with Civic Revolutionary Evan Weissman
Civic engagement doesn’t have to feel like homework.
Instead of asking people to show up to another meeting, read another policy document, or memorize the three branches of government, we can invite them to a carnival, a sports bar, a mock trial, or a Sunday school for atheists.
Evan Weissman’s Warm Cookies of the Revolution is a “civic health club” that uses arts, culture, humor, food, and creativity to help people participate in their communities in a way that makes a real difference.
In this episode of How We Future, Evan and Lisa talk about what it means to make civic life something we joyfully practice every day. Being civic is about recognizing that we have a stake in the schools, roads, air, neighborhoods, and institutions around us and then finding creative ways to exercise that ownership.
The conversation also explores why so many movements for social change began with people on the margins imagining something different, why creativity is essential to democratic life, and what might happen if we practice civic participation from a young age.
In this episode, we cover:
Why civic organizations are competing with the NFL, Netflix, and everything else demanding our attention
The power of reframing something people dread—like Tax Day—into an opportunity for connection and participation
Why civic experiences should engage people’s heads, hearts, bellies, and feet
Evan’s idea for a civic coming-of-age ceremony
How a Warm Cookies “cookbook” could help communities build on what’s already working instead of starting from scratch
What would happen if you made one civic experience this week a little more joyful, surprising, or inviting?
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
Civic engagement doesn't have to feel like eating your vegetables, and today's guest, Evan Weissman, will show you why. Evan is the founder of Warm Cookies of the Revolution, a civic health club that uses arts, culture, and unique experiences to bring people together around the issues that shape their communities.
Evan brings a creative spirit to everything he does, from turning tax day into a carnival to hosting civic conversations in sports bars. He's designing surprising ways to help people see that we all can and should shape democracy to build a better future. In our conversation, you'll hear how Evan uses joy to make civic life more inviting, why making people feel welcome is just as important as what we want them to learn, and how we can create more opportunities for people to have a real say in the future of their communities. Grab your favorite cookie and enjoy this conversation with Evan Weissman.
[music]
Lisa: Evan Weissman, I feel like I should be eating warm cookies while interviewing the founder-
Evan Weissman: Me too.
Lisa: -of Warm Cookies of the Revolution. I'm so excited to be talking to you. I just literally can't contain my excitement.
Evan: Likewise. I was bouncing off the walls this morning knowing this was going to happen, so now I've put the adult back in me, and I'm ready to answer questions in a very serious, measured way.
Lisa: No, because these are conversations that are meant to be joyful, filled with gratitude, filled with hope, filled with hype. That's like you, all of it. Hell, yes. We are talking as part of the Civic Futures series on How We Future. Evan, I feel like you're the epicenter of that. I feel like you're the kind of person. We're going to get into what Warm Cookies of the Revolution is. I literally want everybody to know. I want every teacher to know. I want every parent to know. I want everyone who is in the middle of getting bombarded with negative, crappy messages about the state of our democracy and how we are working or not working together, I want them to know about what you're doing.
I'm just laying out my agenda for you early on. I feel that, in some ways, I crafted this whole season to be able to talk to you and tell your story. Tell us, what is Warm Cookies of the Revolution?
Evan: First off, thanks for having me on. I'm super psyched. Warm Cookies of the Revolution is, we call it, a civic health club, like a gym. You go to a gym, you want to work out, you want to look good, you want to feel good. Started this in 2012. The idea was, where do we do that in our civic life, and what the hell does civic mean? That's what we've consistently and constantly and all the time are reevaluating what does it mean to work on what it means to be civic every day, because there has to be something outside of voting and elections. It can't just be a one-day-a-year thing.
What we do is we create weird, fun, wild, meaningful, surprising programs. These are events, usually. Sometimes they're books, they're videos, they're installations. They're all sorts of different things, but by and large, these are live, in-person, where you can be with other people to talk about and discuss and wrestle with what does it mean to own your community and how do you exercise that.
