anything concrete: 43% said they had no example, with another 6% unsure.

Among those who did, the examples were often practical or situational—hypothetical reforms or ideas about how government could work (10%), local community efforts (9%), or positive views of the current administration (8%). Others pointed to accountability and transparency (7%), effective government services and responses (6%), or past administrations (5%).

But these moments are less consistently visible. While some people say they notice examples of government working regularly (7% say daily and 12% say weekly), many describe them as occasional (29% monthly) or rare (52%). That imbalance matters because what people see most often tends to shape what they believe is typical.

When we asked the most important signal that the government is working well, the answers were distributed: responsiveness to the public (24%), accountability (20%), adherence to rules (18%), transparency (17%), and fairness (13%). These aren’t abstract ideals—they’re observable behaviors people use to evaluate whether institutions are functioning as they should.

Final Thoughts

What emerges is not just distrust, but imbalance. People are more consistently exposed to signals of what’s going wrong than to signals of what’s working—even if both are present.

When we asked what would make the biggest difference in increasing trust, the answers again focused on conditions: clearer communication, stronger accountability, and visible consequences for wrongdoing. In other words, trust isn’t just about outcomes—it’s about whether people can see how decisions are made and believe the system is operating fairly.

So we’re left with a set of questions that go beyond identifying problems:

• What would it take for examples of government working to be as visible as examples of failure?

• How do you build trust in a system people believe is vulnerable to misuse?

• And what signals—consistently delivered—would actually change how people see the government over time?

There’s also a deeper civic implication in these findings. Trust in government shapes whether people believe participation actually matters. When institutions are seen as corrupt or unaccountable, civic engagement can start to feel less meaningful and less capable of creating change. For some people, that distrust fuels activism or protest. But for others, it leads to something else: disengagement, cynicism, or the sense that individual action won’t make a difference. In that sense, visibility matters not only for trust, but for democracy itself. People need to believe institutions can respond, improve, and remain accountable for participation to feel worthwhile.

Proof over promises.

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Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Americans are noticing. A recent Pew survey found that nearly seven-in-ten Americans are worried about higher gas prices tied to the Iran conflict. But what’s particularly striking is how differently Americans across the political divide are responding to the sudden, sharp increases in gas prices nationwide.

Murmuration has been tracking public satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) with gas prices over time, and the data reveals two things happening simultaneously: rising dissatisfaction across the country, and stark partisan differences in how Americans make sense of the same, shared economic reality.

About More Than Gas

The chart above shows Americans’ level of dissatisfaction with gas prices starting in 2023. Overall, dissatisfaction now sits at 76% with just 6% of Americans saying they are satisfied with current prices. The start of the Iran conflict caused an immediate spike in dissatisfaction among all political groups, followed by continued, more gradual increases. Democrats report the highest dissatisfaction levels at 87%, followed by independents at 79%.

Republicans tell a more complicated story. In 2025, Republican dissatisfaction with gas prices fell dramatically when President Trump returned to office, despite relatively modest changes in actual prices. Since February, Republican dissatisfaction has returned to earlier levels, now reaching 60%.

The gap between Democrats, Independents, and Republicans is revealing.

The data suggest Americans are not simply reacting to prices themselves. They are also reacting through political identity, media narratives, and beliefs about who or what is responsible. For some Americans, rising prices appear to register first as a political interpretation before becoming an economic judgment.

And yet, material conditions still seem to matter. Even among Republicans, dissatisfaction still increased substantially alongside the latest price spike. The result is a public that is polarized in interpretation, but still responsive to real-world economic strain.

Final Thoughts

These findings matter because gas prices occupy a unique psychological space in American life. While most economic indicators are abstract—inflation is complicated, GDP is distant, interest rates can be invisible until they hit your mortgage—increases in gas prices are felt immediately.

People see them every morning on giant signs at the corner of their street. They become a running calculation in family budgets. They shape commute decisions, vacation plans, grocery costs, and perceptions of whether the country feels stable or unstable.

There are many ways to interpret this moment, but one question continues to sit at the center of it:

Voters may disagree about the causes. They may blame different leaders or policies. But the emotional reaction is remarkably similar: rising fuel costs make people feel anxious, constrained, and pessimistic about the future.

Filling Up, Feeling Down

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Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

But most of us aren’t forming our views of “the country” in the abstract. We’re forming them through accumulation and algorithms…through what we see, the content we engage with, and what we assume about everyone else.

So this week, we stepped away from the big narratives and asked something more grounded: what are people actually seeing in their day-to-day lives? What moments make them feel like people are capable of goodness? How often are they showing up for others themselves? And what do they believe everyone else is doing?

Because if our sense of each other is built in small moments, that’s where we need to look to understand what’s really holding and what isn’t.

Experiencing Goodness

Even in a moment where broader narratives emphasize division and distrust, most people are still moving through life filled with everyday interactions where they regularly encounter others in unscripted ways. Many of these settings aren’t designed to produce connection or generosity, but they often do.

When we asked what they had seen recently that made them think, “people are actually pretty good,” the answers were often ordinary and close to home: someone returning a lost wallet, a neighbor checking in during a storm, a stranger stepping in to help carry groceries. But, the most common response was simply kindness to strangers (29%) followed by a more general sense of everyday positivity (20%).

These moments aren’t rare, but they aren’t always noticed, either. Some people say they see them often (33% say a few times a week), others say almost daily (19%), while another third describe them as occasional (32% say a few times a month). And where they happen matters. Most of these encounters take place in familiar spaces—neighborhoods (19%), public spaces (29%), or online (16%)—places where people cross paths without expectation.

What’s striking is the weight these moments carry. Eight-in-ten Americans say moments of “goodness” influence how they see others (30% a lot, 50% some). Even brief interactions can shift how people see others, softening assumptions and interrupting more negative narratives.

One of the clearest divides isn’t just in what people do but in what they notice. People who feel connected to their communities are dramatically more likely to say they regularly see moments of goodness, while those with weaker community ties are far more likely to say they rarely see them or can’t think of any at all. The gap here is staggering, with differences of 30 points or more between groups. Financial comfort plays a role, but it’s smaller. What stands out is how strongly a sense of community shapes not just experience, but perception itself.

Being the Goodness

If the first part of the story is about what people see, the second is about what they do. Because alongside these observed moments of kindness is a quieter, more personal question: how often are people showing up for others in their own lives?

We started by asking what defines a “good neighbor,” and the answers pointed to something simple but consistent: showing up, being considerate, and offering help without being asked. Not grand gestures—just a baseline of care that makes shared life feel possible.

Next, we asked people to reflect on their own behavior; most described helping others with some regularity (34% said daily, and another 31% said a few times a week). The majority of support flows through close ties (66%)—family, friends, and people within immediate networks like neighbors and classmates—rather than strangers (21%). That doesn’t mean broader generosity isn’t happening, but it suggests that much of what holds communities together is rooted in repeated, familiar interactions rather than isolated acts. Yet, as we showed above, kindness toward strangers is the most common example people point to when they think of examples of people showing goodness. Helping strangers may be more visible, more interpretable, and more likely to shape how we see people beyond our own circles.

