We’ve Gotten Social Change Backwards!
After forty years of grassroots community organizing, I’ve come to a startling realization:
We’ve gotten social change backwards. We build movements with people who share our worldviews yet end up reproducing the very Culture of Separation that divides the society we’re trying to change.
I’ve encountered this pattern in Christian churches and other religious or spiritual movements, regenerative economic and ecological movements, social justice movements, progressive and conservative political movements, business networks, and cultural movements. Their worldviews differ, but their organizing pattern is the same.
We welcome people who share our vision as potential members, volunteers, and collaborators. But we see those who don't as people to persuade, awaken, convert, recruit, compete with, or defeat. In doing so, we fail to recognize the good they are already contributing to the very society we're trying to transform.
The greatest challenge of our era is not simply war, poverty, ecological destruction, social injustice, economic inequality, polarization, or concentrated power, to name a few. Even as we organize to address these problems, we struggle with a deeply ingrained tendency to form tribes and organize ourselves into separate silos. We decide who belongs and who doesn’t, dividing ourselves from the very people with whom we need to work.
The answer is not to overcome our need to belong to groups. That’s part of human nature. Instead, we must learn to extend the trust, care, and belonging within our kinship groups to people with different worldviews. We do this without asking them to change their beliefs or identities.
I call this moving from Tribal Kinship to Symbiotic Kinship: consciously connecting people and groups across their differences to meet the shared needs of the whole community.
Through decades of grassroots organizing in real communities, I discovered what makes this possible.
I found two universals that bring people together beyond shared worldviews or individual issues: Love and the twelve shared needs of every community. I came to recognize Love not merely as a feeling or moral sentiment, but as the underlying structure of reality itself. Holding space for an entire community was among the hardest things I’ve ever attempted. It forced me to confront my own judgments and prejudices. Overcoming separation in my community had to begin with overcoming it within myself, and only Love made that possible.
These shared needs also gave me a practical way to embody Love in everyday community life. We could work together to build strong local economies, healthy food systems, reliable energy and water, caring neighborhoods, religious and spiritual life, and healthy environments.
The good that transforms society is already happening all around us. Yet we’ve been trying to transform the whole by expanding our separate movements, rather than beginning with the whole community and connecting the good already present within it.
I’ve seen what becomes possible when we reverse this approach. By consciously connecting people and organizations to meet their shared community needs, we cultivate grassroots people’s power.
Together, we use that power to build a parallel culture and economy rooted in Love, mutual care, and cooperation. This is how we begin transforming society from the ground up.
My recently released book, Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life, explores these discoveries in depth. This essay shares the central realization that changed how I understand social transformation.
The Invisible Paradox of Organizing to Change Society
For generations, social movements have followed a familiar path: We identify something broken, develop a vision of how things should be different, gather people who share that vision, and build organizations to expand our influence within the culture.
The prevailing strategy is one of attraction: bring together people who share our vision, build alternative structures, and assume that as they grow, they will eventually transform or replace the existing system.
Extraordinary good can emerge from these efforts, but beneath this strategy lies the invisible organizing logic of the Culture of Separation.
When we organize movements around a shared worldview, agreement becomes the doorway to belonging. Those who share our vision are brought together, while those who do not remain outside the movement, even when they are already doing extraordinary good in their communities. Environmentalists, regenerative economic movements, social justice movements, and religious communities each organize around their own shared visions and commitments.
Even movements embracing all humanity or beautiful visions of Interbeing and Oneness reproduce this pattern. However universal their vision, their shared worldview still defines who is in and who is out.
Over time, these movements develop their own identities, shared purposes, language, institutions, and ways of working. Yet they remain disconnected from others doing good across the whole community, becoming what I call islands of coherence. Their individual successes do not necessarily connect them to one another or to the wider society.
Coherent islands do not make a coherent whole community.
In this way, movements seeking to overcome the Culture of Separation end up reproducing it. This separation runs deeper than political polarization or ideological disagreement. By organizing around shared worldviews, we strengthen our individual movements while leaving the relationships between them and the wider community fragmented. We mistake the growth of our own movements for the transformation of society itself.
