I met Arpan Somani, who leads strategic partnership at the Obama Foundation and is active across several civics-focused boards and special initiatives in New York and beyond, a few years back at a conference. I thought his nose ring was cool and we got to talking about his work at the Obama Foundation and my work at IDEO. He was thinking through difficult issues, like how to incorporate technology, and engaging youth in the service of building a more resilient civic ecosystem. We stayed in touch, and after seeing the swath of subpar content about Gen Z and community in which no one actually spoke to Gen Z in their musings on the future of the generation, I begged him to let me interview him because, if anyone knew the nuances of the issue, it would be him.

Arpan agreed, but on a condition. Alex Edgar, the co-founder of Youth250, an initiative dedicated to getting youth involved in the United States’ 250th anniversary, the youngest person ever to serve on the board of Points of Light, the nonprofit started by George H.W. Bush to create a society where it is easy for every individual to take action and accelerate change within their community and the Youth Engagement Manager of Made by Us, which connects young people with history institutions to inform and inspire their civic journeys, needed to join, as well. Alex is a Gen Z tour de force. Knowing everyone, working on every issue, driven by a very palpable sense of realistic optimism that we can build a better future than we inherited.

What follows is a wide-ranging conversation on community building, civic technology, neighborliness, intergenerational relationships, and canoeing the Gowanus Canal.

Andy Reischling: I'd love to hear a bit more or a bit about both of your backgrounds, what you're working on, and how you got connected, and then also where you see your interests intersect.

Alex Edgar: I grew up in a very conservative community in Southern California and then went to UC Berkeley, in one of the most progressive parts of the country. I carried those contrasting experiences to my work as a community organizer and civic engagement specialist throughout college. The biggest thread of the work I do today is building the permission structures and practices to enable successful intergenerational power sharing within institutions and across society. 

Too often, I’d find myself in spaces in which young people were a target audience, and everyone was asking, how do we reach Gen Z? How do we get them to vote? How do we get them to care? But there weren't any Gen Z in the room.

That’s what led me to my full-time job at Made By Us, a national coalition of museums and cultural institutions dedicated to increasing their engagement with Gen Z by connecting our country's history, civics, and culture to this younger audience. There, I co-founded Youth250, our initiative for the United States' 250th anniversary on July 4 of next year, which is bringing young people to the forefront of the 250th through projects like the Youth250 Bureau. I also serve on the Board of Directors of Points of Light, National Advisory Board for the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and HEDx Advisory Team for Campus Compact and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. 

Arpan Somani: My work and thinking sits at the intersection of civics, environmental justice, technology and storytelling. And that takes form in a lot of different ways, ranging from very informal projects like organizing an annual Halloween haunted house with my apartment building, to more formal programmatic approaches like running workshops with local journalists and environmental justice advocates about how to use GIS geospatial information systems and data in storytelling and advocacy. Right now, a lot of my projects are focused on how we're thinking about using technology to activate and give more tools to frontline organizers and folks who are doing the storytelling on the ground.

There's a really interesting overlap between environmental justice and civics, because it's a lot easier to activate people when something is being done to them; they can feel it, they can smell it, and they can taste it. And people might not realize that that is civics. And so a lot of my work with organizations like Rooted Futures Lab and my own org, Urban Data Response, is rooted in that thinking. That said, I also have other side projects that I'm always working on using data, building maps, and activating civic consciousness in local communities. I'm starting to explore analog community infrastructure in local communities. I'm in the early stages of a research and prototyping project around the state of the bulletin board in communities. Where does it exist? Where does it not exist? What does it offer to communities now? And is there a different vision for what a community bulletin board can be when we think about knowledge exchange in a community? That's where I think Alex's point about intergenerational conversation creating more pathways for people who just share space to be able to engage with each other regardless of questions like... are they “digital natives?” Or do they use apps? Or are they on the same platforms?

It's a lot of different projects, but narrowed down into focus areas of civics, environmental justice, storytelling and technology.

AR: Could you say a bit more about how you two met? So much of your work is in parallel, but you're not always working on the same projects together

AS: We were introduced by my co-worker at the Obama Foundation Libby Otto-Patel and I have to shout her out, because I promised her I would. She's the one who made this happen. 