When we ask people to compare their own behavior to others, another gap emerges. Many believe they are helping more often than those around them (29%)—that while they are showing up, others are doing so less frequently. This perception gap matters. Because even if people are consistently supporting those around them, believing that others aren’t doing the same can erode trust and obscure just how much quiet, everyday effort is already happening.

Final Thoughts

If everyday life feels disconnected, people don’t necessarily point to a lack of kindness—they point to a lack of consistency, visibility, and shared expectation. When we asked what would make life feel more supportive or connected, the answers were practical: more kindness and courtesy (23%), more spaces to interact (15%), and more helping / giving (11%). The most surprising was the 8% of folks who unprompted said using less technology or social media.

So we’re left with lingering questions we’re continuing to explore:

• How can we build community so that our perceptions of kindness grow?

• What could close the perception gap between what people do and what they believe others are doing?

• Is there something about small acts of kindness toward strangers that are uniquely contagious?

The answers may not be dramatic. They may look a lot like the moments people are already describing—just more visible, more frequent, and more evenly shared.

Every neighbor was once a stranger.

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Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Murmuration’s Chief Marketing and Operating Officer, Michael Slaby, sat down with William J. Barber II, President & Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and Founding Director of the Yale Center for Public Theology and Public Policy for The Exchange, our interview series featuring influential thought leaders, organizers, advocates, and others who are shaping the future of civic life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Michael Slaby: Welcome and thank you for taking some time to speak with us today. To start us off, could you introduce yourself and explain how Repairers of the Breach came to be?

Bishop William J. Barber, II: We founded Repairs of the Breach, a national organization that trains moral leaders and builds social justice movements, in 2015 after eight years of mobilizing in North Carolina and building a model of state-based mobilizing. We said there needed to be a form of movement that learned from the First and Second Reconstructions in this country. A Third Reconstruction needed to be deeply state-based; rooted in our deepest moral, constitutional, and religious values; not left or right, not conservative or liberal, not Republican or Democratic, but focused on the issues. Out of that need, Moral Monday happened, one of the most successful historic gatherings, where, for over two years, people went into the state house every Monday and challenged extremism. We founded Repairers of the Breach to be a teaching organization to train people in “moral fusion organizing”, what we call moral analysis, moral articulation, moral agenda building, and moral action, and to do it from the state up. We developed 14 guidelines for moral fusion organizing and started training across the country.

What we were calling for was a national moral revival, saying something is off that we can’t get people to move past partisanship to focus on things like healthcare, for example. Repairers of the Breach says, you can’t address these interlocking injustices—systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of healthcare, the war economy, and the false moral narrative of religious nationalism—without an intersectional moral fusion movement. And it must be from the bottom up–moral leaders, impacted people, and activists. We are an organization that’s not trying to build loyalty to Repairers of the Breach. We’re trying to build loyalty to our deepest moral and religious values. That’s what Repairs of the Breach is about, building that moral commitment.

Michael Slaby: The term “repairs of the breach” comes from Isaiah 58:12 in the Bible, a story about people who restore a community after destruction. The idea that our public civic life is founded on moral commitments to each other is something that often sounds religious or spiritual and is often led by people of faith, but Repairers of the Breach is a moral movement, not a religious one. What is it about faith that continues to act as a catalyst for justice and progress in civic life, especially given the declining participation in traditional religious institutions?

Bishop William J. Barber, II: The greater the pain, the greater the people recognize there’s a sickness. For instance, if you think that Trump is the issue—one person—that is a weak analysis. Part of what’s happening is that authoritarians and neo-fascist movements have been allowed to rise because the door has been left open for them to come in. We didn’t close the door by fixing the issues in America, like poverty, for instance. So what happens is they go to places and say to people, “We love you,” but really it’s not love; it’s a form of spiritual religious malpractice when they try to use religion as a tool of hurt and harm, and not for addressing the issues people are facing.

In my class at Yale, I bring in a Bible that has every passage about how to treat strangers and the vulnerable. I say to the students, do not address public theology where morality becomes a tack on. What is it that you stand for, no matter who’s in office? What is it that you stand for, no matter what party is leading? When Jesus did his first sermon, he said, “I’ve come to bring good news to the poor, those who’ve been made poor by economic policy. Every nation will be judged by, “When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me?” There has to be a movement that uses its voice to say to the nation, “This is sin,” but also gives a vision for the future. What you have to do is give people a vision. Prophetic imagination must precede prophetic moral implementation.

Michael Slaby: I think that to get past the grievance and the shared pain and diagnosis, and into the world of solution, we need to talk about the necessity for using moral clarity as a way to co-organize with “a world full of allies” who might not always share the same priorities. Can you talk a little about your “moral fusion” organizing model and why you believe it’s essential to build power at the local and state levels rather than at the national level to achieve lasting change?

Bishop William J. Barber, II: What we often hear is “elect me because of what I’m against.” And for us, the question is, “What are you for?” That doesn’t mean you ignore the grievance. You simply don’t allow the grievance to have the last word. Because if you do that, then you end up giving power to those who are creating the pain, because you’re refusing to organize those people who are being hurt. The people who are being hurt and the impacted, connected with moral advocates, are more than those who are doing the hurt. For instance, there’s not a state in this country where poor and low-wage people don’t represent between 36%-42% of the electorate. And there’s not a state in this country where if you mobilize 20% of those poor and low-wage people, whose number one reason for not voting is nobody talks to us, you won’t see new political possibilities.

In conversations across the country, I have realized authoritarianism is deeply afraid of three things. It is afraid of truth-telling movements because telling the truth is the most powerful first thing you can do in a season of lies. The second thing authoritarians fear is people and movements that believe there’s something greater than the authoritarian. They freak out about that! The last thing they fear is movements that start from the bottom. So when a movement decides we’re gonna go after the root, and we’re gonna organize the pain, we recognize that the only way is to organize from the bottom. Dr. King said in his 1965 “Our God Is Marching On!” speech at the Alabama State Capitol, following the Selma-to-Montgomery march, that the greatest fear of the greedy oligarchy in this nation is for the masses of Negroes and the masses of poor whites and others to come together and form a voting bloc that can fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the nation. So if we are all black in the dark, we need to be smart enough to unite for the light. And that’s what we have to do right now, build a movement that this country cannot do without.

Michael Slaby: In February, Repairers of the Breach organized a “Moral March from Wilson to Raleigh” and a “Mass People’s Assembly” to draw attention to opposition to the new congressional map passed by the North Carolina General Assembly, which Repairers of the Breach say unfairly redrew the 1st Congressional District, taking away the voting power of Black, Latino, and poor and low-wage people. How does this effort fit into the broader history of justice marches in the South, and why is it essential to bring people together to create highly visible moments of collective power today?

