Executive Summary

Project Overview

Two years ago, when Democracy 2076 first spoke to people about amending the US Constitution, most people thought the idea was impossible. Last year, folks were more amendment-curious. In our conversations this year, especially since January, we’ve found that people are hungry and ready for big, substantive, structural change. We hope that in 50 years from now, our descendants gather to explore how a mighty, imperfect, persistent pro-democracy movement amended the United States Constitution.

This year, we helped participants understand their role in catalyzing and sustaining Constitutional change. We are in the right place, at the right time, to provide a clear, proactive vision and plan with concrete strategies to catalyze popular energy towards democracy reform.

At our first convening in December 2023, we aligned on three proposed categories of amendments which were common across all of the scenarios: re-structuring elections, structural changes to Congress, and guaranteed socioeconomic rights. We left our June 2024 convening with a long term power analysis: we built the foundation for a 50 year amendment ratification strategy; discussed current campaigns for federal and state constitutional conventions; and gained insights into the power and resources that are currently available for existing efforts and will be needed to achieve our goals.

In June 2025, our coalition came back together to achieve these four goals:

During our time together, we achieved these goals and made substantial steps towards helping participants understand how structural changes impacted their day-to-day work, the necessity of broad coalitions in amending the Constitution, and finally, equipped them with tools and resources to take their piece of the greater strategy back to their home organization and beyond.

Bridging Strategic Horizons: From Reactive Defense to Proactive Constitution-Building

The convening's first goal addressed a critical gap in understanding: we needed participants and partners to understand how constitutional change and futures work related to their daily organizing efforts. Many coalition members engage primarily in defensive strategies—protecting existing rights and institutions from immediate threats—making constitutional reform work seem abstract or disconnected from urgent current needs. Exit surveys from our June 2024 convening indicated that 2 in 5 participants struggled to clearly see their work represented in the overall strategy outlined in the convening.

This goal emerged from recognition that sustainable democratic progress requires connecting short-term defensive victories to long-term offensive strategy. Without clear linkages between daily work and constitutional vision, organizations are likely to prioritize the urgent and important work of keeping their communities safe. Of course, this comes with the risk of perpetual reactive positioning that, as one participant observed, means "the best we can hope to do is hold our ground, rather than make gains."

The convening aimed to help participants reframe longer-term constitutional strategy within the context of their day-to-day work, creating coherent connections between immediate organizing needs and transformational democratic change.

Establishing Shared Foundation Through Collective Learning

At the very beginning of our gathering, we laid the essential work of building shared vocabulary and baseline understandings through four categories of readings that intentionally connected present work to future vision: drawing on leading futurists, new research on American democracy, establishing the importance of learning across differences, and providing clarity in strategic vision and implementation.

This approach recognized that constitutional reform occurs within broader systemic change rather than isolated political processes. From education to generational dynamics to cultural transformation, constitutional work requires comprehensive imagination and scope combined with disciplined long-term prioritization.

Learning from Ancestral Knowledge

The convening emphasized that constitutional futures work must draw from ancestral and historic knowledge rather than abandoning past experience for abstract innovation. This approach—informed by leading futurists —recognizes that communities have always engaged in futures thinking as part of survival and transformation strategies that inform contemporary constitutional organizing.

By understanding our constitutional reform work in relation to the work of Afrofuturism and other similar traditions, we can learn how they utilize imagination about the future and creativity in considering new systems as core linchpins of part of existing survival and resistance strategies. Learning from these experiences provides concrete models for organizing within uncertainty and building democratic alternatives within sometimes-hostile conditions.

Connecting Daily Work to Constitutional Vision

Highlighting the urgency and importance of imagination in moments of crisis helped participants understand that visionary constitutional work represents strategic necessity rather than idealistic luxury, especially when confronting the inherent uncertainty and chaos of modern democracy.

The convening emphasized that futures thinking combined with collective action generates power. For example, one participant shared how the military's distinctive position within the federal government exemplified this principle: the military’s unique forecasting capabilities and practice of requesting resources as a collective body—aligned with an entire budget category within the Congressional appropriations process—create unparalleled influence and responsiveness capacity.

A striking contrast emerged around Congressional capacity limitations. When Congress requires additional staff or support, they consistently turn to military resources because defense budgets provide robust infrastructure and immediate availability. This pattern represents unintentional militarization of political processes—not through malicious intent, but as a consequence of who is prepared and well-resourced.

The lesson of this proved stark: decisions are made by people who show up, and the people who are most prepared and resourced are often the ones who show up. If democracy advocates don't plan systematically for the future of the US Constitution, they cede that terrain to others who will.

Pre-convening surveys revealed moderate clarity about how constitutional amendments would affect daily work, averaging 3.68 on a 5-point scale with significant variation in responses. Many participants understood some connections but lacked comprehensive frameworks for integration into their current work.

Post-convening results demonstrated substantial improvement, with clarity about amendment impact on daily work increasing 16% to 4.27 out of 5. Significantly, the range of responses narrowed considerably: while initial surveys included many scores of 2, post-convening surveys eliminated all 2-level responses while maintaining strong 4 and 5 scores. This pattern indicates that the convening successfully moved all participants toward greater understanding rather than simply reinforcing existing high-level comprehension.

Even participants who previously understood defensive-offensive connections gained clarity, resources, and energy to persuade their organizations toward longer time horizons.

Workshop Application: Testing Constitutional Changes on Current Challenges

Counterfactual Analysis Exercise

We asked participants to examine current 2025 challenges through the lens of potential constitutional amendments identified in previous convenings: electoral reforms including right to vote and campaign finance changes, congressional reforms like House expansion and proportional representation, and guaranteed socio-economic rights including Universal Basic Income and environmental protections.

