Major Update from the Beacon Project

Two years I left academia with the daft ambition of starting a new type of social science lab. Its aim: leverage insights from the latest psychology research to ancient Greek wisdom (and everything in between) to identify a new "civic vision" (or narrative, or framework, or theory, whatever you want to call it) that can inspire America's Exhausted Majority. I called it the Beacon Project.

Well, friends, I've just learned that I've received a transformative, multi-million dollar grant from the Templeton Foundation to support the next phase of our work. The grant is entitled "Freedom and Responsibility: Building a National Narrative of Mutual Obligation."

The grant has three parts:

- RESEARCH: expand our research capacities and collaborations, using natural language processing, polling, focus groups, theoretical analysis, and experimental methods to explore how Americans think about freedom, responsibility, and mutual obligation

- COMMUNICATION: increase our public communications, growing our audience and bringing greater attention to other individuals and organizations already working to strengthen people's sense of mutual obligation and transcend false binaries

- COMMUNITY: Host in-person multi-day convenings bringing together scholars, philanthropists, and civic leaders to make progress on the Big Question: "What do we owe each other?"

The news could not have come at a better time, as THIS WEEKEND I had the privilege of joining 20 inspiring leaders and scholars at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to kick off this conversation and lay the groundwork these efforts.

I truly cannot imagine work I would rather be doing or a moment more urgent to do it in.

Let's do this!