Bishop William J. Barber, II: President Trump called North Carolina and told the MAGA state legislature, I want the First Congressional District. It’s a district created by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, predominantly minority Black. So we went and had meetings. At the first meeting, we had about 500 people show up, and they didn’t say, let’s go after Trump or let’s go after Johnson. They said let’s connect. Let’s show that when you attack voting rights, you’re also attacking healthcare. That people don’t just want this district for benign reasons. They want the district because they want the power to continue to inflict pain.

So, Repairers of the Breach organized a Wilson to Raleigh march this past February. The people said, let’s do it right now, in the middle of winter. We walked 51 miles in four days. When we started that morning, there were 278 people. By the time we got to Raleigh, it was thousands. And they didn’t just come for the rally, or to voice their opposition to Trump—I don’t think anybody mentioned his name at the rally. What we were talking about is what we love, what we embrace.

Michael Slaby: That leads me into my next question. What is giving you hope for the future right now?

Bishop William J. Barber, II: This past Sunday, I was in Little Rock, Arkansas, for a justice revival event, and the place was packed. It’s Black, it’s White, it’s Brown. And it’s not just people who came to hear me speak. It was people saying, “Let’s organize! How can we build an agenda?” When I talk to young folk or when I’m teaching my classes, I always share Jürgen Moltmann’s “Theology of Hope,” and I’ll paraphrase him here. He says that whenever people of deep moral conviction see something that is wrong and decide that they can no longer accept it and they put their hands to the work of changing it, that’s where hope begins. Love, truth, and justice have a power that has won before, and that is greater than extremism and authoritarianism. But you have to be willing to do the work to cause that movement to rise.

Michael Slaby: That invitation to love and be in community and not to focus on the grievance feels so refreshing right now. People keep talking about how the world feels like it’s on fire, and that feels like water.

Bishop William J. Barber, II: You know, since we did the “Love Forward Mass People’s Assembly Moral March Mobilization,” we’ve been getting calls from all over from people wanting us to come to help them. And when that happens, Repairers of the Breach doesn’t say, “Barber is the one; let him come in and lead.” Dr. King didn’t believe in that kind of leadership. What we need is to give people the tools to build from the state up. Transformation happened from Raleigh, Greensboro, Montgomery, Jackson, and up. It doesn’t happen from D.C., right?

Every week, I go back and listen to the agenda of the 1963 March on Washington because popular history acted as though all that happened there was Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But there was an agenda–an agenda that’s yet to be realized. That’s why I say we haven’t finished the second Reconstruction. Each Reconstruction was killed or murdered or maligned, but it’s still there. The possibilities are there.

I’d like to leave you with one last thing. During COVID, when so many had lost so much, one family in our movement lost 12 members. I said, “Lord, why these people? I’m not more special than them. Why is it that they’re dying?” And one night it came to me that that’s always the wrong question. Why are you still here? Why are you still alive? Nobody can answer that question. The question that you must answer is, what are you still here for? And it dawned on me that if COVID didn’t teach us anything else, it showed those of us who are yet living that the only way we honor those we lost is to remember that breath is too precious to waste on lies, injustice, hate, meanness, and inequality. And if I have breath–whether it’s six seconds, six minutes, six hours, six days, six weeks, or 60 years–I should commit myself to using my breath to breathe the life of love and justice and mercy into the world. Don’t worry about why you’re here. You’ll never be able to answer that question. But as long as you are here, there’s work to do. And that’s what you set yourself to do with every breath you take.

About William J. Barber II
Bishop William J. Barber II is a Professor in the Practice of Public Theology and Public Policy and Founding Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He serves as President and Senior Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and Bishop with The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries.

About Michael Slaby
Michael Slaby is a leader in how values, systems, strategy, and technology drive movements and organizations. At Murmuration, he leads marketing, fundraising, network engagement, and culture. Before joining Murmuration, he was a senior strategist and head of community at Harmony Labs where he worked on accelerating media reform and transformation. He 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. Michael helped lead the Obama for America campaign 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.

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Murmuration is a nonprofit working to transform America into a nation where everyone can thrive. We organize a network of community-focused partners and equip them with the insights, tools, and services they need to help communities build and activate power more effectively. murmuration.org

This month, Murmuration partnered with Voto Latino to field a national survey of 6,559 Americans focused on the experience of living inside this economy. We asked how people are managing, what they’re cutting back on, and how they’re thinking about their financial futures.

We started with a simple question: what is the biggest problem in your life right now?

For almost half (48%) of Americans, the answer is money. But that burden isn’t evenly distributed. It’s even higher among young adults (55%), those in their prime working years (53%), women (53%), and Hispanic or Latino respondents (52%).

The Cost of Daily Life

To understand how that pressure shows up in people’s lives, it helps to start with the basics.

When we asked people to describe their current level of financial comfort, a majority—56%—said they are not comfortable. That includes people who are struggling to cover basic expenses, as well as those who can technically pay their bills but feel like money is always tight. Only 11% describe themselves as very comfortable, with no major financial concerns. In other words, most Americans are living right on the edge.

For many, an unexpected expense of even $500 would pose a serious challenge. More than half of Americans (52%) have no immediate way to pay. Some would take on credit card debt (16%), borrow from family or friends (10%), or need to sell possessions to raise funds (8%). Fully 18% of Americans say their household would not be able to cover a $500 emergency at all.

Why is money so tight? Over the past year, 50% of Americans point to the cost of food and groceries as one of the top three expenses putting strain on their household budget. Utilities follow at 40%, then rent or mortgage at 37%, and gas or transportation at 32%. These aren’t frivolous, discretionary expenses. They are the necessities and fixed costs of everyday life.

Overall, 62% of Americans say it has become harder to afford everyday expenses compared to just a few years ago (32% much harder, 30% somewhat harder). And for many, the distress caused by rising costs isn’t occasional—it’s constant. Roughly 7 in 10 Americans experience financial worry on a regular basis.

From Adjustment to Triage

When expenses go up, people adjust. They make tradeoffs. What emerges from these choices is not just a set of isolated behaviors, but a hierarchy of sacrifice.

The response to rising gas prices, in particular, offers a window into how people’s lives have been forced to change. Almost half of Americans (48%) say they’ve cut back on driving or travel because of gas prices. But the impact doesn’t stop at fewer trips: 34% say they are spending less on other essentials to make up for what they are paying for gas, and 15% have changed their work or commute habits entirely.

More broadly, people are making significant, life-altering decisions for financial reasons alone. Things that should be high priorities, that characterize our basic quality of life and ability to live stress- and worry-free, are falling by the wayside. Things like cutting time with friends and family, delaying paying bills, postponing medical care, or even skipping meals and reducing food spending.

The data suggests that people start by cutting what feels optional: dinners out, gatherings, small moments of leisure. But as pressure builds, those tradeoffs move inward. Food budgets shrink. Medical care gets delayed. Bills are pushed. What begins as adjustment becomes constraint, and then something closer to triage. These are not one-time decisions. They are ongoing calculations about what can be postponed, reduced, or given up entirely.