Participants analyzed two critical questions: What challenges would not have occurred in 2025 if these amendments were already passed? What problems would have persisted despite constitutional change?

Key Insights from Constitutional Impact Analysis

The Right to Vote amendment generated significant discussion about judicial review standards. Participants noted that constitutional voting rights would require judges to apply stricter scrutiny to voting restrictions, potentially preventing many current voter suppression efforts through legal rather than legislative mechanisms.

In addition, a conversation around Senate abolition exemplified the value of intentional inclusion of both national-level Congressional reform advocates and state-based organizers in constitutional planning discussions. These groups typically operate with fundamentally different problem analyses and strategic approaches. 

For example, advocates focused on the modernization of government bureaucracies often focus on ensuring Congress has capacity needed for effectiveness, emphasizing procedural improvements, staff increases, and strengthening institutions within existing constitutional frameworks. State-based organizers and activists, on the other hand, emphasize the changes to those constitutional frameworks that are required to address representational and responsiveness deficits, focusing on reforms like proportional representation, House expansion, and participation mechanisms like a national referendum.

When discussing the potential abolition of the Senate, state-based participants pushed national Congressional reform advocates to think beyond capacity improvements toward structural transformation, while Congressional experts highlighted implementation complexities and existing institutional strengths that purely structural approaches might unintentionally eliminate.

Democracy 2076's role in facilitating these conversations is crucial for comprehensive strategy development. Both perspectives contribute essential elements: national expertise provides implementation knowledge while state-based organizing offers transformational vision and grassroots legitimacy.

Confronting Coalition Breadth: From Comfort Zones to Constitutional Scale

The convening's second goal addressed a fundamental tension that emerged from the previous year's gathering: as participants began to grasp the true breadth of coalition necessary for constitutional amendments, many became uncomfortable with its implications. Feedback from women's groups, Black organizers, Native communities, and Congressional reform advocates revealed concerns that their specific issues and communities wouldn't remain centered in such an expansive coalition effort.

This discomfort reflected deeper strategic questions about working across not only ideological differences but also strategic approaches—between inside political work and outside pressure campaigns, issue-specific organizing and structural reform, and in communities with different relationships to existing political systems. As the June 2024 report noted, participants often pursued "vastly different strategies" while sharing "overwhelmingly similar goals," creating both opportunity and tension for collaborative constitutional reform.

Constitutional amendment represents the largest and widest possible goal for our democracy, requiring correspondingly broad and diverse coalition engagement that challenges traditional organizing comfort zones while maintaining principled strategic focus.

Strategic Framework: Stakeholder Spectrum Analysis

The 1-5 Stakeholder Mapping Tool

In partnership with Search for Common Ground (SFCG)—an internationally renowned NGO devoted to peacebuilding and conflict resolution through multipartiality—and their initiative Common Ground USA, we introduced a systematic framework to help participants in understanding and engaging different levels of support and opposition. We intentionally drew upon the unique positionality and expertise of SFCG in order to locate our work within an international context. By grounding the conversation in the ability of countries with much more violent conflict to engage in  multiparty peacebuilding, we opened up new possibilities for learning and impact. Search for Common Ground’s 1-5 Stakeholder Spectrum identifies:

Using this tool, participants mapped a spectrum of stakeholders around each category of amendments.

Insights and Analysis

The mapping exercise revealed key strategic insights to the effectiveness of our coalition-building efforts.

Coalitional Blindspots

Participants consistently overestimated the poles (1s and 5s) while underestimating the middle groups (2s, 3s and 4s). For example, some participants perceived certain stakeholders as unmoveable 5s, but other organizers who had engaged with the same stakeholders found them to be persuadable 3s or 4s. Conversely, there were some stakeholders who participants thought were 1s, who Democracy 2076 had engaged with and found were 2s or 3s.

One participant observed that “I think the first hurdle [to constitutional reform] is going to be working with the people we expect to be champions who are actually somewhere between 2 & 4. It seems like once we have a better understanding of how to do that (and some changed hearts and minds under our belt), we will be in a better position to work with a wider set of stakeholders."

As a result of this common dynamic, Search for Common Ground advised that messaging and engagement strategies are often focused on the existing coalitions’ base (1s) while underestimating middle groups (3s and 4s) where the greatest potential for changing opinion exists. In addition, assumptions about who the opposition is often prevent productive opportunities for coalition engagement. 

Completing this exercise as a group helped us as a coalition and as individual organizations to get clear on where there may be additional opportunities for engagement and potential partners we may have written off or taken for granted.

Geographic and Structural Advantages for Cross-Difference Work

Workshop discussions revealed that successful bipartisan collaboration often correlates with specific systemic conditions rather than the willingness to engage across differences. Panelists noted that being in states with smaller populations enables more direct relationships between citizens and legislators, creating opportunities for personal engagement that transcend partisan positioning.

These states also experience less financial influence in elections compared to larger states like Florida, Texas, or New York. This pattern suggests that bipartisan constitutional success might be more achievable once representation problems are addressed through electoral and congressional reforms that reduce influence based on money and increase citizen-legislator accessibility.

Role Differentiation and Strategic Division of Labor

A crucial insight emerged that not everyone needs to engage in cross-difference work personally, but someone must do it for constitutional reform to be ultimately successful. This recognition allows for strategic role differentiation rather than requiring all coalition members to work beyond their comfort zones or community relationships. Role differentiation is also important because some are concerned not for their comfort, but for their safety. As one participant noted: "We're trying to figure out how to work with them… while they're trying to figure out how to oppress us."

