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 Jason Green
Jason G. Green is a Maryland-born community organizer, attorney, storyteller, and entrepreneur. Green served as special assistant to the president and associate White House Counsel to President Obama, advising on economic and domestic policy matters. Green co-founded SkillSmart, a company that reshapes how communities measure economic impact, and is CEO of EverGreen Labs, where he supports visionary organizations working to expand economic opportunity and strengthen community. Green serves as trustee to the Pleasant View Historic Association and supports its efforts to preserve the historic site. His award-winning documentary, Finding Fellowship, explores the rich history of Quince Orchard and the fight to preserve its legacy. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and Yale Law School, Green remains rooted in the work of truth and justice, investing in stories that remind us who we are. He currently spends time between Maryland and Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Ritu, and son, Aidan.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
[Singing] I woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom. I woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom. I woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom. Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah,
[Speaking] I know I was going to have my hallelujah choir over here.
We lost one of our great freedom fighters five months ago tomorrow. Reverend Jesse Jackson. His was the first political campaign I ever worked on. I was a seven-year-old volunteering next to my parents.
And though I have to admit I don't remember all of his policy positions or all of his speeches, there were three words seared into my memory. Keep hope alive. Keep hope alive. I thought it was encouragement, words of inspiration, a rallying cry that would whip an audience into a frenzy.
But it's taken me about 40 years to fully appreciate what he meant.
Because I don't think “Keep hope alive” was ever intended to just be encouragement. It was an assignment. See, hope is not optimism. Optimism is the blind belief that things will get better. Hope requires action. Hope is a belief that our actions still matter.
And the data bears this out, as Sarah showed: people sometimes need to see it to believe it. People don't just become more hopeful because they're told to be. They need to encounter the evidence that shows that their actions, that others' actions still have some impact, that they matter.
My father, who's a Methodist preacher, would say, "Sometimes even we people of faith need to see it to believe it.” We need the demonstration. We need the examples. We need the evidence.
And I'm deeply grateful that I got my evidence sitting with my 95-year-old grandmother. I was grandma's kid. I spent, gosh, maybe 10 years ago, I left my post serving as Associate White House Counsel to President Obama to take up residence with my grandmother, where I thought that I would go and give her these gifts of dignity near the end of her life.
Well, it turns out that she was the one who was going to give me the gifts. She started telling me stories, stories that I had been too busy to hear, stories about the community that my family had helped found in rural Maryland back in 1868, shortly after their emancipation, my ancestors and other formerly enslaved people scraped and culled together $54 to buy three acres of land, to build the church building, the schoolhouse, social hall, the cemetery, or plot.
They built the institutions of community, where children could be educated, where families could worship, where loved ones could be laid to rest, and where neighbors could gather and be reminded who they are. 1868.
These were people who were considered second-class citizens, didn't have many resources, had far fewer reasons to hope, and yet they built. Not because their future was certain, but because they were certain that their future mattered. That is hope.
They didn't stop there. For a hundred years, they built and nurtured and protected that site, until in 1968, that old country church that they had built fell on hard financial times. Its mere existence was threatened.
And so they did what Black church folk do.
They gathered into a single room in a hundred-year-old building, and they debated their future.
And as that debate passionately raged, news was delivered that the drum major for justice, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
So on April 4th, 1968, in what I consider to be one of the most remarkable demonstrations of hope that I've encountered, that little country Black church decided to merge its congregation with two historically White congregations, one of which was northern and one of which was southern. Those three churches, one Black and two White, decided not to allow their past to dictate their future.
They decided that their best chapter had not yet been written, that they were going to then begin the painstaking, daily, intentional, incremental work of binding together these three institutions, these three unique histories, these three unique identities, these three unique cultures.
And so, 158 years later, because of that work, the institution of Pleasantview still stands. It still stands with its original purpose, as a place to gather, as a place to heal, as a place to educate, as a place for sanctuary. I know that firsthand, because it's where I went for sanctuary. After the murder of George Floyd, I was deep in my despair. It was Pleasantview that showed me the evidence of hope that I needed. It was 158 years of names etched on tombstones that showed me how generation after generation had committed themselves to this idea that the future was worth preserving.
We all know it when the concept of hope begins to fade. Right? You stop answering the call, we stop showing up, we start to believe that our small actions don't matter. We call hope naive, and we convince ourselves that, regardless of what we do, tomorrow is going to look a lot like today. My ancestors refused to believe that, and I believe now it's our turn. Because as Murad said, every generation of America inherits an unfinished America. And so then it's every generation's responsibility to decide what comes next. As America faces its 251st, the question I propose is, what is too precious to lose? What institutions are we strengthening? What programs are we defending? What stories are we preserving? What children are we mentoring? And what are we willing to sacrifice? What are we willing to sacrifice to make it all happen?
Because someone's going to soon inherit the America that we're building, just like I inherited the faith of those people who built that church and that schoolhouse and the social hall, the cemetery that built that community.
They had far fewer reasons to hope than we do. That is our charge. Reverend Jackson told us to keep hope alive. I believe my grandmother showed us how. I think my ancestors showed us how. We have to build. We have to defend. We have to preserve. We have to be willing to sacrifice.
We have to commit to those little actions that give community a chance to take hold. And then maybe someone will look back at us in a few years, the way that I look at my ancestors. Not because we solved every problem, but because we were willing to accept our assignment.
Because we were willing in the face of adversity to not shrink. Because the size of the problem didn't overwhelm us. Because we refuse to allow the things that matter to us most to be extinguished on our watch. That's how families survive. That's how communities survive. That's how democracies survive.
And that's how we keep hope alive. Thank you.