What Forty Years of Organizing Taught Me
I spent years following the very organizing strategy I’ve just described. My early work included anti-nuclear activism, inner-city organizing, and efforts to bring people together around political and social causes. Like many organizers, I believed that meaningful change required developing a compelling vision, gathering people committed to it, and building enough collective power to transform the existing system.
Over time, I shifted toward place-based community organizing at the city and county level. In Northern Nevada, I helped build a Local Living Economy Network and a Local Food System Network. I also helped develop public safety initiatives, countywide neighborhood networks, and arts and cultural events that brought different parts of the community together.
Through this work, I began to recognize that people and organizations outside my worldview were already contributing to our community. They had been there all along, but my progressive worldview kept me from seeing them.
One experience with a conventional farmer brought this realization into focus. I was explaining how local farmers, businesses, organizations, and residents could work together to strengthen our regional food system and local economy. The farmer responded with a simple statement: “I’m already doing it.”
Those words stayed with me because they exposed something I had been missing. He wasn’t necessarily part of a regenerative agriculture movement or an alternative economic network. But he was already feeding the community, sustaining livelihoods, contributing knowledge, and participating in the local economy. Why did I need him to adopt my vision of a regenerative food system before I could recognize what he was already contributing?
And what about the independent grocery store, the family restaurant, or the local business owner who had spent decades serving the community? Their contributions don’t become valuable only when they join an alternative movement.
At the same time, I began recognizing another blind spot. As we worked to build a “new culture,” I realized I had been unconsciously excluding Christians. Their beliefs and traditions didn’t fit my progressive vision. Yet churches and Christian communities were already serving neighbors, caring for families, and contributing to the spiritual life of our community.
I had to confront my own judgments and consciously reach out to them. Love enabled me to move beyond my progressive worldview and build relationships around our shared community needs, without requiring us to agree on our beliefs. I wasn’t merely learning to accept people whose beliefs differed from mine. I was recognizing that they were already contributing something essential to the community I wanted to transform.
Each of us carries a piece of the good, but our piece is not the whole. When we treat our piece as the answer for everyone else, we overlook the good already present outside our movements.
These discoveries changed how we organized our Local Living Economy Network and Local Food System Network. Rather than creating networks exclusively for green businesses or regenerative food producers, we connected people and enterprises across the existing local economy. We brought conventional businesses and farmers together with those pioneering alternative approaches.
Ironically, by bringing people together around their shared economic needs rather than requiring agreement on a particular worldview, we actually helped expand alternative and cooperative practices throughout the wider community.
We discovered that connecting the good across differences doesn’t dilute the possibilities for transformation. It multiplies them.
The Whole Community Is Already Here
These experiences reveal where social transformation must begin. A town or city is not an abstraction waiting to be replaced by a movement’s vision. It already consists of people, families, businesses, neighborhoods, public spaces, organizations, and civic institutions. Together, they form a living social ecology, connected by a shared history, common needs, and responsibilities to one another.
Authentic transformation must grow through the relationships already present in the community, not by requiring people to adopt a particular movement’s worldview.
Yet in the Culture of Separation, those relationships have become fragmented.
Our movements are already part of a larger community, not the other way around. The whole community is not the destination. It is where we begin.
The urgent challenge is not to attract more people into our movements, but to recognize, serve, and connect the good already present throughout the community. That is the difference between movement-centered organizing and whole-community building.
I know how difficult this shift is. I once believed our movements had discovered a more enlightened consciousness, a better economic model, a more just political order, or a more regenerative way of living.
The arrogance comes when we assume that our vision entitles us to lead the rest of society towards it. I still encounter this attitude in movements I engage with today. Yet people are already living, working, raising families, and contributing to their communities without waiting for us to enlighten them.
Our movements need to reverse that relationship: instead of expecting people to embrace our vision, we must place our knowledge, resources, and capacities in service of their real needs.
Our visions don’t have to disappear. Each movement retains its distinct identity and mission while becoming part of a wider community of relationships that strengthens both its own work and the whole community.