Same Problem, Different Blame

Americans hold multiple, overlapping theories for why the cost of living has become more expensive over the past five to ten years. They assign responsibility broadly across both the private sector and government. But Democrats and Republicans tell very different narratives about what (and who) is to blame:

While Democrats see corporate greed and trade policy as having the biggest impact, Republicans are more likely to blame the COVID-19 pandemic, energy costs, and the effects of immigration for the rising cost of living.

One thing that people do broadly agree on is that the president, Congress, and other elected officials can impact families’ ability to afford everyday expenses. Nearly two-thirds (62%) say that political leaders have a lot of influence on the economy; another 26% say they have at least some influence. Only 9% believe that elected officials have little to no power over basic affordability.

Yet there is a noticeable lack of optimism about where things are headed. Only 36% of Americans believe their financial situation will improve over the next few years. More than one in five (21%) expect things to get worse, and 38% say they’re simply unsure. For many, the future feels less like a trajectory and more like a question mark.

That same sense of strain extends to the bigger milestones that have long defined the American dream. When we asked whether buying a home, raising a family, and retiring comfortably felt realistic, 31% said these goals are mostly out of reach. Another 34% said they’re possible, but difficult to achieve. Just 25% said these goals feel fully within reach.

Relief, Not Reinvention

There’s actually a surprising amount of agreement on steps that Americans believe would make things better. There is strong support for policies that directly reduce or stabilize the core costs of living—particularly housing and utilities:

Housing, in particular, stands out as the area of strongest agreement—not just overall, but across political lines. Property tax relief is rated as “very helpful” by 62% of Trump voters and 48% of Harris voters. Limits on rent increases are seen as helpful by 59% of Trump voters and 90% of Harris voters. First-time homebuyer support is viewed as helpful by 72% of Trump voters and 85% of Harris voters. In a landscape where consensus is often hard to find, housing affordability emerges as one of the clearest areas of overlap.

There is also meaningful support for policies that address income and debt more directly. About 68% say increasing the minimum wage would be helpful, and 64% say the same about student debt relief. These solutions operate on the other side of the equation—either increasing what people earn or reducing what they owe—but they point to the same underlying imbalance.

Final Thoughts

The story this data tells is not just about money. It’s about the conditions under which people are living their lives and how those conditions are forcing people to change in response to accumulating economic pressure.

For decades, there has been an implicit promise at the center of American life: that if you work hard, you can get ahead. But for many, that promise no longer feels true. Today, 69% of Americans say that even “people who work hard struggle to get ahead financially”.

At the same time, people are not confused about what would actually make a difference. When asked what would help most, 28% point to lowering the cost of everyday essentials like food, gas, and utilities, while 18% say wages that keep up with the cost of living would matter most, followed by housing costs and taxes (11%), healthcare (9%), and debt (9%). They are a set of clear, immediate pressures that shape daily decision-making.

And those decisions are increasingly defined by tradeoffs. When nearly half the country is cutting back on time with family and friends, even connection itself starts to become a luxury. The slow erosion of gathering, celebration, and everyday togetherness doesn’t show up in economic indicators, but it reshapes how people experience their lives, their communities, and their sense of belonging.

These are some of the questions that follow:

• How should institutions respond to a population where financial insecurity is the norm rather than the exception?

• What happens to a society when people can no longer afford to show up for each other, not just economically, but socially and emotionally?

• How does a life organized around constant tradeoffs change what people expect from the future?

What this data makes clear is that the financial strain Americans are living with is a structural reality, built up over years and felt in grocery aisles, doctor’s offices, and kitchen tables across every region of the country.

Hard choices, not inevitable ones.

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Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

Voto Latino is a civic advocacy organization dedicated to educating and empowering the next generation of Latino voters while working to build a more inclusive and representative democracy. votolatino.org

This is not a story about apathy. It is a story about drift—the slow, uneven way that political awareness fades when people are stretched thin, when institutions feel distant, and when the news cycle feels both relentless and disconnected from daily life. Understanding that drift matters right now, because local elections are where it shows up first.

Declining Awareness, Rising Doubt

Since May 2025, Civic Pulse has been tracking local political awareness, personal impact on local issues, and local government effectiveness across nearly 150,000 Americans. The results are worth sitting with.

Political awareness has declined steadily. A year ago, the net share of Americans who felt politically aware and informed was around 70%. Recently, it has been closer to 60%. That is not a collapse, but it is a meaningful erosion, and it has moved in one direction. Over time, people are expressing lower confidence in how informed they feel—reflecting changing engagement patterns, evolving information environments, and the possibility that national narratives are crowding out attention to local issues.

Perceptions of local government effectiveness have fallen even more sharply and crossed into net negative territory. A year ago, Americans tended to view their local governments positively by a 10-point margin. That confidence fell over the summer, and since September 2025, a greater share of Americans consistently say their local government is not effective than say it is effective.

When a national measure of local effectiveness declines this suddenly, it reflects something broad and widely felt: a general sense that institutions aren’t working, which trickles down from federal politics and colors how people see everything, including the city council and the school board. The risk in that conflation is real. Turning out for a primary—even a quiet, low-turnout one—can shape who leads a school district, a county commission, or a city hall for years.

And yet, over the same time period, Americans’ perceptions of their own capacity for personal impact have risen. On net, 25 to 30% more Americans feel they can make a personal difference in their communities. People are volunteering. They are donating. They are showing up to events, signing petitions, organizing neighbors, contacting officials. The community infrastructure—the personal, relational kind—has not dissipated even as the institutional confidence around it has fallen.

Final Thoughts

Political interest and local government confidence do not usually recover on their own. They recover when something pulls people back in—a candidate who feels like one of them, a ballot measure that hits close to home, a neighbor who says “this matters, help.”

Our upcoming nationwide elections will be decided, in many cases, by small margins in places national media will not cover. The people most likely to make a difference in those races are the same ones whose political awareness is slipping—not because they stopped caring, but because the information environment has made it harder to know what to pay attention to, and the issues that should feel local have started to feel abstract.

The data don’t answer what comes next. But they do raise some questions:

• What would it take for the people who still believe in their own personal impact to see local elections as the most direct expression of that belief?

• How do communities keep the personal and relational infrastructure alive when government confidence continues to erode?

• And what do we lose—in representation, in accountability, in the basic mechanics of democracy—if many voters are uninformed or unaware of the political forces shaping elections?

The trends on that chart are not inevitable. But they do not reverse themselves.

What slips still shapes us.

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Murmuration is a non-profit that organizes a network of partners and equips them with the insights, tools, and services needed to help communities build and activate the power to transform America into a nation where everyone thrives. murmuration.org

This conversation came into focus recently at a gathering in Los Angeles, where we celebrated Murmuration’s Founder and CEO Emma Bloomberg being named one of USA Today’s Women of the Year. That room felt like a mirror for something we see in the data over and over: leadership in America is often local and personal: people stepping up to provide care, organize their communities, or lend a hand. And the women doing it frequently carry a heavier burden than anyone acknowledges.

We took a closer look by fielding a national survey of 7,287 adults, specifically focused on women’s leadership in communities across the country.

Here’s what we found.

