Michael’s Pitch: “Beginning to Build the Democracy We Were Promised”

Over the past couple of weeks, the Campfire Working Group members have been sharing ideas for projects to work on.

This is what I pitched to the group. Click here to read the full pitch doc
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Hey everyone, thanks in advance for reading.

I’ve been reflecting on the current moment. With the Green Party imploding so publicly, and Campfire heating up in response, I want to start pulling together my pitch for where we go from here, and what I can offer as part of that path forward.

So here's the heart of it: I’m an organizational designer. I’m a facilitator. I bring methods, processes and structures for helping groups translate passion and purpose into functional, participatory, non-coercive organizations.

This means building systems that don’t rely on a boss handing down orders, or a single visionary dictating the plan. We’re talking about participatory governance, sociocracy, self-management, and real distributed power. We’re talking about the game of continuous, collective change.

That’s the service I want to incubate within Campfire.

I want us to be able to say: "Yes, better democracy is possible, and here’s how you actually do it." Not just as a slogan, but as a rigorous, trainable, supported practice. The kind that leads to the kinds of outcomes we believed the Green Party might deliver—until many of us saw firsthand that it wasn’t built to live up to its own values.

I’m not here to attack the Green Party. Many of us already tried working from within. We left because we saw the writing on the wall. We saw what happens when an organization becomes more about legacy, or vanity, or personality politics than about living the values it proclaims.

But what if we built something better?

What if we created the conditions for practicing democracy, starting not at the federal level or with political parties, but with the complex web of organizations and networks that actually uphold a democratic society?

This is about more than politics. This is about contributing positively to a civic culture where people know how to do democracy, not just vote in one. Where we aren’t defaulting to coercive hierarchies or letting the loudest or most privileged voice steer the ship.

The truth is, we’ve all inherited systems that work, technically. They produce outputs. They manage people. But they don’t liberate people. They don’t activate our full cognitive and social potential as a species evolved to make sense of the world together.

Most of us were not trained to work collaboratively. Our education system emphasizes individualism. Most of us didn’t learn how to make equitable group decisions, how to navigate conflict productively, or how to recognize and counteract bias in ourselves and our systems.

That’s the work I want to do.

What I’m proposing is a combination of coaching, consulting, facilitation, events and maybe even lightweight products and toolkits down the road. The core idea is helping mission-aligned organizations build cultures and structures that support shared power, high-fidelity sense-making, and collaborative decision-making—even at scale.

I’m not interested in dogmatically promoting any one method like sociocracy, agile, etc., because those can easily become buzzwords or barriers. But I am deeply grounded in those kinds of practices, and I know how to translate them to fit different contexts.

And I’m clear that this work isn’t for everyone. We’re looking to work with organizations that truly care about the people in their systems, and accept that they’ll likely be changed in the process. That likely means public-good oriented orgs, nonprofits, progressive businesses, possibly even new political formations down the road.

I’m not looking for, nor can I afford, corner-of-the-desk volunteer work. How might I make this sustainable?

That’s the next piece of thinking: I believe this is public-goods work. I’m curious to explore a hybrid model—a not-for-profit, cooperative-like business that offers services, yes, but also seeks grant funding and partnerships to make this work accessible, especially to under-resourced groups who need it most.

It’s not just selling a service. We’re cultivating the muscle of democratic participation. We’re helping groups build living systems that are capable of navigating complexity, adapting together, and thriving in a changing world.

To my peers who’ve left the Green Party not because we stopped believing in its values, but because we believed in them too much to keep pretending—I want to point to a future where we’ve lovingly walked away from an ambitious movement that, despite our very best efforts, didn't work. But it brought us together.

Let’s build something. Let's teach democracy by doing it. Let’s help others do the same.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Michael