Some participants struggled with the stakes of not doing cross-divide work while acknowledging they weren't the appropriate people for such engagement. For them, the importance of organizations supporting rather than ostracizing coalition members who engage in cross-difference work became paramount. 

As a participant from West Virginia's Rural Digital Resilience Project observed, people use weapons to shield from their own powerlessness, and that such defensive reactions can be redirected toward collaborative engagement, offered practical guidance for working with seemingly intractable opposition: "The closer you are to working with people on the ground, the closer you are to the people you want to move and their realities." This suggests that cross-difference work is most effective when rooted in authentic community relationships rather than abstract political strategy.

Strategic vs. Ideological Support

Workshop analysis revealed the importance of distinguishing between ideological support and strategic and/or process support. For example, someone might strongly champion health care access while opposing a right to health constitutional amendment, requiring separate stakeholder assessments for issue agreement and strategic approach agreement.

Understanding this distinction enables more nuanced coalition building that can engage ideologically-aligned stakeholders who prefer different implementation strategies rather than assuming that strategic disagreement indicates fundamental opposition.

Aikido Politics: Strategic Engagement Across Opposition

Foundational Principles for Cross-Difference Work

The next framework we introduced with Search for Common Ground was the concept of Aikido Politics: a principled approach for driving change despite powerful opposition. 

Aikido is the martial art of the unarmed. It is a Japanese practice for people to harness the movement and momentum of their opponent. Unlike traditional confrontational organizing that fights directly against opposition or defensive approaches that avoid conflict, Aikido politics involves leaning into opposition to leverage attacks for strategic advantage, helping activists succeed even in the face of great odds.

In our session, we split up into groups of three, where one person was asked to provide an argument in support of an amendment, one person had to effectively oppose that argument, and a third person evaluated for signs of a productive conversation.

Key concepts include:

Separating People from Problems: Address substantive policy disagreements and psychological/emotional concerns separately, dealing with emotions first before engaging policy specifics.

Addressing Perceptions and Emotions: Include opposition voices in decision-making processes, address concerns important to other sides, and create opportunities for unexpected positive engagement. Openly talk about your own feelings and theirs and engage in actions that can have strong emotional impact.

Communication Strategy: Acknowledge opposing opinions without agreeing, demonstrate understanding without compromising core principles, and engage in side-by-side problem-solving rather than adversarial debate.

Shared Problem Identification: Focus on meeting the underlying needs of different stakeholders rather than defending specific policy positions, creating collaborative approaches to shared challenges.

Choosing your Battles: We need to be clear of our BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) to be able to critically choose when to build trust, when to act, and when to take a different step.

By shifting expectations from ideal coalition partnerships to practical collaborative capacity, we can acknowledge imperfection while maintaining strategic effectiveness.

The framework emphasizes that relationships must be established well in advance of specific campaign moments. Successful bipartisan constitutional work requires ongoing trust-building rather than transactional engagement during critical votes or crisis periods. Doing this work amidst political systems and cultures that are primed to be confrontational is not easy; a core piece of this workshop was to reiterate the value and efficacy of a more flexible, “lean-in” style approach to coalition work, especially when it comes to relationship-building and more efficient uses of capacity.

Expanded Coalition Vision and Strategic Skills

Quantitative Improvements in Coalition Understanding

Post-convening surveys demonstrated substantial progress on coalition building metrics. Understanding of necessary coalition breadth increased 16.7% from 3.82 to 4.46 out of 5, with the median score improving from 4 to 5. This represents one of the strongest improvements across all convening goals.

Confidence in working across ideological and strategic lines increased 6.5% from 3.96 to 4.22 out of 5, indicating that participants gained both understanding of coalition requirements and practical skills for cross-difference engagement.

Coalition Building as Democratic Practice

These workshops helped establish that coalition building across difference represents living the values of democracy rather than optional strategic enhancement. Working with people you disagree with is a fundamental feature of constitutional reform rather than an unfortunate necessity.

The Aikido Politics framework offered principled approaches for engaging opposition constructively. Combined with examples of successful cross-difference collaboration, participants gained both inspiration and practical guidance for expanding their coalition engagement beyond traditional comfort zones.

Through systematic analysis of stakeholders and strategic engagement approaches, the Democracy 2076 coalition developed enhanced capacity for the broad, diverse partnerships necessary for constitutional amendment success while maintaining principled commitment to their own values—understanding that engagement across difference, when done so carefully and safely, is distinct from endorsement and can be a useful (and often essential) tool for sustainable long-term change.

There still are, however, important gaps—especially between perceived skills and actual capacity for cross-difference work. While many people indicated that they felt very comfortable working across differences in their pre-convening surveys, conversations in the room in response to the workshops indicated a need to expand understanding of the degree of difference we might work across and invest in hard skills necessary for such engagement, rather than abstract concepts.

Meeting Our Strategic Objectives

Building on previous convenings that identified priority constitutional amendments to ensure effective, representative, and responsive democracy, and mapped essential strategic activities, this gathering focused on collective progress toward passage in the context of the shifting political landscape since November 2024 and potential scenarios that could impact efforts over the next five years.

Through expert presentations, collaborative workshops, and strategic stress-testing, we transformed an ambitious but complex 50-year constitutional reform strategy into a more accessible and actionable framework. The refined plan provides a cogent strategy for constitutional amendments while maintaining the flexibility necessary for effective adaptation to changing political conditions. With clearer sequencing, stronger stakeholder buy-in, and improved coordination mechanisms, the Democracy 2076 coalition is well-positioned to advance long-term constitutional reform that strengthens American democracy for future generations.

Understanding Power and Historical Context

The convening examined historical structural reform efforts through the lens of Three Faces of Power: organizing to influence decision-makers, building infrastructure, and creating culture change. Various participants shared their expertise and analysis of how marriage equality, Reconstruction amendments, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Progressive Era amendments reveal critical lessons about what works, what fails, and what gaps persist in constitutional reform efforts.