Who Holds it Together

When we asked Americans who shows up, keeps things running, and looks out for people in their community, most saw men and women sharing these responsibilities. But one in five said mostly women, compared to only about one in ten who said mostly men.

Here’s where it gets more interesting. Women and men don’t see this the same way. Among women, 25% said mostly women, and only 7% said mostly men. Among men, 14% said mostly women, and 15% said mostly men. Among women under 35, the perception is even stronger: three in ten say it is mostly women doing this work.

Nearly as many Americans see leaders in their community as informal – people in their own neighborhoods (36%) – as they see as formal leaders like elected officials or administrators (39%). And when we asked an open-ended question—who specifically holds your community together?—the answers deepened this. People named their informal anchors: the individuals and groups that they saw taking action in their everyday lives: “The mothers in the community are what seems to be holding everything together.” “Women because they are more nurturing.“ “Women, specifically black women.“

Americans are not limiting their understanding of leadership to titles. They recognize the everyday forms of authority that come from trust, proximity, and reliability.

The Cost of Showing Up

Most agree that taking on responsibilities in their communities is a source of personal fulfillment. Among those who are actively helping others or working on solving problems, 70% find the work more fulfilling than draining (20%). In fact, 39% of women and 36% of men say they want to be even more involved in their community than they currently are.

But here the similarities end. A majority (64%) of Americans agree that “when women step into leadership, they face more criticism or pushback than men.“ The gender breakdown is stark: 70% of women agree (33% strongly) vs. 58% of men (19% strongly). Among women 18-34, fully 45% strongly agree—nearly double the rate of women 65+ (23%). Even across party lines, there’s majority agreement: 78% of Democrats, 63% of Independents, and 53% of Republicans all agree that women face more scrutiny in leadership. These are majorities across the board.

At the same time, burnout is widespread—and it isn’t evenly distributed. Over the past year, 35% of women said they felt extremely or very burnt out, compared to 27% of men. That 8-point gap compounds at younger ages: among women 18–34, 44% fall in the high-burnout zone. Almost one in four young women say they have felt extremely burned out.

The data offers suggestions for why. Americans who are more involved in their communities are also more likely to be busier with family responsibilities at home. The work compounds. 42% of women are currently caring for children under 18, aging parents, or both—compared to 39% of men. Those caring for both generations are among the most civically active people in the country. They are more likely to volunteer, attend community events, sign petitions, and show up to town halls than those without caregiving responsibilities. These are people simultaneously sustaining households, sustaining communities, and sustaining everyone else.

“The everyday parents that take responsibility for their children, family and neighbors”– 57, Female, Republican, Clark, NV

The weight shows up again when you ask why women aren’t doing more. Feeling spread too thin is the top reason—peaking at 32% among women 35–49, and at 25% among women 18–34. But underneath that, something else surfaces: 22% of young women say they aren’t more involved because they simply don’t know where to start, which is 7 points higher than the national rate.

Women are seen as central to keeping communities running—and many are, in both formal and informal ways—while also managing caregiving demands, financial pressure, and some of the highest burnout rates in the country.

Traits of Community Leaders

We asked what people truly want and expect from leaders in their community. What characteristics matter most to them? The top answer, selected by more than half of Americans, was honesty and trustworthiness. The second was listening and understanding.

When broken down by gender, women prioritize listening and understanding at 42%, compared to 36% for men. Women select “showing care and compassion“ at 27%, men at 21%. Men are more likely to prioritize expertise and competence (21% vs. women’s 15%). But at the very top, the two groups converge: 53% of women and 50% of men chose honest and trustworthy.

What Americans say they want from community leadership—across gender, across party, across age—is, at its core, a feeling of confidence in those around them to treat them with honesty and respect, to hear their voices and concerns, and to keep their commitments to one another. It’s the kind of leadership that looks a lot like what women are already doing in neighborhoods and school boards and community organizations every day.

Final Thoughts

Women’s leadership is not a future aspiration. It is a present force shaping communities from the ground up, especially at a moment when the country feels fragile, frustrated, and uncertain.

And there is a gap between that reality and how we respond to it. Women are doing more of the work, facing more scrutiny when they step up, and burning out at higher rates—and yet they remain the most hopeful and the most hungry to do more. That combination is somewhere between remarkable and concerning.

So we are left with a set of hard but constructive questions.

• What does it take to change the scrutiny people face when they lead?

• How do we close the gap between women who want to be more involved and the on-ramps that would actually get them there?

• What does it say that the qualities Americans most want in a leader are ones women are already demonstrating in communities every day?

The question now is not whether women are leading. It is whether we are fully seeing, and fully supporting, the leadership that is already here.

Turns out it’s women. And sure, maybe coffee too.

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Murmuration is a non-profit that strengthens community-driven change at the local level. By equipping local organizations with powerful data, technology, and insights, Murmuration helps them amplify community voices, build collective power, and drive solutions that reflect the lived realities of the people they serve. murmuration.org

Introducing…

25 young kids, with sticky fingers, strong opinions, and absolutely no interest in pretending things are fine if they are not.

The results were surprisingly coherent. Also, kinda funny. And, at times, a little devastating in the way only a five-year-old can be when they look you dead in the eye and say something like, “[If I were in charge] I would say you can’t have any candy. And no TV.”

Let’s begin.

The Diagnosis

Kids do not have a theory of polarization. They do not know what a filibuster is. Most have never heard the phrase “civic decline.” But they are extremely clear on one thing: things start to go wrong when people are not nice.

To them, “not nice” behavior is concrete. It is something you can see. “A mean face,” one four-year-old explained, squinting and tightening his fists to demonstrate. Others described it as yelling, complaining, touching things that are not yours, or calling someone stupid. Some talked about it more directly: “When another friend bit me.” “[When] they don’t treat people how they want to be treated.” “[When] they’re grumpy like Grumpy Monkey.” In their world, these moments disrupt the group quickly. When they happen, kids expect the grownups in the room to step in. One child proposed a clear enforcement mechanism: “The teacher should take them home and their mommy can put them on their bed for time out.”

But the bigger problem is often exclusion. A bad day at school is rarely about academics—it is about belonging. Even small moments carry weight: someone touching your desk without permission, someone throwing away your pencil, someone insisting you are a ninja if you are not.

Fairness is another fault line kids notice quickly. When asked what they would do if they had ten cookies and another child had none, most favored balance. “I would give them some of my cookies” or “Give them five so we would have an even number.” Others proposed partial sharing: “I’d give one so I would have nine.” “If I have extra cookies, they can have my extra cookies.” Only two children suggested keeping everything: “I would just eat them myself” (though we were told he was very hungry at the time) and “I would keep them all in my hand.” But the dominant instinct was visible fairness. Or, in one particularly elegant solution: “Make more cookies. And then he can have 10 cookies too.” That same instinct showed up again later—when asked what they would do if they were in charge of the country for a day, one child simply said, “Give them my cookies.”