AR: Shoutout Libby Otto-Patel. 

AS: One day she just told me, you need to meet Alex. So Alex and I set up a zoom call.  We both thought we were going to talk about our day jobs. And instead we talked about the book Seeing Like a State for an hour.

AE: It was an unexpected alignment of values. Both of our work is very much rooted in not just looking at the big picture of: why did we get here? Why are all of our systems messed up? But also in thinking tangibly about what we can be doing in communities to break through the mess of the systems that we're under. 

Arpan recommended I read Seeing Like a State. What I loved about that book was how it connects the dots of how government standardization of classification has led to a lot of the problems that we're dealing with today. The idea that sorting people into nice classificatory boxes has ultimately played a large role in creating many of the issues Arpan and I are working on solving resonated with me. 

That’s why I’m focused on bringing communities together in physical spaces, in ways that actually decentralize power and put it back in the hands of the communities themselves, instead of relying on some overarching national solution to trickle down to everyone, everywhere. 

AS: One of the the long tail effects of how we calculate and measure things is that we end up with a lack of imagination. There are people who love to use the expression, "if you can't measure it, you can't fix it"—especially when I worked in tech. Metrics become traps when you think like this because you're abstracting reality, the nature of real human-to-human experience, and then trying to extrapolate that into a data point that you can report back on. 

Even in the nonprofit world this way of measurement and thinking has become part of the systems of change. If you need to report on a grant that you received and show certain metrics, how do you show the long tail impacts of human connection? Alex and Arpan, with a 10-year age difference, hung out for an hour and planted the seeds for the company that they're going to start together in 20 years. 

AR: Could you define the term “community?” What does it mean to you and for your work? And then, as a follow up, what happened to community writ large? Because everyone is talking about how divided we are, how polarized everything is, our lack of unity and the epidemic of loneliness. 

AS: Shared space—a sidewalk, the library, the park—has become my root definition when I think about community. 

People keep saying, "New York's changed," or "New York doesn't have community anymore." It's incredibly false. People move here because they’re attracted to community. But then they get here and they expect community to happen to them. 

What's changed is our expectation of how we interact with community. Because it exists. You move into a neighborhood and there are people who have shared that space for way longer than you have lived there, and it is not their job to invite you in. It is your job to raise your hand and say, "I want to be part of this community, and I want to participate." You just have to open your eyes and raise your hand to participate. 

AE: In our current, digital era, so many people's only communities tend to be based on a shared interest or shared value, and less so on physical space, which I think can be deeply detrimental. 

To your second question of “what happened to community?” I have a rant built up in my soul. 

AR: Give it to us. Edges loves a rant. 

AE: First of all, we have transitioned into a society in which our attention has become commodified in a deeply harmful way. The attention economy ruins our ability to authentically interact with people in online spaces, which were supposed to solve our connection problems. There's also what I've seen referred to as the loneliness industrial complex, which has really taken root over the past couple decades. You see it in the rise of porn addiction, online gambling, and all kinds of industries built around keeping you alone at your computer and not interacting with other people. 

Another thing is that, over the past couple decades, we've seen people less willing—or able—to put down roots and stay in one spot. Obviously there are a lot of factors that are at play there. But when we have fewer intergenerational households and people moving across the country, far away from their families, we lose the ability to feel tied to a specific place. We’ve lost the built-in infrastructure that previous generations had. 

I was listening to an interview with Ocean Vuong recently, and he mentioned that his students were afraid of being cringe. They wanted to be poets, artists, whatever it may be, but were too afraid of being perceived as trying. Our culture has arrived at a point where we know we are always being watched, monitored, recorded somewhere. And the surveillance ramifications of this kind of mindset are interpersonal, too! It's had such a horrible effect on our ability to build communities because people are so much more afraid of doing the wrong thing, or looking like they’re trying too hard in public. 

We've broken the social contract. We're not consenting to be recorded and tracked all the time, but we are. All of those things together are my answer to what has happened to our community: just a lot of bad things piled up on top of each other. Okay. Rant over. 

AR: Yeah. It's harder to open your heart than ever. 