We are sharing the main insights and takeaways here in the hopes that they will inform your work like they have ours.

Marriage Equality: Winning Infrastructure, in the Short Term

Organizing to Influence Decision-Makers
The marriage equality movement demonstrated sophisticated strategic planning and nimble, opportunistic execution. Organizers identified New York as a critical tipping point where success would catalyze national momentum. After New York passed marriage equality, ten other states followed. The movement developed a strategy that placed each state in categories based on likelihood of success, enabling resource allocation and tactical customization across different political contexts. This systematic approach to state-by-state organizing provided a model for sequential implementation.

Building Infrastructure
Infrastructure development centered on political power-building and moving with existing groups and parties rather than creating entirely new organizational structures. This approach leveraged existing political relationships while building marriage equality-specific capacity.

Despite remarkable success, the marriage equality movement revealed a fundamental strategic limitation that offers crucial lessons for constitutional reform. Organizers had a clear policy goal but lacked a North Star vision for sustained progress for LGBTQ equality; namely, the movement failed to plan for what happened after marriage equality was won. As a result, the infrastructure built for marriage equality fell apart and was unable to respond effectively to attacks on trans rights and other emerging concerns. This gap demonstrates the critical importance of maintaining ambitious cultural North Stars that sustain infrastructure beyond individual policy victories.

Creating Culture Change
The marriage equality movement's cultural strategy proved particularly sophisticated. Empathy building became central to culture shifting work, with organizers asking heterosexual people why they get married and aligning those reasons with LGBT community desires for the same rights and recognition. The movement focused on erasing stigma while simultaneously creating celebrations and power around gay marriage and coming out. This dual approach addressed negative cultural narratives while building positive cultural momentum and visibility.

Reconstruction Amendments: Military Force without Cultural Foundation

Organizing to Influence Decision-Makers
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were adopted at a unique historical moment, while the Union Army occupied the South after the Civil War. The federal government set terms influenced by abolitionist activists and did not permit former Confederate states to reenter the Union unless they ratified the Reconstruction Amendments. Some states like New Jersey attempted to rescind their approval. The bloody and convoluted process underscores that there are multiple paths to formal constitutional change, regardless of what Article V says, but there can be serious costs.

Building Infrastructure
When the federal government committed to enforcing the Reconstruction Amendments, seeds of multiracial democracy began to take root in the South. But when the federal government retreated from that commitment and withdrew the military, infrastructure for the amendments' implementation crumbled, and decision-makers institutionalized Jim Crow in its place. Civil rights activists pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In response, opponents of multiracial democracy invented the idea of constitutional "originalism," and successfully developed a social movement to undermine effective implementation of the Reconstruction Amendments. This history proves that formal constitutional change alone does not accomplish an amendment's goals, and shows the need for public support and sustained elite leadership.

Creating Culture Change
The Reconstruction Amendments provide a stark and fundamental lesson: changes to the Constitution's text that are not accompanied by changes to the culture are deeply vulnerable to subversion. A motivated and organized opposition, in particular, can rob even the boldest amendments of their radical potential.

Equal Rights Amendment: The Ongoing Ratification Challenge

Organizing to Influence Decision-Makers
Though there has been persistent advocacy for the ERA since the women’s suffrage movement first proposed it in 1923, the act’s ratification is not universally recognized. Congress passed the ERA in 1972 with a 7-year timeline and later received a 3-year extension. After decades of organizing to push bipartisan support in state legislatures, the ERA reached the 38 states threshold in 2020 with Virginia’s ratification. However, questions still remain around whether timelines, extensions, and recissions of ratification are constitutional. ERA advocates successfully encouraged President Biden to announce its ratification near the end of his term in 2024 on the premise that deadlines for ratification were not legally enforceable. However, it has not been officially written into the Constitution. Ratification efforts appear even less likely under the current administration, which is one of the reasons why a multi-faceted approach that prioritizes broader cultural, not just legislative, change is essential for those working on these issues.

Building Infrastructure
Since originally ratifying the ERA, five states have voted to rescind or otherwise withdraw their ratification. There are competing ideas of whether revocation of ratification has legal validity. State landscapes, parties, and politics have realigned over the past decades, with bipartisan support alternately surging and waning over the years, creating challenges for sustained momentum.

The infrastructure that was built to ratify the ERA in the early 1970s has not been able, in some geographies, to sustain over this extended period of time and political volatility, which threatens the viability of the amendment being affirmed as part of the Constitution.

Creating Culture Change
The women's suffrage movement, which first pushed for the ERA in 1923, framed itself as a patriotic movement, strengthening cultural appeal and political viability across different constituencies. Forty years later, the rise of the women’s rights movement of the late 1960s led Congress to act. Now, the amendment’s liminal status represents what ERA organizers call "an agenda-setting fight," where the strategy is culture rather than legislative advocacy. Advocates of this approach promote "cognitive awakening”—realizing we have this amendment even while its formal status remains contested. This approach demonstrates the prioritization of cultural change over official legal change, a novel approach that will be interesting to learn from in the coming years. 

Progressive-Era Amendments: Radical-Moderate Coalition Strategy

Organizing to Influence Decision-Makers
Progressive Era amendments consist of the 16th-19th amendments (federal income tax, popular election of Senators, Prohibition, and women’s suffrage), all of which were ratified within a seven year timespan. The 16th and 19th Amendments particularly demonstrated consistent success through bifurcated strategy, whereby some groups demanded radical change, while others advocated for moderate approaches that then gained support with decision-makers. This strategic sequencing moved the Overton Window of political acceptability.