Kids also notice when effort does not lead to success. One child described the feeling simply: “Building a high building but it keeps falling down.” Frustration, in their view, often builds from there. When asked why someone might feel grumpy or sad, many traced it back to something that happened earlier: “Because something bad happened to them.” and again, “Because their friends are not nice.” In their framework, problems are connected. Hurt people often become the ones acting unkind.

Finally, they notice when the rules themselves feel unstable. One child described bringing a favorite toy to school and being allowed to have it briefly—but not later. “I could only have him for snack time.” The frustration was not just the rule itself. It was the rule changing. For kids, predictability matters. When expectations shift without explanation, trust starts to erode.

Taken together, their diagnosis is surprisingly clear. Things deteriorate when people are unkind, when someone is excluded, when fairness feels off, when effort does not lead to progress, and when the people in charge seem inconsistent or absent.

The Repair Agenda

Most kids are not drafting ten-point policy plans. They are not talking about “systems change.” Their solutions are much more practical. Much more immediate. If you ask them how to make things better, the answers cluster around a few simple conditions.

Start with playing. A lot of kids seemed to believe the country’s problems might ease up considerably if everyone just had somewhere to climb and run around. “I would tell them to all go to Hawaii and go on a waterslide,” one child told us. Even when it came to school, the same logic applied: learning works best when it still feels like play—“when we get to do the lab stations where you get to play.” Finally, one respondent offered what may be the simplest theory of social cohesion we’ve heard all year: “Playing with someone nice.” In their world, togetherness is preventative care.

Then there is food. Snacks are not a side note. They are infrastructure. “Adults should know snack time is at 3:00 and they can pick any snack they want,” one child said, with the calm authority of someone who has thought this through. Another explained, very emphatically, “I like Chick-fil-A.” And when asked what to do if someone didn’t have food, the answer was immediate. “Give away some.” In their world, hunger is solvable, sharing is obvious, and fairness is something you can see.

Rest follows naturally. They may resist naps themselves, but they understand the pattern. When someone is unkind, something else is usually going on. “They need to rest a little bit more,” one respondent said. Another offered the simplest reset available. “Take a break.” or spoken from true personal experience they might just need “Water and bandaid.”

And finally, repair. For kindergartners, apologies are not ceremonial. They are functional. It starts with stopping the behavior. “I’ll say, ‘Stop! I don’t like that. Don’t do it ANY day!’” one child explained. Then comes care. “A hug.” “A smooch.” Or, as one child put it, “a hug, or a kiss and respect.” Another suggested a slightly more advanced approach:

“Say something nice to them, give them a compliment or ask them what made them upset.” - 7 year old girl, Virginia

The goal is not punishment. The goal is to help someone feel better so everyone can return to playing together.

Final Thoughts

It is hard not to hear, beneath the humor, a serious civic vision.

A country with more kindness, places to gather, and fewer barriers to belonging. A country that takes fairness seriously in ways people can see and feel. A country that intervenes early, apologizes often, and understands that sometimes conflict is what happens when people are overwhelmed.

Rather than our tradition of leaving you with more questions, we’re passing along a few things these experts thought all adults should know:

• “Share with everybody.” - 4 year old boy, New York

• “Learn to be kind.” - 4 year old boy, Texas

• “Don’t be naughty.” - 4 year old boy, California

• “People need to be treated good… make everyone feel included.” - 6 year old girl, Washington

And finally, one child offered a gentle reminder:

“Grown ups do not know everything. Kids are sometimes smarter than grown ups.” - 4 year old boy, Vermont

Honestly, that feels about right.

It may be April Fools…But the quotes are real.

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Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer, Sarah Stamper, sat down with political scientist Hahrie Han for The Exchange, our interview series featuring influential thought leaders, organizers, advocates, and others who are shaping the future of civic life.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Stamper: Thank you so much for making the time to talk with us about everything that’s been going on in your research, your lab, and winning the MacArthur Fellowship.

I want to start by talking about your newest book, “Undivided,” which centers on Crossroads, a large evangelical church in Cincinnati, as a primary case study. In the book, you followed a predominantly white evangelical megachurch in Cincinnati as it launched a program called Undivided to confront structural racism within its congregation and the broader community.

The book centers on the journeys of several church members as they confront difficult conversations about race and shift their perspectives over time. In Crossroads’ transformation, how much of the momentum came from explicitly theological commitments, and how much from relational organizing strategies that might translate beyond a faith-based setting?

Hahrie Han: I think a lot of people assume the program had the effects it did because the participants all believed in God, which is a faith commitment that animates people to action in a unique way. But, I think what actually mattered was that it was a group of people who had a visceral experience of the value of collective life. They had been part of this really vibrant church community ahead of confronting the issues they grappled with in the program. These are people who knew in their bones already that what we can do when we act together with others is more powerful than what we can do when we act alone. I always tell my students, once you’ve learned that lesson, once you have an experience like that in your life, you can never un-have it.

Sarah Stamper: Murmuration’s data shows that as third spaces vanish, belonging, community, and civic participation decline. In that context, and the context of faith communities, how should we think about the scalability and durability of relational organizing?

Hahrie Han: I 100% agree with the findings that you’re describing. With the loss of intermediary organizations, we’ve lost many of the natural social networks that knit our social fabric together. That was one of the things that the church, Crossroads, in my book offered: a culture of relational interaction.

They had lots of different sayings in the church, but one of the more common sayings was “we do life together.” It means that if you’re a part of this church, it’s not just that you show up for an hour on Sunday. No. Instead, it’s “we do life together,” which means that we want you to come and use our lobby as a co-working space, and there’s always free coffee, and there’s always babysitting that’s available so that parents can come and participate in events. They really want to provide a wraparound community to the people who are part of their church.

It’s a great question about the scalability of those kinds of social networks. And in fact, that was part of what made me really interested in studying these megachurches. If you’re getting 50,000 people together in person every Sunday, there’s something powerful going on. I wanted to understand how they draw all these people together. It’s true that it’s hard to scale the kind of dense relational networks that we talk about in relational organizing, but we have a ton of evidence that you can. It happens across megachurches every week, and there’s no inherent reason that I’ve seen that says that can only happen in a church environment.

96% of the budget of these megachurches comes from individual donations and most megachurches are growing. People are committing real resources to these places, which tells me that people are hungry for opportunities to be part of relational communities. When they find it, then those communities have a natural scalability to them.

Now, one thing that’s really different about churches relative to a lot of relational organizing that happens in more issue-based civic and political spaces is that churches have a natural organizational unit to them. If I’m part of a church, then I might tithe, I might sign up as a member, or as a congregant. There are different ways in which there’s an organization, and that organization has a governing board, it has a leader, all the things that go into self-governing associations. It has a structure to it. Often it has a physical space, but not always.

In contrast, a lot of times, the kind of relational organizing that we’re doing, going door to door around issues, is trying to pick people off one by one from their natural social environments. That’s what is really hard to scale. Yet, we have decades and decades of data that tell us there are other ways we can do it. When you organize through structures, school boards, churches, gun clubs, hobby organizations, YMCAs, libraries, where there’s a natural base, then it’s a lot faster to scale.