And the barriers to civic engagement and activity can seem particularly high. You might be a member of a community who says,  "Oh no, I'm not a policy expert," even if for a policy decision that might affect your neighborhood. So how do we create permission to participate in civic life, even for people who feel they need to be an expert to get involved?

AS: I want to start by separating civic engagement from policy and politics. We often equate the two. When you hear the word civics, you think politics, you think voting, you think doing your democratic duty as a citizen. It's not only about the policies and politics that are at play, it's also about the people in your building or the people on your street or the small business next door We need to broaden our definition, or come up with a better word than civic engagement. Maybe that's too loaded.

Then when we think about this idea of permission, there's an irony to that. It's like civic engagement. Civic means that you are a citizen or a civilian. It's inherent in what the word means, and yet we often feel like we don't have permission. That might be because you don't feel like an expert, or the information asymmetry that exists around something is really difficult to overcome. How do you know what's happening in your local community board? How do you know what's happening policy-wise at the assembly level? And politics and the infrastructure of all that can get super complicated and confusing. 

What I often tell people is, start with something that you are just willing to engage in from an excitement level, not from a "I'm trying to make the world a better place" level.

A very short example: I recently went canoeing on the Gowanus Canal, which is kind of gross, but also pretty cool. And the group that does that, they're called the Gowanus Dredgers, and they spearhead a lot of cleanup efforts of the Gowanus Canal. 

The Gowanus Canal is a Superfund site, designated by the EPA as a disastrously polluted region of New York City that requires investment in infrastructure and cleanup. But I just wanted to canoe at first. I like getting on the water. I saw this sign at a coffee shop that said "free canoeing on Sunday," and I went. And my engagement expanded from there. It can be that simple. You have done your due diligence as a member of the community just by showing up and following your interests.

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AR: You start the process through something that you're interested in, getting engaged in it, and then you start to understand: what are the broader ramifications of this thing I'm involved in?

AS: Over the last year I've been speaking with a group called the Library Newsroom Project, which is happening in Sunset Park in Brooklyn as a pilot program with the Brooklyn Library. A journalist, Terry Paris Jr., started this project, looking to come up with a new model for what community journalism looks like. He asked, "How do we enable people in this neighborhood to go out and ask questions about their neighborhood?" 

You can just go out and email your city council person, or your city’s equivalent, to say, “I have a question about this thing." That is your right. And yet, we don't often feel like we have the authority or that we're going to be taken seriously. But all of a sudden you have this Library Newsroom Project. Through a series of workshops, library-goers investigated their relationship with their own communities and with each other, and built confidence in civic inquiry, eventually publishing a print newspaper that was written by and for local community members. So now you have community members of all ages deciding what questions are important to them and going out and doing the work to find the answers themselves. And they're using the Library Newsroom Project as their cover. 

There's some authority that people feel like they need in order to speak on an issue or even ask questions.  They need to feel like they're attached to some larger institution, even if it's a small community group or volunteer group. I don't necessarily agree that should be the case, but it is how people's brains operate.  We should lean into that power, formal or informal, whenever possible. 

AE: When Arpan first told me about the Library Newsroom Project, I was so blown away. Because, the biggest barrier for most people is that they feel like they need an invitation to be civically engaged. 

The coalition Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement did a study about a year ago on civic language perceptions. They found that "civic engagement" is not a super sexy term. It doesn't matter if you're Gen Z or not. Most people have a more negative relationship with civic engagement. The word people do have a positive association with? Community.

Yet, we still frame things in terms of civic engagement. When people say things like, “We need to save democracy," I ask, “Well, what is democracy? And show me how it's been working for people." That's one of the big problems with our language in communities, online, and in civic spaces. Too often "experts" define what it means. 

And everyday people end up alienated. They think, “That doesn't sound like it includes me at all." That’s where the idea of invitation connects back in. People need to be empowered to participate. 

I used to work for a youth-run nonprofit called the Youth Power Project, which started with the idea that young people are not invited into policymaking. There are no pathways teaching young people that we actually have the power to write and lobby for legislation that affects our lives. This nonprofit focuses on not only helping young people write legislation, but also getting them in front of representatives to say, "Based on my lived experience as a young person today, here’s why mental health or any other issue matters to me.”