Building Infrastructure
The success of the Progressive Era relied heavily on legislative persistence, introducing and reintroducing ideas until political conditions aligned for passage. Proponents focused lobbying efforts on state legislatures, where populist and progressive movements were strong. For Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage, advocates achieved early wins at the state and local level, which built momentum. This sustained infrastructure development established the conditions for rapid action when opportunities emerged. Furthermore, the groundwork laid for the coalition during this time period allowed organizers to respond quickly and dramatically to the Great Depression.

Creating Culture Change
When passing these amendments, Congress did not, in fact, expect that states would ratify many of the Progressive Era amendments, but rather used them as a strategy to quell the support for more radical options. Ratification momentum, therefore, relied on sustained cultural change work and state-level organizing.

The 16th Amendment was strategically framed as a response to inequality and a way to restore Congressional authority after the Supreme Court struck down earlier income tax attempts in 1895. Proponents built bipartisan support by having Republicans introduce it as a moderate compromise, while using the constitutional amendment process of ratification through state legislatures to make opposition appear undemocratic and give the measure legitimacy. The amendment gained momentum through focused lobbying at the state level, where populist movements were strong and lawmakers faced pressure from constituents who wanted to reduce reliance on tariffs that hurt the poor.

Similarly, for the 17th Amendment, reformers capitalized on the growing public dissatisfaction with the influence of special interests and political machines in state legislatures—especially in the selection of senators. Advocates worked across party lines to build a broad coalition of those who wanted to reduce the governmental control by elites. This coalition galvanized public support, ultimately creating significant political pressure on Congress to act.

Advocates for Prohibition had built cultural power through moral and religious framing, casting alcohol as the root of crime, poverty, and domestic violence, especially using stories of harm to women and children to gain public sympathy. Prohibition advocates took advantage of the geopolitical moment of World War I and furthered the cause by casting German-American brewers (like Anheuser-Busch) as unpatriotic and arguing that the grain used to make alcohol was better used for feeding soldiers and civilians. The Anti-Saloon League—the most effective lobbying group for Prohibition—built powerful alliances with religious and community groups and utilized focused media and storytelling campaigns to first achieve early wins at the state and local levels to build momentum and normalize these types of policies before pushing for Prohibition in the federal government.

Finally, suffragists built upon the media narrative infrastructure of the Prohibition movement and presented the 19th Amendment as a further response to the abuse of women in the home and in society, while tying voting rights to the larger fights for justice, equality, and democracy that characterized the Progressive Era. They highlighted women’s contributions to the war effort and argued that women had earned the right to vote through their patriotism and public service. This reframing helped win over President Woodrow Wilson and many lawmakers who had been previously opposed. Like other Progressive Amendments, suffragists focused first on winning victories at the state and local level to build momentum and utilized a multi-pronged approach that included both more militant and more moderate tactics to put pressure on key government actors from multiple angles.

Strategy Revision

The review of historical amendment efforts within the context of three faces of power was instructive in revising our own strategy. We applied these learnings to a review of our plan for passing amendments we’d aligned on at previous convenings: 1) universal basic income/guaranteed socio-economic rights, 2) electoral reform, and 3) structural Congressional change. We shared the plan developed from input at the 2024 convening and solicited feedback from participants on necessary additions or refinements. If you’d like to see more details on this work, please reach out to Democracy 2076 through our contact form.

Five-Strategy Framework

Participant feedback during the workshop generated significant refinements across all strategies, including suggestions for new stakeholder engagement and additional research opportunities. The revised plan reflects collaboration from across the field and encompasses five interconnected strategies, each with specified inputs, sequenced activities, and outcome-dependent phases rather than rigid timelines. This approach ensures flexibility while maintaining clear progression markers.

Gap Analysis

We also developed a Gap Matrix to evaluate amendments across multiple dimensions: public awareness of underlying problems, expert consensus on amendment efficacy, public support levels, advocacy landscape, and coordination between state and national advocates.

The gap matrix allows for efficient resource allocation and strategic focus on areas with greatest potential for near-term progress while building capacity for longer-term efforts.

Possible Challenges and Opportunities in the Next Five Years

Preparing for Changes to Circumstances

After refining the constitutional reform plan as a group, a crucial component of the convening involved stress-testing the refined strategy against potential scenarios that could significantly impact constitutional reform efforts. This exercise examined how strategic approaches might need to adapt to changing contexts while identifying scenario-specific opportunities and challenges.

We asked participants to consider three questions for each of the 10 scenarios: 

1. How would this event shift political will and for what amendments? 
2. How would this accelerate, derail, or reshape our strategy?
3. How do we get there? Suggest activities, messages, etc., working backwards from 2030 to 2025. Consider how census, redistricting work, and the 250th anniversaries of the Declaration of Independence (2026), and the U.S. Constitution (2029) might be used to build toward this moment.

For more details on this workshop, please reach out to Democracy 2076 through our contact form.

Emergence of New Amendments in Our Planning

As seen above, the Scenario analysis activity uncovered several new constitutional amendments that weren’t originally included from previous convenings. Participants found that technology and executive power are creating constitutional vulnerabilities that our identified amendments didn’t address. Our original amendments were explicitly developed in the context of a 50-year timeline; only when we added possible scenarios of the next five years did these new categories emerge. This activity illustrates a key aspect of long-term planning - while it should not be constrained by immediate concerns, it is most effective when tethered to potentialities that may occur over a variety of timespans, including the near-term.

