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 Amanda Litman
Amanda Litman is the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, diverse progressives running for down-ballot office. Since launching in 2017, RFS has elected more than 1500 leaders across nearly all 50 states, mostly women and people of color, and built the largest pipeline of potential candidates on the left.
She's also president of RFS Civics, a 501c3 that works to end the gerontocracy. Shortly after launching Run for Something, Amanda wrote a book, Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself, published by Atria in 2017. More recently, Amanda published When We're in Charge: The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership (Zando/Crooked Media Reads) in May 2025. Politico named Run for Something (and Amanda!) one of the 50 ideas driving politics in 2018. Bloomberg called her one of the people to watch in 2019. Fortune named her to their annual 40 under 40 list in 2020. In 2022, Amanda was one of the Time NEXT 100, a list of 100 rising stars from around the world. She was also a 2022 Dial Fellow at the Emerson Collective. She is a 2025/2026 Obama Foundation USA Leader. Before launching Run for Something, Amanda worked as a digital strategist — she served as email director on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign, the digital director for Charlie Crist's 2014 Florida gubernatorial campaign, the deputy email director for Organizing for Action, and an email writer for Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.
She graduated from Northwestern University in 2012 with a B.A. in American Studies. Amanda now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two daughters, and their rowdy rescue dog.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Hi, I’m Amanda Litman. I am the co-founder and president of Run for Something. For those of you who are not familiar, Run for Something is the country's largest candidate recruitment organization. We recruit and support young people to run for local office. Candidate pipeline of a quarter million people, 1,700 elected officials across the country. I am not going to talk to you about that.
I'm also a writer. I've written two books, most recently one about millennial and Gen Z leadership, about how you can create community and workplaces where people feel connected and together. Not going to talk to you about that either.
I'm going to talk to you about dinner. So rewind with me. December 2024, very bleak. Trump has just won the election. I, a professional political operative, had just had to lay off some staff. I have a two-year-old and a two-month-old. So I am deep in the postpartum trenches. I'm losing my mind. I am lonely.
Anyone who's been in that stage with little kids knows what it's like, where you are just so desperate for human adult conversation that isn't somebody screaming at you. And also it is so hard to find the time. So hard. My husband and I kept reflecting on this throughout 2024 as I was pregnant, coming out of the toddler, like, ugh, we are so lonely. It is so hard to get people to hang out. And yet when we do find them and manage to make the time, they tell us they're lonely too.
So my husband, who is responsible for really all good things in my life, said, “You know what, let's make a New Year's resolution. Every Saturday in 2025, we are going to have people over for dinner.” I was like, “That's crazy. You're the one that cooks in our house, that seems like a lot of work for you. But sure, let's try it.”
It's much easier to have people in our home with little kids than it is to go elsewhere, we can just put the baby down when she gets sleepy. This will be fine. So we made a list of everyone we know, we put it in a spreadsheet because we are who we are, and then we started sending text messages. Hey, Declan has a New Year's resolution. He's gonna host people in our home, he, not we, he, is gonna host people in our home every Saturday in 2025. Are you free these three Saturdays?
We started building a list. People started saying yes. And that first Saturday in January, I distinctly remember, we had two different couples come over along with their two toddlers, and unbeknownst to us, the woman was pregnant at the time. And we ate BLT sandwiches sitting on the floor of my living room. And the baby was screaming for so long, and it was magical.
And then the next weekend, we had more families over, one of whom we kinda knew that well, one of whom we didn't, was like a daycare family we saw at pickup. And I had done the minimum viable cleaning that we need to do in the apartment, where the bathroom was clean, and the floors were clean enough. And the counters were clean-ish. At the very least, there was not dog kibble everywhere, and there was somewhere you could wash your hands. And then we did it the next weekend, and the next weekend. And then we got through halfway through the year, and we realized we had done it for 26 weekends in a row.
Now you may be asking, Amanda, don't your children get sick?
They are toddlers. They do, only Monday through Friday. Only when it is most inconvenient for me. And we didn't travel that much last year again to tiny little children. When we hit halfway through the year, we were like, we gotta keep this going now. I'm compulsive, I love to win the game. We're gonna keep this going.
So we did. 52 dinners in a row. I like to live my life in public. If you are on the Internet, you may see me yapping. And so I wrote about it for my Substack. AmandaLitman.Substack.com, like and subscribe. And it is the most viral thing I've ever put online. Millions of people read or watched these dinners. And I heard from thousands of people who said, hey, I want to do that. How do I do that?
I heard questions like, “So what did you talk about?” I heard questions like, “Where did they sit on the floor?” I have a New York City apartment, it's not that big.
It was so staggering to hear from people that they just needed the instructions on how to build community. And I had framed this quite publicly, and I still believe this, that I, a professional political operative in New York City, voted in two different elections last year and volunteered and gave money. Dinner was the most political thing I did in 2025. Because it was how I, a grown-a** adult, made new friends.
Raise your hand if you've made a new friend as an adult. It's wildly difficult, wildly difficult. Especially as a parent of little children, where most of my conversations are happening in two-minute increments, trying to keep my toddler from throwing herself off the edge of the playground. It was transformative for my friendships, for my relationships, for my marriage, for my family, and, most importantly, my sense of connection with others around me and near me.
Many of the people, not many, but a few of the people in this room came over for dinner. People who I did not know that well and said, you know what, I would like to come over. It'll be two hours, medium chance one of my children will be wearing pants. It is going to be casual, and it is going to be a time for us to connect.
Now, one of the things that I heard from a lot of the folks when I posted this online was, “Congratulations, you invented Shabbat!” OK, listen, I am Jewish. I understand Friday nights were not going to happen with, again, small children. But yes, it is the oldest ritual in the books of bringing people together to break bread. But for so many of us, especially those of us who work in politics or philanthropy or foundations or institution building. It is really hard to think. How do you operationalize that? How do you scale that? How do you create infrastructure so people can just hang out?
It's a thing I've been thinking about a lot, and I have many crazy ideas for how one might do it. But most importantly, when I think about the question of what America beyond 251 looks like, it's a country where I'm not getting questions of, “What did you guys talk about over dinner?” Or like, “What if someone said no?” It's fine. “Did others invite you back?” Sometimes. But building community doesn't mean keeping score. It means opening the doors to your home and letting them in and sharing space in a way that is vulnerable and honest and sometimes involves lots of screaming children.
And I am so proud and so grateful that my stupid husband was like, “Yeah, let's do it. Let's open the doors to our home. Let's have people.” We have kept it going into 2026. A little less compulsive. If someone gets sick, we just cancel and let it ride. But it has been the most meaningful thing that I've continued to do far and away. And as I look at what we need to build to get out of this era that we are in, it's strong ties between neighbors. It's people feeling like they can have their friends, their colleagues, their acquaintances over for dinner without feeling like it needs to look good for Instagram, without feeling like their kitchens need to be immaculate, their meals need to be perfect, that everything needs to go exactly right, that they can just talk to their neighbors over tacos or ribs or chicken pot pie, that they can use the baby's formula pitcher for water and that the plates do not have to match, because they will not.
And it can be political without being partisan. It can be political. It can be patriotic to have people over for dinner. Please come over.