As we face ongoing crises in our democracy both at home and abroad, almost everyone I’ve talked to feels that they’ve done good, necessary work, but the field, collectively, still isn’t meeting the moment. From our perspective, that feeling often comes from the tension between short-term urgency and long-term necessity. Even if we all do the right things for the next two to four years, the lingering sense is that we are not getting to the root causes that will ensure we have a democracy over the next 50 years.

But that gap—between individual excellence and field-level insufficiency—is an opportunity. Democracy 2076 was launched to step into this gap, identified in the 2022 report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy, to prioritize long-term future work in the effort to protect democracy.

The Case for Expansion as a Means to Build a Better Democracy

In 2023, I made the case for expanding the landscape of democracy work. At that time, I critiqued national progressive organizations for standing up against all parts of the authoritarian playbook, and I critiqued national pro-democracy organizations for not engaging on the issues most critical to voters—leaving grassroots organizers unsupported by both types of organizations.

In 2025, attacks on our institutions and civil society scaled up significantly. Political violence has garnered national attention. National progressive advocacy organizations fully understand the full scope of the authoritarian playbook—those attacks are often directed at them. Even parts of civil society that would not identify as progressive or even political, such as food banks, are feeling the crushing weight. And progressives have organized effectively in response. The “No Kings” protests, for example, have shown strategic discipline and broad appeal.

However, as national progressive organizations have more explicitly used the language of democracy, I have observed that people might not be clear on the distinction between attacks on liberal democracy and policy disagreements, demonstrating the importance of education as a means to build a better democracy.

Read the full article about building a better democracy by Aditi Juneja at Nonprofit Quarterly.