26 Jul Reflecting on America at 250
Welcome to SparkAnew
Early last month, I sat in a room on Capitol Hill listening to a senator, two members of Congress, a surgeon general, a Harvard professor, and a handful of people who spend their lives doing the quiet work of bringing neighbors together, all circling the same question:
What kind of people, and what kind of communities, do we need to become if we hope to realize America's highest ideals?
The timing was hard to ignore. The country just marked 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, and the conversations about what comes next are everywhere: policy, economics, technology, demographics. Those conversations matter. The gathering I attended was one expression of a letter from the Bahá'ís of the United States, A Common Endeavor: Realizing the Promise of America, written for the occasion.
But I came home thinking about something underneath all of them.We spend a lot of energy asking what's wrong with the country. We spend far less asking what habits of relationship, what qualities of character, and what shared practices actually let a diverse people build something together. Freedom, equality, and justice aren't just lines in a founding document; they're outcomes of how people treat each other, day after day, on ordinary streets.
That question has been at the center of my own work for a while now.
Through SparkAnew, we're building SparkPlace: a way to find the cafés, bookstores, studios, parks, and gathering spots where strangers keep showing up for each other. We call these "third places," the spaces beyond home and work where people slowly become neighbors. I've come to believe communities aren't rebuilt mainly through better systems. They're rebuilt through better relationships, one repeated encounter at a time. Systems matter, but relationships are what give a system life.
That's why the conversations I heard in Washington landed so hard. A senator talked about the patient work of crossing old divides. A surgeon general talked about a country where we love better, serve better, and grow better. A journalist talked about learning to disagree well instead of avoiding disagreement altogether. Different vocabularies, same underlying question: how do we rebuild trust and a sense of shared purpose in a country that's forgotten how?
Over the next several weeks, I want to walk through what I heard, one voice at a time, and connect it to a question that's become central to how I think about SparkAnew:
What conditions help strangers become neighbors?
I don't have that fully worked out. But I've come to think that asking better questions together, and building the everyday places where those questions get asked, is itself part of the answer. Striving to be HUEman isn't a solo project.If America is opening a new chapter, maybe the work isn't only to fix our institutions. Maybe it's to strengthen the fabric of community: the relationships, habits, and places that let people become more fully human together.
I'd love to have you along for it.
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