Our experience with the Local Food System Network illustrates this reversal. If we build a network only among regenerative farmers, food cooperatives, and values-aligned businesses, we may strengthen an alternative food economy while leaving the rest of the community’s food system disconnected. Instead, we begin with the whole food system, bringing together conventional and regenerative farmers, distributors, grocers, restaurants, schools, and local governments.
By connecting the whole food system, we create more opportunities for alternative and cooperative practices to spread throughout the community.
The Whole-Community Parallel Polis: An Alternative to the Culture of Separation
This approach to whole-community transformation has an important historical precedent in 1970s Czechoslovakia. Václav Havel, Václav Benda, and other dissidents confronted the Soviet communist totalitarian state that sought to control political, economic, cultural, and civic life. They recognized that opposing the government or replacing one ruling ideology with another wasn’t enough.
Society needed to recover its independent capacities to think, communicate, educate, create, cooperate, and govern its common life.
Charter 77 brought together people across profound ideological and religious divisions. They included former communists, Christians, secular intellectuals, writers, artists, and others who would never have agreed on a single comprehensive vision of society. Drawing on his Catholic faith, Benda saw the family, the Church, and independent communities as foundations of social life. He developed the idea of a Parallel Polis, through which people could build independent institutions and networks throughout their communities, beyond state control.
Consider a thought experiment. Imagine Havel and Benda organizing only around an ecological vision or an alternative economy. They would have gathered people who already shared their worldview. They might have built a valuable movement, but the existing system could have isolated and marginalized it as another special interest.
Dominant systems know how to contain movements representing only one part of society. They face a much greater challenge when people from across society begin acting together.
This is how collective people’s power begins to emerge. Charter 77 connected people across these divisions, while the emerging Parallel Polis gave their cooperation lasting form through independent networks and institutions in education, culture, religious life, and civic affairs. Together, they helped build an independent social, economic, and civic life at the grassroots without requiring agreement on a shared political or economic ideology.
Their experience demonstrates how people with profoundly different beliefs can cooperate to recover independent civic life beyond the control of a totalizing system. Our circumstances today are different, but the principle remains: we build the collective power to shape our society by connecting people and institutions across their differences, without requiring agreement on a shared worldview.
This is the deeper possibility of a Parallel Polis: people recovering the freedom and capacity to live, serve, cooperate, and assume responsibility for their common life.
Stop Asking Others to Join Us. Show Up for Them.
These discoveries changed how I approached community building. I began to see that my work was only one part of a much larger community. That meant recognizing the good others were already contributing and finding ways to support and connect their efforts with those of others.
The change is simple but demanding: we stop asking others to join us and begin showing up for them.
Instead of beginning with a program, campaign, or worldview that others must embrace, we begin with relationships. We listen, learn what matters to people, and discover how we can work together to meet their needs.
The twelve shared community needs give us practical places to begin working together.
A conservative business owner and a progressive environmentalist may disagree about national politics while finding common ground in strengthening their local economy. A Christian pastor and a secular community organizer may disagree about spiritual reality while cooperating to support families and neighbors. Belonging comes before agreement.
I saw this firsthand in Northern Nevada, where people who would never join the same movement accomplished things together that no single movement could achieve alone.
Connecting the Good: Giving Love Social Form
But what begins with cooperation can grow into something much larger. As people build trust, serve one another, and take greater responsibility for their community, they begin transforming how they live and work together. They strengthen their local economy and food systems, build caring neighborhoods, improve education and health, and protect their environment. They also strengthen spiritual and cultural life and gain a greater voice in decisions affecting their community.
Over time, new networks, organizations, and institutions grow from these relationships.
Together, these relationships and the institutions they create form a lasting social architecture that reflects the underlying order of Love itself. This architecture sustains a parallel social reality rooted in Love, service, and cooperation.
I began recognizing this same pattern throughout history. Across different cultures and traditions, people built communities and institutions that embodied the same underlying Virtues and principles. Together, these examples revealed a historical lineage of people giving social form to what I call the Ancient Blueprint for common life.