The mindset that you need to be a lobbyist or a Harvard grad to influence a lot of these big decisions is entirely false. I’ll never forget the first time I walked into the Cannon House Office Building. I was expecting that there'd be a bunch of guards, or, I don't know, that, it somehow wouldn't be accessible to me. But at 19 years old, to walk into a member of Congress's office and say with conviction, "I would like to meet with someone to talk about this issue” was surreal. Even more so when they responded by saying, "Sure, we have a staffer available." 

But I shouldn't have been so surprised. They are there for us. The bigger problem is that there is this wide-scale mystification over the ways our systems work that makes the everyday person feel like they can’t participate. In reality, anything from volunteering with a local nonprofit to helping out a neighbor is civic engagement. You are helping build a stronger civic ecosystem and helping rebuild your community infrastructure! Those small interactions play such a large role in building up our broader community connectedness. 

AR: There was this brief boom during the pandemic that led to this idea of digital nomadism, or global citizenry. You can belong anywhere and nowhere. Can you talk a little bit more about why an established sense of place is important, and what does being a good neighbor mean in that context?

AS: The narrative around digital nomadism, especially in the wake of the pandemic, was actually reserved for a very small privileged minority. So I think when we think about the importance of an established sense of place, it's part of the sense that everybody is in a place, and, more often than not, has occupied that place for a long time rather than flitting around the globe.

AR: That's one of the principles of physics, right? You always must occupy a unique place and time. 

AS: We do! We occupy a place. For me, the importance of groundedness or a sense of place, comes down to one word: familiarity. Feeling that what's around you is familiar does a lot for our wellbeing, and does a lot for our sense of confidence in how we move through spaces, in how we feel. You might be thinking, "Okay, I'm worried about certain things in my life, but one thing I can count on is walking down the street and seeing the bodega owner." There's a sense of consistency that comes with that. 

I'm very lucky to say I've lived in my building for eight years, and so when I think about familiarity, I might also be the consistent face that people have seen. Another thing I think about is the transition that happens with neighbors, from not saying a word to each other on the street, maybe not even making eye contact, and then seeing the same people again and again, month-over-month, year-over-year, to eventually doing a head nod, to maybe smirking and smiling. One day I just stopped this guy, and I said: "Hey, I feel like, I see you all the time and that we’re always crossing paths. Where do you live in the neighborhood?" And turns out it was four houses down, and we exchanged numbers and we went for a walk and got coffee.

Fast forward and we have a big neighborhood hang that we do on Sundays on our stoop. And he’s there, and he brings his son sometimes. Now I'm making a short experimental film about one of my other neighbors turning into a gargoyle. The guy who lives a few houses down is an art director, and he's gonna do the graphics for my short. That all started with a head nod.

AR: Let's pause to plug Arpan's film. It's about your neighbor turning into a gargoyle? What's it called?

AS: The Gargoyle. We're shooting it in one day for the Failed Film Festival, which is about making a movie with your friends and neighbors, with no budget, no resources, and they will screen it no matter what it looks like.

AR: So we're going to do a quick plug, everybody. It's The Gargoyle at the Failed Film Festival in October, and then, hopefully, a theater near you. 

AS: To me, being a good neighbor is that evolution. Looking up and making eye contact is the starting point. With the person on the street, the barista, the small business owner, the Bodega owner.  Then think very intentionally about how you evolve that relationship. It's a really hard thing to do right to put yourself out there and to say hello to somebody. But once you traverse it, every step after that is so minuscule.

And as you do it, you start to unlock a new ecosystem of resources in your community, like childcare or  plant and pet care. In the middle of the day yesterday, I took my neighbor's kids to the park for an hour because he didn’t have childcare.  We had reached that level of neighborliness.

AR: Alex, what are your thoughts on the importance of intergenerational bonds and spending time with people who might not share your entire belief system? And what do you see the role of technology playing in forming different types of bonds? Where is it helping? Where is it hurting? Where is it doing nothing at all?

