Our mission is to help generate the inter-movement connections, capabilities, and strategies required to achieve the collective influence and impact needed to “turn our country around.”   Our main functions include: 

• Convening, curating, & facilitating generative inter-movement forums

• Growing a community of pro-democracy leaders and stakeholders  

• Cross-pollinating and connecting key convenings for greater alignment between pro-democracy movements

• Incubating “high impact” synergy projects between unlikely allies that share common concerns for our democracy
  

Movement of Many Movements:
There is no silver bullet for transforming a system as complex as American democracy. For communities to flourish, a just, representative, and people-powered system of governance must be paired with a civically literate, united, principled, and engaged citizenry. Thousands of organizations across many disparate movements, such as bridging divides, structural reforms, civic education, peacebuilding, countering authoritarianism, and participatory democracy, are already working to improve specific aspects of democracy, civic health, social cohesion, and social justice, but most of these efforts are siloed and struggling to build momentum.  

In service to Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld’s call to 

“Build a broad-based, multistranded, pro-democracy movement [and beloved community] around a positive vision concretized in locally rooted action,” 

we are helping these movements mature into a transpartisan “Pro-Democracy Movement” united in purpose and effort, prepared for collective impact, and exemplifying beloved community. Through thousands of exploratory conversations, we have discerned that the Pro-Democracy Movement is coalescing at the intersection of: bridging our differences, strategies, and endeavors, to block the advance of authoritarianism, political violence, and other threats to democracy, and to build a multiracial, pluralistic, people-powered democracy.

We support this emergent Pro-Democracy Movement by:

• Convening, Curating, & Facilitating Generative Conversations and Forums:
  We provide a time and place for conversations to foster inter-movement connections, share lessons learned, address points of friction, and identify opportunities for collective impact. These conversations range from quarterly large group community forums, where Pro-Democracy Movement strategies are co-developed, to smaller, ad hoc critical intersections forums, where needs, ideas, and disagreements are transformed into opportunities for collaborative innovation.

• Community Building:
  We are not a new coalition or umbrella organization. Instead, we are promoting the trust-based, meaningful relationships, sense of belonging, and ethic of care that fuel the innate power and action of beloved community.  

• Cross-Pollinating: 
  We co-amplify collective impact frameworks, principles, and strategic innovations across the Pro-Democracy Movement to increase overall effectiveness, collaboration, and learning. One critically important way we help spread these ideas is by helping other conveners feature these concepts in their in-person convenings.

• Incubating Key Synergy Projects:
  We help identify, incubate, and rally support for high-ROI, synergistic projects that benefit participating organizations while also creating the infrastructure, capabilities, processes, and teamwork required for collective impact.  

Local Intersections Project:
To promote inter-movement organizing “concretized in locally rooted action,” we have partnered with more than two dozen organizations to develop a process for creating “local democracy hubs,” where diverse local organizers and activists strategically and considerately form community with each other, invite in state and national resources and capabilities from across the Pro-Democracy Movement, and work together to holistically support the needs and desires of their local communities. We are currently piloting the process in Washington state and co-producing a guide for replicating the process in local communities across the U.S.  

Defining Key Values:

• Transpartisan: Transcending and transforming partisan identities and worldviews by prioritizing communities and country over party, systems over ideologies, and solving problems together over zero-sum politics.

• Beloved Community: Diverse groups unifying around a shared sense of purpose and neighborly love, proactively working together to ensure everyone can flourish.  

• Prefigurative: As a movement and beloved community of practitioners, we must practice what we preach and embody the changes that we seek to make in American democracy and civil society through how we organize, relate to each other, and share power. 

Project Director Bios:

Caleb Christen: With the ultimate goal of enabling all communities to thrive, Caleb co-founded IMIP based on the desire to transform American democracy and civic health by enabling and empowering others to work together to maximize overall effectiveness. He is also a lawyer and a senior officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Caleb holds a JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School, an MA in Christian Practice from Duke Divinity School, a PGDip in Organisational Leadership from Oxford University, Said Business School, and a graduate certificate in International Politics and Practice and a BA in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Walter Roberts: Co-founding IMIP is the culmination of Walt’s decades of supporting transpartisan pro-democracy and civic health organizing as an inter-movement and collective impact strategist, large group process designer, and facilitator. He was the lead process designer for Living Room Conversations and has facilitated hundreds of generative group conversations. Walt has experience as a strategist and generative forum designer for the Sustainability Movement, the Transpartisan Movement, and the Occupy movement, working with the team that created InterOccupy.net   

Victoria Hattersley: Victoria joined the Inter-Movement Impact Project to apply her extensive project & quality management experience to support inter-movement community building, synergy projects, and coordinated action. She previously supported the pro-democracy ecosystem by volunteering with the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Before that, Victoria executed and oversaw project management, quality management, change management, knowledge management, training, and quality culture at PAREXEL International for 19 years, supported researchers doing AIDS Clinical Trials at the Harvard School of Public Health, Statistical and Data Analysis Center, worked in the technical education field, and was the co-owner of a small business.