Personally, my understanding of this Ancient Blueprint began with Jesus and his way of Divine Love. For me, Jesus reveals the Divine Source of the Love that holds creation together. His life and teachings were more than moral instruction. They showed us how to love, serve, and live in communion with God and one another, giving that Love social form in community.
Looking back, I recognize in the early Christian communities the same pattern of the Parallel Polis. Across the Roman Empire, people from different ethnic and social backgrounds came together in a shared life of Love and service. They shared meals, shared resources, cared for the poor, sick, widows, and orphans, and welcomed strangers and travelers.
Through these relationships and practices, they built a parallel social reality of mutual care, sustained by their own communities and institutions. They developed an independent common life while remaining connected to the wider Roman society in which they lived.
I later recognized this same sacred design in Gandhi’s constructive program, Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne’s Sarvodaya movement, and the independent civic and cultural networks developed by Václav Havel, Václav Benda, and Charter 77.
Across these different traditions, people were not simply challenging existing systems. They were building another way of life within them.
We can embody this same pattern today without requiring others to share my Christian beliefs. People across different faiths, beliefs, and worldviews can bring their whole selves into relationships rooted in Love, recognizing the good already present in one another as they build a common life together.
That Love becomes visible through the Virtues we practice in everyday life: integrity, courage, service, respect, and compassion. These Virtues shape how we treat one another and build relationships of trust across our differences.
The deeper unity among us already exists, even when our everyday relationships are fragmented.
We don’t create that unity by connecting people. Our work is to recognize that unity and live it in our relationships.
From Local Communities to a Worldwide Commonwealth
We give these relationships lasting form by building small circles of trust and service, connecting people through networks across organizations and sectors, and creating shared structures that sustain these relationships without taking control of those involved.
I call these Symbiotic Circles and Symbiotic Networks. Rather than gathering people into another movement organized around a shared worldview, they connect people, existing organizations, and institutions across their differences, building lasting relationships that uplift the whole community.
As these relationships deepen, people gain greater power to shape their community’s future. They develop new ways to meet shared needs, build their local economy, and make decisions together. Connecting the good isn’t the ultimate goal. It is how people begin recovering their collective power to build a new social, economic, and civic reality together.
This is how a whole-community Parallel Polis emerges: not through one movement expanding until it replaces all others, but through the relationships and institutions people build together across the whole community.
Imagine thousands of communities around the world doing this, each building a shared future together while forming connections with other communities. Together, they create a worldwide commonwealth of communities.
From local communities to a worldwide commonwealth, this is what I mean by giving Love social form universally. Love becomes more than an individual virtue or spiritual aspiration.
It becomes the activating principle of a transformation unfolding simultaneously in communities around the world.
That Love shapes how people relate to one another, build institutions, and live together in community, giving rise to a global Culture of Connection.
And we don’t have to wait to begin. Transformation begins wherever people are willing to recognize, serve, and connect the good already present around them. And it can begin with just one person willing to reach across differences and bring people together from throughout the community.
The Extraordinary Scale of the Good Already Here
And that person doesn’t have to start from scratch. The foundations of this quiet revolution are already present in the extraordinary good that people and organizations are doing throughout the world.
Consider its scale. Globally, we have:
Approximately 10 million formal nonprofits and an estimated 50 million grassroots associations and community groups.
4.4 million Christian congregations worldwide, alongside religious communities of other faiths.
Approximately 10 million social enterprises addressing social and environmental needs.
Across Europe and the US, an estimated 700,000–850,000 Christian congregations and more than 700 million Christians among 1.1 billion people.
Approximately 2.1 billion people volunteering monthly, mostly outside formal organizations.
Hundreds of millions of micro, small, and medium-sized businesses supporting livelihoods and local economies.
More than one hundred million organizations, community groups, and businesses are already part of the everyday lives of billions of people. Many of these people also participate in movements working to transform different aspects of society.