Sarah Stamper: In many civic contexts, success is defined by what’s easiest to count—clicks, contacts, turnout, short-term engagement metrics. What are the dangers of measuring only what’s easy rather than what actually builds power? Are there indicators you think better capture whether civic capacity is genuinely growing or eroding over time?

Hahrie Han: I hope that one lesson people take away from my work is this idea that it’s not just that we get people involved that matters, it’s how we get them involved that really matters.

I’ve spent my career studying the micro foundations of collective action. The key finding that comes out across all these different kinds of studies that I’ve done–from political campaigns to community organizing to issue-based work to church-based work to whatever–is that how you engage people affects what we’re able to accomplish together. I totally understand why we count clicks and likes and actions and things like that because those are observable behaviors that give us a sense of what’s happening. But if that’s the only thing we count, then we’re only getting a partial sense of the picture for the reasons that we already talked about. So what does it mean to measure not just what people do, but also whether they’re building the kind of capacity that we need?

I always think about it at the micro, meso, and macro levels. At the micro level, we want to understand whether or not people are not only taking action, but also developing those kinds of strategic, agentic capacities. We have to rely on some survey data to be able to capture some of the more effective orientations that we know underlie that kind of capacity. But then we also want to look at the meso level, which is about building collective vehicles or structures through which people can take action. You could have individuals who have all the affective and behavioral orientations that we need to take civic action. But if they’re doing it alone, it’s ultimately not going to build the kind of collective capacity that we need. We have to measure organizations at the meso level and then finally institutional change at the macro level.

Sarah Stamper: If our metrics and incentives shape behavior, they also shape the ecosystem itself. If you were designing civic infrastructure for the next 20 years and not the next election cycle, what would you prioritize?

Hahrie Han: There’s a famous political scientist who wrote in the mid-20th century, Albert Hirschman, who has this terrific book called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. The idea behind it is that market-based organizations operate on the logic of exit. So if I don’t like your “product,” then I leave. If I don’t like Cheerios, I go buy Chex. If I don’t like Heinz Ketchup, I go by Hunts. I can go to the store and can pick different products based on what I like.

But the logic of civic and political organizations, he argues, should operate on this logic of voice, which means that if I don’t like the product—which could be a candidate, a policy, or a position—then instead of exiting, instead of just leaving like we might with a different type of “product,” I should fight and try to exercise voice within the organization to get the organization to change. That distinction between exit and voice as the dominating logic behind what differentiates market-based organizations and civic organizations is a foundational insight.

The next question is, what does it take to build voice-based organizations? In the 21st century, people are so accustomed to thinking about network-based activity and thinking that you can’t please everybody. We should instead be thinking about the mechanisms of loyalty, which is what the third part of his argument is— that we need to generate people’s willingness and commitment to exercising voice when they disagree and build organizations in which disagreement is allowed.

If I were redesigning a civic architecture that would work for what we need in our moment, whether it’s online or offline, digital or not, I would be thinking about the measures of self-governing, voice-based organizations to ensure we have a supply of civic opportunity that matches what we know we need to build the civic capacity that we want.

Sarah Stamper: Your lab’s civic opportunity mapping shows stark disparities in where people can find meaningful participation. What surprised you most about that data? And what should funders and practitioners be doing differently in response?

Hahrie Han: One of the things I was most surprised by is that in about 80% of counties in America, the top providers of civic opportunity are still social and fraternal organizations and faith-based institutions. Social-fraternal organizations include sororities, fraternities, Elks, Masons, Rotary Clubs, ethnic clubs, hometown associations, hobby groups, and so on. Along with faith-based institutions, they are the top providers of civic opportunity. They’re the ones who invite people into civic life most often.

What that tells me is that the places where people are gathering to come together are really still the same kind of places that they’ve always gathered and tried to come together. Those kinds of organizations still matter for building the kind of civic fabric that we need, for tilling the soil in the ways to make civic life work.

We’ve also been delighted to see the way funders and other organizations have built on these insights–about where the civic deserts are and what providers of civic opportunity look like–to try to make investments to renew civic architecture in certain places. For example, we’ve done a lot of work with an organization called the Trust for Civic Life, which is really a consortium of funders that have come together to try to invest in a set of pilot counties to see if they can reinvigorate civic life by building civic opportunity.

Sarah Stamper: Murmuration’s research shows that despite the challenges many Americans face, hope has held steady across the country. Even amid financial strain, rising stress, and widespread burnout, hope has held steady—an often overlooked but powerful sign of community resilience.

I would love for you to talk about examples or ways that you think movements can actually sustain hope without denying the loss or the failure or the risks that we’re experiencing. How are you thinking about hope in this moment?

Hahrie Han: I love the Maimonides quote that says, “hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, not only the necessity of the probable.” I feel the most hopeless when I look at data and it says, probabilistically speaking, that we’re heading in this direction or that direction or somewhere negative. Hope requires a leap of faith that we can do things that are unexpected. Anyone who’s been part of a really vibrant community knows that it’s true that we can do unexpected things if we invest in each other.

I feel most hopeful when I am in a relationship or in dialogue with everyday Americans just living their lives, trying to do work, and trying to build their community. I feel most hopeless when I spend all my time with policymakers or funders in DC.

When I first started as an organizer, before I was a scholar, one of my mentors told me, “people are people are people,” and you have to always remember that. I still feel like that’s true, that when I’m on the ground with people, I’m reminded that we might disagree, we might have different politics, we might have all these different things that seem to divide us, but then in the end, people are people are people. Once you recognize that, then it’s hard not to feel hopeful.

Sarah Stamper: People are people are people—but you’re a person who just won a MacArthur Fellowship! Congratulations. That fellowship is often framed as both recognition for past work, but also freedom to reset or expand your research agenda. Can you give us a glimpse of what might come next and what this unlocks for you?

Hahrie Han: It’s such an enormous privilege and gift, not to mention a total shock to receive the fellowship. It was completely unexpected. It’s not like I had been planning for it, so I’ve had to spend a few months thinking about what makes the most sense.

I don’t know that I’ve totally landed on it, but—not unrelated to everything that we just talked about—I have a sense that the underlying paradigm that most people have about how public life works is somewhat broken. We’re at a moment where we need a different paradigm that helps us understand how we can rebuild the very foundations of what public and civic life can be in America. I would love to be able to develop a project that can help move us towards that alternate paradigm.

Right now, too many people experience public life as a spectacle that they’re only invited to consume every two to four years, maybe. When they’re invited to consume it, they don’t really like the choices that are before them. So a lot of people are responding with a kind of fight or flight response that is not unreasonable, given the way in which they feel disempowered from the system. There are glimmers where people are rebuilding a different kind of paradigm that is grounded in practice that recognizes people as architects of their own future. I would love to be able to do some kind of work that helps us bring that paradigm to life.

Sarah Stamper: We’ll stay tuned for that. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to speak with you and to see where your work goes next. And as always, thank you so much for being in community with us and for being in this conversation.