AE: Last time I was in New York, I got to attend one of these Sunday neighborhood gatherings and saw the definition of an intergenerational melting pot.  

One of my favorite questions to ask older adults in professional settings is, “Who are the younger people in your life you speak to frequently?” Nine times out of ten, it’s  their children, grandchildren, or other relatives. Similarly, if you ask most young people, who are the older people you talk to outside of work? The answer is almost always just family. 

If we base our understanding of one another solely on family connections, we end up with a warped perception of the world. It doesn't teach us the skills to form friendships and relationships that go beyond the traditional sense of “who you should be around.” From an early age, you are taught that you should only spend time with people who are the same grade as you. So even as adults, most of us spend our lives surrounded by people the same age, with similar levels of education or class standing. That’s a narrow circle. 

The power of these intergenerational relationships is that they expand those circles. If I want to learn about how to deal with heartbreak or to experience political unrest and uncertainty, I don't want to go talk to one of my friends who's also 22 years old and has been through the same limited life experiences I've had. I want to talk to one of my 60, 70, 80 year-old-friends who lived through the Civil Rights Movement and can tell me why they still have hope today. If they have hope, I'm not going to sit here and say "woe is me." I'm going to bring the energy that these older friends of mine bring into my life.

There's a nonprofit I do a lot of work with called CoGenerate. Their entire focus is on building those intergenerational relationships, not just interpersonally, but also in organizations. Earlier this year, I was at this gathering for a report they were producing on “What Older Leaders Want from Younger Allies.” I was almost in tears. Donna Butts, the former executive director of Generations United was asked, "What do you want from younger people in your life?" She said that she wanted to be invited to joyful events, because the only events she gets invited to are funerals. I felt chills. I had never thought about that before—that I should be inviting older adults in my life to birthday parties, happy hours, and dinner parties. We benefit so deeply from having intergenerational relationships. You need to learn how to exist with other generations, because neighborhoods are always going to be intergenerational. You don't control who lives nearby. 

One other thing: don't walk around with your headphones in. Strike up a conversation with someone new! When we're too plugged into our digital worlds, we lose the ability to connect with our actual physical reality: the people and places right alongside us.

There's a Gen Z-run data and research firm called dcdx that created a framework based on constantly seeing people describe Gen Z as digital natives. What their research showed, and this resonates with a lot of other people around my age, is this idea that Gen Z are less "digital natives" and more "digital captives."

The core part idea is that none of us chose to grow up online. We were born into a world where, at 8, 10, or 13 years old, smartphones were just there. It became so normalized for our generation to be part of this digital world, so it looks like it's something that we're all on board with. When, in reality, for most young people, that’s not true. Social media is how they stay connected with their friends, communities, and what's going on in the world. Even work happens mostly online. You might go into an office, but you're in Zoom calls all day. So it's not that we chose to live this way. It's more that society and corporations that make money off of our attention created a system that glued us to our screens. We inherited it. We had no say in it. And that's concerning. 

I have friends who work in the youth responsible technology space, at organizations like Design it For Us and Young People's Alliance. They’re pushing back against big tech's grip on our attention, politics, and daily lives. Their work is predicated on this recognition that so may crises—mental health, social isolation, suicide and eating disorder rates, political radicalization—are all so deeply connected to how attention economy runs so much of our lives. And we need to actively be pushing back. 

However, it's not as if "technology" in the abstract is universally bad. Digital communities can be transformative. They allow people to find support, resources, and connection with others who share their values or experiences. For many, it’s been essential for feeling comfortable with their identity, especially if they grew up in places where that identity wasn’t accepted. Another big positive is the ability to learn about current events and hear directly from people who are impacted by what is happening. Citizen journalism has had a real boon, and it's been an important tool to keep our leaders accountable. It’s not a zero-sum game. These systems are here to stay—there’s going to be social media, we’re going to hop on Zoom, we’re going to exist in a digital society. The question is: what can we do to make sure that technology actually promotes community flourishing instead of commodifying our attention?  