1. Limits on Executive Powers: The pandemic, climate, major war, and terror scenarios all showed the same pattern: crises become pretexts for the President to claim unlimited authority that effectively suspends normal constitutional protections. These aren't separate problems but manifestations of the same constitutional vulnerability—the lack of explicit limits on presidential emergency powers. Each of these scenarios showed the Executive using different crisis justifications (public health, climate emergency, national security, public safety) to bypass democratic oversight and constitutional constraints. The scenarios suggest that executive power constraint amendments might be an essential foundation to other Constitutional reform. Without clear limits on presidential authority in crisis moments, other constitutional changes remain vulnerable to executive power during emergencies. 
2. Data & AI Governance: The deep fake, AI job replacement, and data breach scenarios revealed democratic governance threats that our existing amendments don't address. For example, data breaches create public anger at corporate greed and government incompetence, making data privacy a natural rallying point.

These two new amendment categories suggest we prepare solutions for the technological and executive power challenges that our scenarios consistently identified.

Key Amendment Insights from Scenario Analysis

The scenario planning analysis revealed several insights about constitutional amendment strategy resilience and timing. Universal Basic Income emerged as the amendment most likely to gain support across scenarios, gaining support in six out of ten scenarios, demonstrating remarkable utility across different crisis types. This finding may influence amendment priorities as these crises arise.

Scenarios involving economic disruption—including Economic Crisis, AI Replacement, and Pandemic scenarios—drive support for multiple amendments simultaneously.

For example, wealth tax proposals also show strong support during these scenarios where corporate behavior becomes a mobilizing issue. Additionally, the Right to Health gains traction across scenarios of economic disruption and also climate disaster scenarios—when existing systems fail people during crises. This pattern suggests the importance of recognizing the interconnected nature of our political and economic systems both in considering when strategic opportunities may arise and in being explicit about how our political system enables economic success and security. Emphasizing the way amendments will help establish the enabling conditions for positive economic outcomes may be a meaningful framing for constitutional reform efforts in the future.

Across four scenarios (Climate, Major War, Immigration Reform, and Terror Event), the National Referendum amendment emerged with broad political viability, suggesting that crises will create an appetite for direct democracy. A National Referendum amendment could serve as both a popular crisis response mechanism and a vehicle for advancing other amendments, since direct democracy tools historically have allowed people to bypass legislative gridlock and corporate influence.

Community-based organizing infrastructure emerged as make-or-break for success. Nearly every scenario requires strong grassroots organizing, trusted messengers, and infrastructure for participatory democracy to succeed. This reinforces the infrastructure strategy's critical importance and validates the emphasis on capacity building identified throughout the convening.

Addressing Organizational Capacity and Commitment

The convening's fourth major goal focused on ensuring coalition members have adequate resources to execute their respective pieces of the broader constitutional amendment strategy. This objective emerged from clear feedback during pre-convening meetings and the previous year's gathering, where participants identified funding limitations, organizational capacity constraints, and challenges building buy-in for long-term work within their existing coalitions.

The fundamental question driving this goal was straightforward but critical: "What needs to happen for my organization to be able to hold this work?" 

By addressing resource needs directly, we aimed to help organizations understand their capacity for commitment and identify concrete next steps for meaningful participation in constitutional reform efforts.

Three Horizons Analysis

In pre-convening conversations, participants indicated difficulties building buy-in from funders, board members, staff, or their membership for long-term work. In response, to generate buy-in for futures work, we presented the Three Horizons (3H) framework to explore how organizations across system intervention points can work together effectively and generate buy-in for constitutional reform work. Three Horizons (3H), originally developed by futurist Bill Sharpe, is a framework for creating a shared vision of a new system and a plan for moving towards it. Each of the three horizons represents a different phase in the lifespan of a system.

Horizon 1 organizations focus on direct service delivery within existing systems. These include government agencies, school systems, mutual aid organizations, and nonprofits that have assumed responsibilities previously held by the government. Healthcare workers, teachers, and service providers exemplify H1 work. Over time, their effectiveness can erode as systems change around them, creating both challenges and opportunities for reform.

Horizon 2 organizations work to change existing systems from within. Advocacy groups, policy organizations, and civic engagement entities generally represent this horizon. Their work involves pushing for reforms that, when successful, become new institutional norms. H2 organizations often serve as bridges between current system maintenance and transformational change.

Horizon 3 organizations represent "pockets of the future," focusing on large structural changes that exist primarily in small-scale experiments or theoretical frameworks. Opportunities to build toward the future might include efforts to replicate or scale the work of these “pockets.”

We asked participants to consider the types of organizations, current scopes of work, and existing challenges organizations face along each of the three horizons.

Cross-Horizon Collaboration Challenges and Opportunities

There were several key themes that emerged in these discussions:

1. Resource Imbalance: The extreme skew toward H1 work (75-99%) leaves movements unprepared for strategic opportunities and crises.
2. Communication Gaps: Each horizon has different languages, timeframes, and success metrics, requiring tailored engagement strategies.
3. Mutual Dependencies: Success requires all three horizons working together - none can achieve transformation alone.
4. Identity & Power Dynamics: Professional identity and organizational survival concerns create  resistance that must be addressed, not dismissed.
5. Coalition Potential: The common recognition that "something is wrong" provides a foundation for cross-horizon alliance building.
6. Fear Patterns: H1 fears displacement, H2 fears irrelevance, and H3 fears dismissal - suggesting that successful buy-in strategies must address these specific concerns rather than using one-size-fits-all approaches.

H1 organizations struggle with long-term strategic thinking because their work demands immediate response to current system needs. Daily service delivery pressures can make 50-year constitutional planning seem abstract or irrelevant to organizational survival.

H2 organizations face capacity and focus challenges as they balance advocacy for immediate policy wins with longer-term constitutional change. Their effectiveness often depends on responding to current political cycles, making sustained attention to multi-decade strategies difficult without dedicated resources.

