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 Daria Dawson
Daria C. Dawson is the Executive Director of America Votes, where she works at the intersection of democracy, coalition-building, and civic participation. A veteran political strategist and coalition builder, she leads one of the nation's largest progressive coalitions, coordinating hundreds of organizations focused on voter engagement, civic participation, and democratic representation.
Since becoming Executive Director in 2024, Dawson has led America Votes through a period of significant growth and impact, overseeing the coalition's largest-ever voter engagement program, including more than 57 million door knocks, 106 million phone calls, and over 700,000 new voter registrations nationwide. Before leading America Votes, Dawson served as Director of Strategic Engagement for then-Senator Kamala Harris's presidential campaign and as Deputy National Political Director at SEIU, where she helped lead national advocacy tied to the Fight for $15 campaign. Dawson has been recognized nationally as one of Business Insider's "20 strategists to watch," and her insights have appeared in The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Politico, The Washington Post, USA Today, and leading political and culture podcasts.
Born and raised in Florida, Dawson is a graduate of Florida A&M University and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
Continue reading for the full transcript
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When I think about agency, I don't think about politics. I think about my grandmother. My maternal grandmother was the granddaughter of a man who had lived in slavery. As a little girl, she sat at her grandfather's feet and listened as he told her the stories about him coming across the Atlantic in the hold of a slave ship.
Years later, she would share those stories with me. Within my lifetime, I've heard stories that were passed down from a man who had lived in slavery to his granddaughter and then to me.
History was not something that I first learned in a textbook. It lived at my family's kitchen table. My grandmother grew up on the farms of Jackson County, Florida, where generations of our family had worked the land.
This was the life that she knew. It was the life that generations before her had known. And then World War Two happened. Opportunity arrived. She and my grandfather made the decision that would change the trajectory of our family. They left the farms of Jackson County, Florida, and moved to the big city, Panama City, Florida, where they went to work at the Wainwright Shipyard. But that opportunity came at a cost because they had to leave behind their oldest child, my uncle, with family while they did this work.
My grandmother became a welder. She was what we now know as the Black Rosies, Rosie the Riveter, stories that we don't talk about a lot. So when I think about that journey of a lifetime of a granddaughter of a man who had been a slave becoming a woman building ships that supported America's fight for democracy around the world, like thousands of Black women like her during World War Two, she had this opportunity to do work that was never open to them, building ships to defend democracy abroad while being the citizen of a country where democracy still did not include her.
No one promised her what that success would look like, and no one guaranteed her future. But my grandmother made the choice that her past of working on a farmland was not going to be her future.
I doubt she ever knew what the word agency meant. She probably just wanted to make her life better. But that is, in fact, what agency is. She didn't wait for history to change. She decided to become a part of it. And in doing so, she did more than change her life. She expanded what my family believed was possible. My grandmother's courage became my inheritance. And her story became my definition of agency.
We spend a lot of time asking people to participate, vote, volunteer, run for office, attend a meeting, make a phone call. And those things do matter. But I think we have been asking the wrong first question.
Before we can participate, we have to believe that participation matters. Before we vote, we have to believe that our voice matters. That belief is agency. Mumuration recently asked Americans whether ordinary people can make a difference in their communities and 93 percent said yes. That should give us hope. But at the same time, only 41 percent actually took action. And nearly a third, one in three said that they wanted to act but did not.
So somewhere between belief and behavior, something gets lost. That's the gap that, as someone who works in civic participation, I'm interested in. Because democracy does not simply require belief, it requires practice.
Too often we talk about democracy as if it's about elections and it's about election day. It is not. Agency is what democracy looks like before election day. It's that teacher that refuses to give up on the student. It's that entrepreneur who decides to open up a business in an area that pretty much is going downhill. It looks like that mentor who sees something in someone and invests time and commitment into them.
It's that neighbor you all see that has that free public library in the neighborhood. It's that person, God bless their soul, who volunteers to coach Little League.
And yes, it is about voting, and it matters. But it's never just dependent on democracy; it's never just dependent on voting. History teaches us this lesson over and over again, and I was a history major, so I love history. But Black communities across the South understood agency before anyone gave it a name.
When schools excluded children who look like me, freedom schools were built. When segregation denied dignity, communities organized things like the Montgomery bus boycott that built the infrastructure to sustain it for 381 days.
When Black women were denied economic opportunity, the Atlanta Washer Women organized. They did not wait for permission. They did not wait for certainty. They took action. Agency has always required us to move before we know what the outcome is. Sometimes we like to confuse confidence with agency.
Confidence says, I know this will work. Agency says, I don't know how this is going to end, but I'm going to do it anyway. My grandmother did not know how her story was going to end. The women in Atlanta did not know. The communities that built the freedom schools did not know. The marchers who crossed the Edmond Pettus Bridge did not know.
But they knew that the future was something that they wanted to shape. And as we celebrate 250 years of this country, I don't think the defining question is whether or not democracy will survive. I think the defining question is, what habits are we practicing today that the next generation will inherit tomorrow?
Because democracy was not built at once. It has always been built one decision at a time. One person, one family, one neighborhood, one classroom, one business. My grandmother never imagined that decades later, her granddaughter would be standing on the stage talking about democracy.
She thought she was building ships. She was, in fact, building me. That's the beautiful thing about agency. We never know whose future we're building. But the next courageous decision you make will not only change your life. It's going to change someone else that you've never met.
My grandmother gave me permission to believe in possibilities. And if this country is going to continue to thrive for another 225, 250 years, we have to leave that with one another: the courage to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. Thank you.