That’s why I like the “doing nothing” framing in your question. Too often, older adults—especially leaders—say, “We need a screen everywhere. We need AI on every platform. It should follow you wherever you go.” My favorite counterexample: some pharmacies rolled out those digital cooler doors with product images; you’d open the door and realize there was no Coke inside, no Arizona Iced Tea. They ended up removing the screens because people just want to open the fridge and grab a beverage. No one was asking for a screen. A lot of “doing nothing” is recognizing that not every problem needs a tech layer. Sometimes the better question is: do we even need this extra step?

AS: Yeah. It's the difference between technology in service of something greater versus technology in service of itself.

AR: Arpan, I want you to talk a little bit about your GIS work, because that is technology, and it incorporates storytelling and incorporates community in a way that I think is really interesting.

AS: The whole purpose of the program we’ve developed called Mapping Your Local Environment—or MYLE—is not just to create abstractions of place, but to combine a real sense of locality, understanding what’s happening around you and putting it on a map. It’s for storytelling and actually showing, visually, what the data looks like. And, honestly, it’s about invitations. Maps are invitations. Our brains are wired to understand things geospatially, and most of us use a map app every day without thinking about it. When you look at a map of, say, an environmental justice issue in your community, or you’re in Detroit looking at lead pipe infrastructure, one of the first questions is, “Where am I on this map? Where do I live? Where do I go to school? What places do I recognize?” That’s why we use maps as invitations—to help people see themselves in relation to the story being told. That makes it personal. And that loops back to civics, and what it means to be part of a community. We ran MYLE workshops this year in Atlanta, Detroit, Newark, L.A., and Brooklyn, each in partnership with local community groups who are trying to tell a story about environmental justice.

AR: All right, I have one last question. 

How do we recapture the real funk of how communities work, the actuals of civic life, the particulars, the local ecologies of culture that drive the communities and democracies that we all live in. If metrics don't really correspond to real life, what's the alternative?

AS: I would challenge why we need to measure it in the first place. What does measurement do for us? Is measuring "community engagement" a signal of the strength of the community, or is it actually the opposite? The amount of difficulty in measuring indicates that these webs are really, really difficult to unweave, which actually shows the strength of a community. That there's so much interconnection that to parse through that just defies the clean metrics some people are after. 

Imagine a situation where you've met a bunch of people through a program, and   years later, you start working on something together. The time scale in which you want to measure those things has to span years if you want to actually see impact. My brain really broke earlier this year, when I did a deep dive on the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, which was a group of black activists at Polaroid. Specifically, two employees who discovered that Polaroid was selling their cameras to the South African apartheid government, then started the campaign to get Polaroid to divest from South Africa. It took more than 10 years for them to do that. But Polaroid was the first US corporation to divest, and other US corporations followed suit. Then the Anti-Apartheid Act was issued in 1986, but it took 10 years for them to get the ball rolling within their own company.

Sometimes we look at communities and ask, “What did we achieve this year?” But real measurement takes a decade. And I don’t mean the metrics you package for grant reports—I mean true impact. Part of me wants to stop asking that question altogether, because someone else will have to look back and tell us what the impact really was.

AE: I agree, with some caveats: the way we measure community doesn’t fit neatly into boxes. And when we try to force metrics into boxes, we get lost in the sauce. We’ll say, “If we can increase feelings of belonging by ten points through this program…” But what does “belonging” even mean on a 1–10 scale? That’s not really quantifiable. At the same time, data does matter. Often the problem isn’t that we’re measuring the “wrong” thing. It’s that the systems we use to measure are fundamentally flawed and need to be redesigned. 

Here's a personal example: I served on the 2030 Census Advisory Committee for the Department of Commerce, helping the U.S. Census Bureau rethink how it engages Gen Z and millennials. Most people don’t realize it, but the census is one of the most consequential things our government does each decade. It dictates redistricting, federal funding for schools, community investment—all of it. In one meeting, we heard a presentation about the chronic undercount of young children (ages 0–4). That undercount affects programs like WIC and a lot of services meant for those kids. So I asked a simple question: did you actually talk to Gen Z and Millennial parents while trying to solve this problem, since they’re the majority of new parents?

The answer was no. If you want to know why young kids aren’t being counted, talk to the people filling out the forms. Instead, our systems default to conversations with leaders of national organizations, people who are far removed from the day-to-day realities of those young parents. A couple of focus groups with young parents where they could've heard why they didn’t list their kids on the form could have made a world of difference. 