They include:
Faith and spiritual communities
Charities and social-change efforts
Civic engagement and bridge-building movements
Regenerative culture and creation-care movements
Purpose-driven businesses
New Economy and commons movements
Localization and bioregional networks
Pro-democracy and civil-society movements
Arts and cultural communities
The good is not absent. It is already present on an extraordinary scale. With so much good already happening, why does society remain so deeply fragmented? The answer brings us back to the paradox at the heart of this essay. The problem isn’t the absence of good or the failure of individual movements.
It’s the separation between movements, institutions, and worldviews that prevents their efforts from becoming the collective power of the whole community.
People don’t have to join a movement for social transformation. Their contributions are already part of the good transforming society.
Our task is to connect that good across the whole community and across communities worldwide, unleashing the greatest collective power for social transformation in history.
The Invisible Revolution: Connecting the Good That’s Already Among Us
Even efforts to unite diverse movements draw boundaries around who belongs, based on an unacknowledged shared worldview. In his 2007 book Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken identified a vast global movement working for environmental sustainability, social justice, and indigenous rights. He then sought to connect these organizations through a platform called WiserEarth.
Yet this mainly progressive political vision still created a divide between those recognized as part of social transformation and those outside it.
Our movements don’t merely separate us from others. They shape our ability to recognize the good already present outside them. The limitation wasn’t the diversity of causes, but the worldview defining who belonged.
That is why overcoming the Culture of Separation requires us to expand beyond movement-centered organizing to whole-community building.
Hundreds of millions of organizations, businesses, and community groups are already doing good throughout the world, but their efforts remain largely disconnected. Individual community members and people within existing organizations can become bridge-builders. They bring these groups together, help them build relationships, and connect their efforts with the wider community across differences in worldview.
I saw why this distinct role matters at the founding gathering of our Northern Nevada Local Food System Network. The executive director of the local food bank stood up before nearly a hundred community leaders. She told us she’d wanted to bring people together like this for ten years but had never found the time or capacity to make it happen. She was grateful and relieved that someone had finally taken on the work.
Many people are already busy serving their own organizations and communities. But others, including volunteers within those organizations, have the time and willingness to connect the good across the wider community. Organizations can help by inviting people in their networks to become bridge-builders. Getting started doesn’t require a budget, paid staff, another organization, or changes to existing organizational structures.
Whole-community building begins when people practice Symbiotic Kinship. They reach across their differences, build relationships, and connect the good already happening around them to meet their shared Common Needs.
This brings together people who might otherwise remain in separate worlds: the farmer, the restaurant owner, the pastor, the businessperson, the neighbor, and the community organizer.
They don’t have to embrace a shared worldview. They begin acting together where their lives already intersect. That is how relationships become the collective power of the people.
Turning Social Change Right Side Up
This brings us back to why I believe we’ve gotten social change backwards. We’ve been trying to transform society by expanding our separate movements, rather than strengthening the relationships among the people and organizations who already make up the whole community.
We’ve made agreement with our worldview a condition of belonging to our movements, overlooking the extraordinary good work already happening on the ground in every community.
We’ve sought the power to change society by growing our movements. Instead, we need to connect the people, organizations, and institutions already present throughout our communities.
The deeper transformation begins beneath our movements, in how we relate to one another throughout the community. By connecting the good across our differences, we recover the collective power to build a new social, economic, and civic reality together.
This is how the universal Ancient Blueprint takes shape in local communities, each in its own way. In one community, people begin by strengthening their local food system and economy. In another, they come together to improve neighborhoods, public safety, education, health, or care for vulnerable people. The people, histories, cultures, and needs of every community are different. No one needs to give this transformation a name, claim it as their own, or control the whole community in order to participate.
So who is connecting the good across the whole community? Who will take responsibility for building these bridges and bringing together people and organizations across their differences?
I’m sharing these reflections to challenge all of us working for a better world to rethink how we approach social change. Let’s start building whole communities together. In my new book, Recovering the Sacred Pattern of Common Life, I explore how we recover the relational fabric of culture and community, giving Love social form as we build a new social, economic, and civic reality from the ground up.
The book is available to read freely on Substack, with no subscription required. I welcome your thoughts on how we put whole-community building into practice and transform society together.
Keep up the good Heart!