The Ordinary Architects of Hope

Hope isn’t coming from Washington right now. It’s coming from living rooms, cul-de-sacs, and condo clubhouses—from people like Jayne.

I met Jayne while canvassing and she showed me a two-page plan she wrote called A Wicked Problem Needs a Grand Strategy. It’s not a think-tank white paper or a campaign memo. It’s a blueprint for rebuilding democracy from the ground up.

Her plan starts with the simplest acts:

• Find your people. Invite a friend to an event. Meet afterward to talk about what moved you.

• If you feel overwhelmed, start smaller. Organize a carpool, share information, form a neighborhood circle.

• If you have more energy, volunteer for a local candidate. Knock on doors. Host a meeting.

• If you burn out, rest — but always have a Plan B for who picks up the baton when you do.

It’s ordinary, almost mundane. And that’s what makes it profound. Because the truth is this is what rebuilding actually looks like.

Jayne told me that she and neighbors meet regularly to make democracy a social habit again. They plan carpools to rallies, share voter resources, hold postcard nights, and help each other stay informed when the news cycle feels unbearable.

No budget. No consultants. No institutional permission. Just intention.

Jayne’s approach reminded me of something I see on the doors every day: the hunger to belong to something functional. People are tired of national shouting matches. They want to know how to help in a way that feels real, local, and human.

Her memo uses language like wicked problem and grand strategy, academic terms borrowed from systems theory. A wicked problem is one so complex it can’t be solved with a single linear plan. Saving our democracy is one of those. A grand strategy, she explains, is the coordination of all available resources toward a shared goal. Her version of a “grand strategy” isn’t about tanks or trade deals. It’s about neighbors. She’s redefining political power as social architecture.

And that, to me, is the future.

It’s what we’re building through this campaign too, the belief that everyone can hold a piece of the rebuild. That small groups can regenerate civic life faster than institutions can repair themselves. That the next wave of political leadership won’t come from DC consultants but from women like Jayne.

What gives me hope is that people are already doing it. They’re writing their own manuals, teaching each other how to reconnect, refusing to surrender to cynicism.

And the through line between all of them is the same: they’re not waiting for saviors. They’re building stairs.

If Jayne can draft a strategy for democracy at her kitchen table, then the system isn’t broken beyond repair. It’s just waiting for more builders.

That’s where my hope lives now—in the ordinary architects of democracy, the quiet engineers of connection, the people who still believe that showing up matters even when no one’s watching.

Because that’s how every real climb begins.
 

One small circle. One new conversation. One person who refuses to stop believing that we can still move up.

Let’s climb.