H3 organizations grapple with concerns of relevance about practical implementation and immediate impact. Constitutional reform can seem disconnected from daily struggles unless H3 groups clearly articulate how amendments will improve service delivery and system effectiveness for frontline organizations. Furthermore, they struggle with resource acquisition and organizational legitimacy because their long-term focus can make it difficult to demonstrate immediate impact to funders and stakeholders.

Horizons are fundamentally interdependent. H1 organizations provide legitimacy and real-world testing for proposed changes. H2 organizations offer advocacy infrastructure and political experience. H3 organizations contribute strategic vision and long-term planning capacity. Successful constitutional reform requires intentional collaboration across all three horizons.

The insights on each horizon reinforce  the value of our workshops on coalition building and campaign planning and reaffirm the following themes as we co-create our strategy: 

• All Three Horizons Are Essential: Success requires intentional work across all three, not just focusing on one
• Relationship Building Is Critical: Opposition can be transformed into synergy through careful coalition work
• Resource Allocation Must Change: Movement needs dedicated investment in H3 work, not just crisis response
• Communication Strategy Matters: How H3 advocates approach H1 and H2 organizations determines success or failure
• Crisis Creates Opportunity: H3 organizations need to be prepared to leverage inevitable future crises

Exploring Collaborative Models and Partnership Structures

Fellowship and Network Models

We presented different models for ongoing collaboration and received valuable feedback about implementation preferences:

The fellowship model generated particular enthusiasm among participants, though productive disagreements emerged about optimal fellowship duration and structure, specifically about balancing the turnover of fellows with the stability and institutional memory that longer-term positions provide. One solution proposed was to ensure fellows are housed in membership organizations so, even as fellows may change, their organizations will bring consistency and institutional memory. The discussion also highlighted competing priorities between incorporating youth voice through fellowship opportunities versus leveraging experienced professionals who already possess established relationships and organizational influence. This tension reflects broader strategic questions about building future leadership while maximizing immediate organizational impact.

Formalizing the network

Throughout the convening, participants emphasized that successful collaboration requires centralized strategy, stability, and long-term investment beyond individual organizational capacity. This validated that Democracy 2076 provides essential collaboration, alignment, and future thinking capacity that individual organizations struggle to maintain.

In particular, there was high energy around inter-state collaboration, which will significantly reduce duplication in effort and accelerate program development across states. To coordinate the ongoing work, participants expressed trust in Democracy 2076’s decision-making with regard to the structure of the partnership network while requesting more specific direction about which strategic pieces their organizations should prioritize. This represents a substantial shift toward coordinated, collaborative implementation rather than independent parallel efforts.

Fundraising and Strategic Planning Support

Practical Tools and Materials

Democracy 2076 shared resources to support organizations including grant proposal templates, job description drafts, and a strategic planning guide that incorporates futures work. These materials addressed the practical implementation challenges that prevent organizations from committing to long-term constitutional reform work.

Notably, as we shared these resources, we received questions about how to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of constitutional reform work, which demonstrates a major step forward in building buy-in for the movement. This shift from asking, "what are we doing," to, "how are we doing it," demonstrates that the field has moved beyond questioning the importance or feasibility of constitutional reform work, to focusing on effective implementation strategies. 

Measuring Progress Toward Having Adequate Resources

Pre-Convening Baseline

Pre-event surveys revealed significant resource challenges among participants. Respondents averaged only 2.59 on a 5-point scale when asked whether they had what they needed to commit to constitutional amendment strategy work, with funding and capacity limitations dominating responses.

Participants showed moderate confidence (3.5 average) in their skills for building stakeholder buy-in for longer-term work, but many lacked organizational infrastructure for sustained engagement. One participant noted, “[My state] does not have a state table or strong statewide coalition that brings together intersectional advocacy work. Building that is beyond my capacity as a single staffer organizing an entire state."

Post-Convening Improvements

Post-convening surveys demonstrated substantial progress on resource adequacy metrics. Survey participants reported substantially greater preparedness to contribute to constitutional amendment efforts, with mean responses increasing 37.6% (from 2.59 to 3.56 out of 5) and median scores rising from 3 to 4 out of 5, indicating most respondents now feel adequately equipped with necessary resources and next steps. This represents the largest improvement across all measured outcomes, indicating that the capacity building tools we provided met the needs that participants had when they entered the gathering.

Understanding of individual roles within constitutional amendment strategy increased 26.8% to 3.93 out of 5, suggesting that clearer strategic frameworks help organizations identify manageable participation approaches even within resource constraints.

Persistent Resource Challenges

Despite significant progress, funding remains the primary obstacle for effective constitutional amendment work. Half of post-convening responses identified funding and resources as the largest implementation barrier.

These responses indicate that while organizational commitment and strategic clarity have improved substantially, sustainable resource development requires ongoing attention and systematic support.

Conclusion

Challenges and Learnings

This year’s convening achieved significant progress across all four strategic objectives and demonstrated that a coordinated, multi-horizon approach to constitutional change is not only possible but essential for democratic survival in an era of accelerating crises.

Catalyzing and Coordinating Structural Reform Efforts
Our landscape analysis revealed that different amendment efforts are at different levels of readiness for passage. Many of the electoral reform amendments have active coalitions working on federal legislation, if not federal amendment efforts. Additionally, there is significant advocacy already advancing ideas for guaranteed rights we identified, but most of this work seeks specific legislative wins rather than advocating for legal rights via Constitutional amendment. Finally, we have found there is very little advocacy behind the ideas for Congressional structural reform we have previously identified through our convenings and Congress 2076.