Metrics are incredibly important. The ability to track change over time is is crucial, especially for marginalized communities that need access to grants, resources, and opportunities to thrive. So the real question is: what can we, as the people building metrics and the organizations tracking them, do to reshape how we quantify problems and frame questions so actual experience is centered, and we’re not just relying on the consensus of the so-called “elite” to define progress?

AS: Alex, I appreciate you challenging what I said earlier about “why measure at all?” What I’m really arguing is that the system itself needs to be broken and rethought. In our data and in GIS workshops, we look at the now-defunct/now-rebuilt environmental justice (EJ) screening tool from the EPA. (The federal government shut it down. A group called Public Environmental Data Partners rebuilt it and put it back up.) We review that tool with EJ advocates in places like Newark and Southeast L.A., and you can see how easily it flattens complexity into a binary. It weighs health, economy, jobs, environmental burden, then boils it all down to a single question: “Is this a disadvantaged community or not?” Agencies use that binary to decide whether funds flow, or don’t.  When we put that map in front of people from areas labeled “disadvantaged,” reactions vary. Some are offended—“What does that even mean?” Others say it doesn’t tell the full story. Communities aren’t binary. Our measurement system is broken because we’ve simplified for so-called effectiveness in distributing resources, and that simplification ends up creating more inequity. We’re not letting the full picture paint itself. So my anarchist brain says, “Let’s not measure anything right now and see what happens in the future.” But Alex is probably right. Instead of ditching measurement, we should rethink the questions, because ultimately, we still need to make informed decisions. It’s complicated.

AR: I guess the question is, are we asking the right kind of questions in the right way?

AS: You can tell whatever story you want with data. That is what a business analyst that I used to work with at one of my former jobs would always tell me. "What do you want the data to say? We can shape the data to frame the narrative. 

AE: Ultimately, as in the example Arpan just gave, data can be manipulated in whatever way you want it to go. But  having the ability to show someone that an argument isn’t just from the perspective of someone who lives in the community, but  the level of pollution in the air is actually too high—that is the type of data that you want.

The question is, when change is possible, how do we take that next actionable step and create some positive impact? Can we do something about this? That’s my philosophy. 

AR: Where are you finding hope? Who's doing cool work? 

AS: There's a couple newsletters for me that are truly a joy to read up on. There's GROUP HUG. 

AR: GROUP HUG is actually created by IDEOer Elise Granata who works at IDEO and is one of my very good friends!

AS: Cool. I didn't realize that. I love her work.

AR: Shout out Elise. Whenever she is in Cambridge she stays in my house and we watch old Steven Seagal movies.

AS: Connective Tissue is another one that I really appreciate about community building and civics. Dark Properties is one of my favorite reads, focused on a range of topics that connect people, communities, gardens, and ecology. There's a program called Documenters which trains regular everyday people on how to report on what's going on in their local governments. And they do this in around 25 or so cities across the country. A few local Documenters programs were partners in the MYLE workshops we did. They just really, really inspired me. 

And then I have to give a big shout out to my wife who read about Stoop Coffee in a newsletter and then started hosting her ownt, and it has evolved into this really beautiful thing in our neighborhood. I gotta shout out my entire building at 196. We’re already planning for our 4th annual Dark Slope Halloween Haunted House. When people see what’s happening, they say, "This is so cool. I've never seen this in New York before." And I say, "This is why you moved to New York! You moved to New York for this!"  

AE: Kentucky Student Voice Team, Civics Unplugged, and New Voters are all doing incredible work to actually bring young people to the table and redefine how local civic ecosystems thrive. And I really wanted to shout out the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, also known as CIRCLE at Tufts University. We are in a sea of lots of bad data on young people, and they are just really, really great at bringing good data to the table. The last thing I'd say is there are so many incredible local organizing efforts. There's something out there for everyone, and everyone should be involved!

AR: Thank you both. 

This has been a dispatch from the Edges. I don't know when these guys sleep. But I left the conversation with more hope than I entered it with, and that is certainly enough to just get started.