About Hahrie Han
Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning author of five books and numerous scholarly articles. Her latest book (Knopf 2024), about faith and race in America with a focus on evangelical megachurches, was named to the New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2024, and the New Yorker’s list of Recommended Books for 2024. She has also written for scholarly and public outlets ranging from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the American Political Science Review, Nature Human Behavior, and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). She is a 2025 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (so-called “genius grants”), is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation, and delivered the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University in 2024.

About Sarah Stamper
Sarah Stamper has been a neuroscientist for over 15 years, specializing in the quantitative analysis of behavior and systems. At Murmuration, Sarah leads a team of data and scientific experts building cutting-edge data and insights that empower partners to better understand, engage, and mobilize their communities. She also authors State of Us, a series that explores what America is feeling, thinking, and moving toward together, for Murmuration’s Substack. Before joining Murmuration, she led product and data science at Helm, a civic technology company. She also previously led research at the Art & Science Group, providing valuable data and insights to K-12 institutions, higher education, and nonprofit organizations, shaping their approaches to community engagement and strategic planning.

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Murmuration is a nonprofit working to transform America into a nation where everyone can thrive. We organize a network of community-focused partners and equip them with the insights, tools, and services they need to help communities build and activate power more effectively. murmuration.org

Technology is often told as a generational story. Younger Americans are supposed to be the ones who adapt first—the “digital natives” who grow up alongside new tools and incorporate them into everyday life. From social media to smartphones, each wave of technology has arrived with the assumption that younger people will lead the way. Artificial intelligence might seem like the next chapter in that pattern.

And in one sense, it is. Younger Americans are experimenting with AI tools more than anyone else. They’re using them to write, summarize, organize ideas, plan projects, and navigate everyday tasks. AI is showing up in homework, early careers, creative projects, and even personal decision-making.

But the data tells a more complicated story. The same generation using these tools most frequently is also among the most skeptical about what they do and what they might become.

Heavy Use, Growing Doubt

Artificial intelligence is already woven into daily life for many Americans, but using AI and trusting AI are two very different things. In fact, the data reveals a stark reality: despite all of the hype around AI technology, most Americans remain deeply skeptical.

Increasingly, Americans are saying that they think Artificial Intelligence technology is a bad thing and that it is having a negative impact on the world. Young Americans are leading the way. Above age 35, 46% say AI is bad; under age 35, it is 58%. Above age 35, 49% say AI is having a negative impact on the world; under age 35, it is 66%.

It is not only that younger Americans are more negative in their assessment—they are also more certain. Uncertainty about the impact of AI is much higher among older Americans. Over a third of those age 65+ say they are unsure whether AI is having a positive or negative impact on the world. It is possible that as older Americans have more experience with AI, they will come around to the views of younger people.

Most strikingly, Americans—especially younger people—simply do not trust AI to be safe. Nearly seven in ten (67%) say they lack confidence in its safety, a concern that is even more pronounced among those aged 18–34, where 70% express the same skepticism.

The Worries Behind the Numbers

When Americans talk about AI in their own words, the concerns come into focus quickly. They are not abstract worries about the future of technology. They are specific, practical fears about how these systems work today and how they might be used tomorrow.

The most common concern centers on misinformation. Many respondents worry about tools that generate confident answers without actually knowing whether those answers are true. In our data, 21% of participants raised concerns about AI producing false or misleading information. People also worry about how easily these tools could be used for manipulation with 14% mentioning malicious use by bad actors, and 12% pointing to the lack of regulation or oversight.

As respondents put it:

“Artificial meaning fake, need we say more?” - 64, Female, Hidalgo, TX

“How many instances do we see of AI providing false information? A government report used AI and was filled with nonsense.” - 29, Female, Eagle, ID

“The current implementation lies frequently with extreme confidence.” - 30, Male, Leon, FL

“AI can be trained to produce lies and fake narratives.” - 73, Male, San Francisco, CA

Another concern that surfaces often is dependence. People worry about what happens when judgment, creativity, or decision making begin to migrate from humans to machines. About 11% of people talk about people losing the ability to think critically or function independently if AI becomes too embedded in everyday life.

This is captured best by the following responses:

“It is destroying the ability to think critically about sources and research.” - 27, Male, Baltimore, MD

“It removes the need for humanity to exercise critical thinking skills.” - 43, Male, Salisbury, NC

“It will erode the users’ ability to think for themselves, making them easily manipulated.” - 70, Female, Richmond, VA

For younger Americans, these concerns are unfolding in a particular social and economic context.

This is a generation already navigating a fragile information environment. Trust in institutions is low, and the line between real and manufactured content is increasingly difficult to see. AI does not create that instability, but it amplifies it. Tools that can generate convincing text, images, and voices raise the stakes of discernment at a moment when many people already feel overwhelmed by information. In about 8% of responses, there are specific concerns about deepfakes, impersonation, and identity fraud. As one 32-year-old man put it, “Fake images, videos, and voices can be used to confuse or lie to nations.”

At the same time, young adults are entering a labor market shaped by uncertainty. Concerns about job displacement and economic disruption show up clearly in the responses. There is a recurring sense that AI may replace work faster than it supports workers, particularly for early career professionals and people in creative fields.

“[AI] takes jobs away from artists and writers. It prevents people from using critical thinking and using their own talents.” - 26, Female, Riverside, CA

“Employers will use it to replace human functions rather than passing the benefits off to employees.” - 20, Male, New York City, NY

“It has the potential to prematurely upset a jobs-based society, or prematurely bring about an apocalypse.” - 36, Male, Somerset, NJ

“I feel that it will take away jobs of my great grandchildren. Exactly what jobs will be in store for them to have if AI takes over?” - 75, Female, Glen Carbon, IL

Taken together, these responses suggest that the anxiety around AI is not only about the technology itself. It is about trust, information, work, and the pace of change in a society that already feels unstable to many people.

Final Thoughts

What’s notable is how often these worries are framed not as personal inconvenience, but as collective risk. People talk about AI changing society, reshaping opportunity, and shifting power. They are asking, implicitly: Who is this for? Who decides how it’s used? And who bears the cost when it goes wrong?

Beneath the polling numbers sit deeper questions:

• What would it look like for people to have meaningful input into how or if AI is deployed in their schools, workplaces, and communities?

• How do we build norms and guardrails that increase transparency without stifling innovation?

• How do we ensure that the potential benefits of new AI technologies do not bypass the generation most anxious about its consequences?

These are not questions engineers can answer alone. They require public deliberation, institutional trust, and civic infrastructure strong enough to hold complex tradeoffs.

Still thinking for ourselves.

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This research was supported by the Walton Family Foundation, which has funded Murmuration’s Gen Z research efforts since 2021. Learn more about our ongoing research partnership and findings on the youngest generation of voters here.

Murmuration is a non-profit that strengthens community-driven change at the local level. By equipping local organizations with powerful data, technology, and insights, Murmuration helps them amplify community voices, build collective power, and drive solutions that reflect the lived realities of the people they serve. murmuration.org