Community is good and our source of abundance, empathy, and tradition.

We need to develop community by:

1. Welcoming and integrating people into shared efforts toward shared goals.
2. Encourage and ensure our shared responsibility for shared resources.
3. Support all people’s basic needs: public health and safety, housing, food, health care, and opportunities to learn.

The community we’re building is a subset of the increasing number of American voters who feel outside of the two major parties, and those who can be persuaded to leave their major party affiliation (“weak partisans”). Specifically, we’re looking to build with those who:

● feel that the two parties lack a principled foundation, are focused more on power and division than on solving problems, and dislike the negativity and partisan battles;

● are looking for a new home that celebrates pluralism and wants to put forward principled leaders who are looking to solve problems through compromise and conversation; and

● want to explore innovative approaches to problems, focusing on solutions, and will use data to analyze these approaches and their results.

We’re also looking to build with disaffected Americans (non-voters) who don’t vote because of the options that they’re given. We aim to give them a home and a voice to draw them back into civic engagement. Finally, our focus on service suggests another community - civic and cultural leaders in all communities. By empowering them and providing infrastructure for them to improve and lead in their communities, we can find future Forward leaders and candidates. In order to reach these communities, we’ll need to focus not just on organizing work, but also on creating a national media network that can make our case directly to the American people.

FREE PEOPLE + THRIVING COMMUNITIES = VIBRANT DEMOCRACY

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