Beyond Doom-Scrolling: How The States Project Built a Movement Around Grassroots Social Networks

Episode notes

If you are completely exhausted by national political noise and panic-driven fundraising spam, you are looking at the wrong political map. On this episode of Professional Jealousy, Anomaly’s Chief Innovation Officer Natasha Jakubowski sits down with Daniel Squadron (former NY State Senator, Co-founder and Executive Director of The States Project, and author of the new book The Fourth Branch) and Melissa Walker (Head of Giving Circles at The States Project) to explore how true political power can be reclaimed from the ground up. As Melissa puts it: "We work not where the glamour is, just where the power is." By bypassing traditional, top-down political gatekeepers and focusing directly on community grassroots, The States Project has engineered a model that allows everyday friend circles to completely shift the balance of power in state capitols. They have taken complex, intimidating political systems and turned them into a simple, collaborative math problem that trusted social networks can solve together.