On July 16, 2026, Murmuration brought together leaders, organizers, creators, and journalists at The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice for America 251 & Beyond, a forward-looking conversation about the kind of America we want to build over the next 250 years. Across seven lightning talks exploring belonging, community, joy, identity, agency, nation, and hope, speakers Murmuration’s Chief Research Officer Sarah Stamper, Alex Johnston, Amanda Litman, Cord Jefferson, Astead Herndon, Daria Dawson, Murad Awawdeh, and Jason Green offered distinct perspectives on the people, relationships, and communities that shape American civic life. Together, their reflections challenged us to look beyond the current moment and imagine what becomes possible when we invest in the conditions that allow communities to thrive.
About Sarah Stamper
Sarah has been a neuroscientist for over 15 years, specializing in the quantitative analysis of behavior and systems. At Murmuration, Sarah leads a team of data and scientific experts building cutting-edge data and insights that empower partners to better understand, engage, and mobilize their communities. She also authors State of Us, a series that explores what America is feeling, thinking, and moving toward together, for Murmuration’s Substack. Before joining Murmuration, she led product and data science at Helm, a civic technology company. She also previously led research at the Art & Science Group, providing valuable data and insights to K-12 institutions, higher education, and nonprofit organizations, shaping their approaches to community engagement and strategic planning.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I am so grateful that you all are here. Thank you so much for being in conversation with us about building the America we imagine. For the past couple of months, Murmuration has really been focused on understanding the following. And that is: what could the next 250 years look like? I am going to show you some slides of data. So I am grateful that some of you have a drink in your hand. Because drinks and data, I think, go hand in hand.
Since 2024, Murmuration has been continuously listening to Americans. Roughly 500 voices per day through our always-on survey infrastructure called Civic Pulse. And what we do through this listening is we seek to understand people's real lives and their experiences in their own words and how those experiences change over time.
Over the last two years, from listening to more than 340,000 people talk about their hopes, their dreams, their stresses, what's keeping them up at night. We've become convinced of at least one thing. And that's if you wanna understand where America is going next. You should not start in Washington. You should start with the questions that people are asking around their kitchen tables every night.
And so those questions are not centered on reflecting on 1776. Those questions are much more centered on, “Oh, s**t, how am I gonna put food on this table? What are we leaving for the next generation? Can I help my community? And do I belong here? And more importantly and more saliently recently, can government serve people like me?” And so in our America 251 project, this is really what we hoped to uncover.
We asked people about their lives, their experiences, and the questions that are keeping them up at night. And the things that are shaping the way that they think about their communities so that we can paint a more future-oriented view. To do that, we went and asked a lot of people a lot of questions. And so each of our speakers today is going to touch on one of these themes. On connection, on belonging, on joy, on identity, on change and agency, our nation, and finally, what I hope we're all here for: a little bit of hope.
And over the past couple of months, 35 or so thousand people have participated in the America 251 research and have talked to us and shared their experiences, which informs the next little bit that I'm gonna walk you through.
Who doesn't love a good too long didn't read? Which is this. Our civic life, thanks, X. Our civic life may feel strained, but our community life is far more resilient.
Most people have helped a neighbor recently. Most people have spaces in their communities where they can go to spend time and enjoy themselves. Most people feel a sense of responsibility to others around them and in their community. And finally, nearly all of us have close friends who help make us happy. And I am grateful that for me personally, some of you are in this room.
And so using this as a launch pad, there's a lot to build on. If our local communities and our lives are strong, we can build a future together. And when we entered into this project, we were sort of like, seven scripts, seven topics, we'll probably get seven stories. And we're surprised to find that more than seven stories, we found one. And that is that this is a little complicated, so we're gonna hang here for a second.
That is, no matter what the topic, the answers that people gave over hundreds of different questions about hundreds of different things in their lives all really boiled down to two underlying evaluations. The first is, well, how's my life going? And the second is, how do I feel, and am I supported by my community?
So if you look horizontally, we're moving from people who have a lower perceived personal well-being towards people who have a higher perceived personal well-being, and as you go down, you have lower perceived community support and higher perceived community support. And the fact that these little dots aren't scattered all over the place, but they kind of look like a cloud moving together, shows that there's a deep connection and relationship between these two things. It tends to be folks who perceive their life to be a little bit higher on the well-being scale who feel more supported by their communities. And it tends to be that folks whose life is not as high on the well-being scale tend to think that they don't have as much support from their communities. And the reason that it's color coded is that the single biggest predictor of both of these things is folks' financial comfort.
The perception of how well they're doing. And so if you, particularly those in the back, if you squint, right? That's a lot of orange down here. And orange correlates, or is labeled by those who say that their financial comfort is struggling, that they are financially struggling. It fades into some yellow and some light blue here in the middle for those who are getting by and for those who are comfortable.
And finally, you see the highest concentration of those sort of dark turquoise dots up here in the top where those are people who say that their financial comfort, that they're prosperous. And this raises really important questions about one, what are the baseline financial and economic conditions in which people need to have the time, to have the agency, to be able to participate in their community, to think beyond immediate survival, and to engage in a way that helps reinforce that they have community and that they're supported. And second, if we assume, which we hypothesize, that community truly matters, then how can community also help improve your perception and your personal experience of your own well-being? And so these are examples of questions we don't yet have answers to.
But the data really prompted us to start thinking about and looking more at the relationship between our well-being and our community support, and the mediation that financial stability and security can provide. Why I'm harping on this particular point is that these aren't subtle differences. These are, in scientific terms, dramatic.
So if you are prosperous compared to those who describe their financial situation as struggling, you are significantly more likely to have strong roots in your community, to have the right amount of social connection, to be happy, to feel hopeful, to be able to be yourself, to feel like you have control, and to finally, and sort of plus 38 points here, feel like your story belongs as part of the American story.
And what we take away from this is not that what people ultimately want is not just about money. It is about the security, safety, and stability that can provide to build the life that you imagine. And so we wanted to test that idea. If you gave people a big empty text box and they could tell you anything and you ask about one change that would make America in the future feel more successful, what would they say?
And when our data scientists, far more talented than me, use LLMs, and they go, and they code this, everything that we heard from these 35,000 people, this is how it shakes out.
What people tell us is they want everyday life to feel less stressful and more stable. They want communities that are stronger and more connected. They want more people to feel like they belong, to have time for what matters, and to feel less alone and supported. They don't talk about ideology, they don't talk about politics, they don't talk about the world, they talk about two things. They talk about stable lives and stronger communities.
And so the question that we wanna open the door to is if that's the America that we want to build, what would it take to build that future?