Our landscape analysis also revealed a pattern of fragmentation within the structural reform space. Organizations pursuing similar or complementary reforms are operating in isolation and missing opportunities for strategic alignment. This siloed approach significantly diminishes the collective impact of reform work, creating a situation where individual efforts remain less than the sum of their parts.

The opportunity for coordination is substantial. By coordinating structural reform efforts, we can create mutually reinforcing strategies that leverage shared resources, coordinate power-building activities, and strengthen relationships with key policymakers. This coordination function appears to be a critical gap in the current ecosystem across amendment areas—one that could dramatically amplify the effectiveness of existing reform efforts if properly addressed.

It is for this reason Democracy 2076 is excited about formalizing our network of partners in 2026.

Building Capacity for the Ecosystem and Beyond
The post-convening survey data revealed significant growth in participants' understanding of their roles within a constitutional amendment strategy, with self-reported clarity increasing 26.8% on our assessment scale. Similarly, participants' confidence in having the necessary resources or knowing next steps to commit to our amendment strategy increased 37.6% over the course of the convening. These gains demonstrate both the value of strategic capacity building and the substantial room for growth that exists within the reform ecosystem.

However, we’ve identified critical capacity gaps, particularly around strategic foresight and broad coalition building. Most organizations lack experience with structural change work at the scale required for constitutional reform. The trainings we conducted at the convening on three-horizons framework and coalition building in partnership with Search for Common Ground suggest a clear path forward, but also highlights the extensive capacity building needs across the network. It is for this precise reason that Democracy 2076 is planning to provide ongoing capacity-building support to our network. 

Urgent Window of Opportunity
Perhaps the most urgent finding was the identification of multiple potential scenarios that could create openings for structural reform as the current presidential administration ends. Our  work revealed at least ten different scenarios that could generate political momentum for constitutional change within the next five years.

This timeline creates both opportunity and pressure. The consensus among participants was clear: neither our network nor the broader structural reform community is adequately prepared to capitalize on these potential opportunities. This preparation gap represents a critical vulnerability that could result in missed opportunities for transformational change.

Interestingly, the scenarios also surfaced the potential need to expand our reform portfolio to include constraints on executive power—suggesting that our current window may be broader than initially anticipated but also more complex.

What’s Next: A Constitution for 2076

Democracy 2076 stands at a pivotal moment. The energy and ecosystem buy-in generated from our June 2025 convening emphasizes the momentum and need for the structural, strategic constitutional reform demanded at this moment, both for our generation and the ones to come. Our path forward for this work centers on two core imperatives: catalyzing and coordinating national partners to prepare for a window of opportunity for reform in 2029 while strengthening the infrastructure and increasing capacity of the constitutional reform ecosystem that will position us to achieve congressional introduction of key amendments.

Preparing for the 2029 Window of Opportunity
The success of our constitutional reform work requires coordination across multiple reform movements. Given the window of opportunity we’ve identified for passage in 2029, we want to do our best to support partners to be prepared for Congressional introduction in 2027. 

We have identified leaders in each of the amendment areas and possible anchor partners to work with via our Gap Matrix. We intend to coordinate partners who are already thinking about federal legislation or federal amendments to align on their strategies for Congressional passage. Many of the electoral reform groups are at this stage of readiness.

In order to ensure readiness across amendment areas, we are planning to engage in a few catalytic activities. First, we are engaging actors in the guaranteed rights space to explore how constitutional amendments can advance their policy objectives. By presenting constitutional rights as viable interventions for achieving their policy goals, we can tap into existing advocacy energy while offering resources on rights-based frameworks to coalition partners. Second, we see an opportunity to host a gathering on Congressional structural reform framed around the lack of trust Americans have in Congress and changing expectations for Congress in our current media and information landscape. We also see an opportunity to go beyond those who have traditionally worked on Congressional reform and bring in participants who work to support Congress or do advocacy within Congress.

We have also identified amendments where there are indications of public support for an idea, but no advocacy. We have begun talking to organizations who we think could be well situated to lead that advocacy work to see if it’s something they’d be interested in taking on.

Collectively, the goal of this work is to be prepared for a window of opportunity that may present itself over the next five years. In the unlikely event that this opportunity does not present itself, the work done to be prepared for Congressional introduction will still be useful to the long-term passage of amendments.

Ecosystem Infrastructure and Capacity Building
Democracy 2076 recognizes that sustainable constitutional change requires generational commitment and enduring infrastructure. We are beginning to engage in activities designed to cultivate future constituencies for reform, particularly focusing on how to ensure future generations will demand constitutional change as a political priority. In order to ensure success in the long term, we will continue to prioritize strengthening the infrastructure of proactive, future-oriented work in the US democracy movement by building capacity through the network of democracy futurists, training pro-democracy advocates (especially youth leaders engaged in futures work), and helping partners integrate strategic foresight into their own workstreams. This will require participation from funders, organizers, state and national groups, and elected officials alike, all of whom acknowledge that today's movements must plant seeds for tomorrow's democracy.

As a key step in moving our generative conversations about constitutional change from the drawing board to the governing chamber, we are working to establish a structured and distributed network of Democracy Futurists positions across participating states focused on holding these long term strategic initiatives, as indicated by continued conversations on capacity. This formalization is a critical step in, requiring us to address fundamental questions of governance: who participates, how we meet, what working groups we establish, and how we structure decision-making processes.

Central to this effort is building a network that can function collaboratively on strategy yet independently make decisions about the needs of their states, while maintaining robust management systems and shared knowledge repositories and learning from each other. Our success depends not just on having people in place, but on ensuring they are connected, informed, and strategically coordinated. This infrastructure will serve as the backbone for all our subsequent efforts, from research and advocacy to public education and coalition building.