The reason that we make it fun and weird and surprising and all that is because that's the way that we know it actually works to get people who are not typical civic decision makers, who aren't already part of that process. That's what it is in a nutshell. I can give examples because that actually sounded dry.
Lisa: I can't wait to get into the sample because that's what it's like. I think we were talking earlier about your theater background. One of the things I've heard you say is, "We are competing with other things that are taking people's attention. We have to make it fun." Your events have circus performers, incredible food, face painting, cool stuff. Cool stuff that you would pay to go to, like festival, fairy kind of stuff. There's no homeroom murmur, like, "Eat your beets."
It really is a philosophy that we are all owners in some ways of our communities. We pay taxes, and therefore, we should have an ownership stake. That's not just a voting thing, that's an everyday thing. This idea of vote every day, you actually turned it into a cardboard book, like a Goodnight Moon-inspired cardboard book. Tell me about that book and tell us about the philosophy in that book.
Evan: Yes, totally. Here. Ready? For those that are seeing this, it's a visual, Vote Every Day. Yes, this is the idea. I'd been toying with that for a long time. I did an installation at the Denver Art Museum for a number of months that was called that as well. It was just this idea of there has to be more than just voting. Everything that we do is trying to start with this, like, "Can we be realistic? Can we just cut to the chase here? Let's name things what they are. Let's point out the truth, and let's start from there."
One, civic. No one knows what that means. You took a class maybe in junior high. You know it has to do with voting or elections or something like that. Let's dig into that. Ultimately, for me, it was like trying to get that down to: "What does that mean?" That means, do you own your community? Does it feel like the way that you own your bicycle and your purse is the same as how you own the jail and the school and the roads and the air that you breathe? For most people, it doesn't feel that way.
For those that it does feel that way, well, then great, you already know what it means to be civic. For most of us, we haven't been trained that way. The idea, the artistic dilemma, and the challenge is how do you get that across to people that they do own these things? That's why this idea of vote every day is like, we can make these choices. I think a lot of people understand the consumer choice of voting with your dollars idea. Like, "I hate Amazon, or "I only shop local," or whatever the thing is. That makes sense to people.
There's also more than that. We are more than just consumers. Being civic is where we are collectively and how we spend our money collectively. I think the other thing is, in terms of why we do stuff fun, is that same bit of, "Can we just be honest here?" There are most of the people in most of our communities who don't feel like they have a say, who are not involved in decision-making. Some people are not involved because the system's working for them. That's not who I'm interested in connecting with, for the most part.
I'm interested in who does not have a say and doesn't know that they could or should have a say. This part about competing with the NFL and Netflix is just the reality. We just don't have a lot of time. If you don't have time and you don't have a marketing budget, like Budweiser, to tell you where something is and how much and et cetera, et cetera, then you have to be incredibly creative. That is basically where we start with everything that we're doing. Is this important? Should people know about it? Okay, great.
Everyone thinks what they're doing is important. Every professor at a university writes, I'm assuming, a book that they worked really hard on, but most of them never get read by anyone. The trick here is: how do we make it so people will actually participate and show up? For me, it's culture; that people spend that little bit of time and money that they have after raising families and work, they do it on whatever they love. They like comedy. They work on cars. They bake. They love music. They shop. They go to a church. That's the stuff you do.
That's where we're going to go. That's what we're going to do. We're going to meet people where they are in this very realistic way. That ends up being fun. That's the bit that's connected to this joy bit you're talking about, which is people are inundated with crap, with fear, with everything's going to hell, and it's very real for people. Making rent is hard. We need escapes. I know that everyone cares about the air that they breathe. They care about the school their kids go to.
Linking that stuff into things that are fun, that are joyful, that are thinking about a different way that the future could be, it's not difficult to have an educational component or to have some nerdy tax code civic bit. That's actually not hard as long as you get the people there, and it's fun.
Lisa: Evan, you are one of the best examples of embodied futures and design that I know. Honestly, I want to get into it and make it super concrete for people. When you talk about fun, what are we actually talking about? If you go to your website, and I really hope everybody listening does, you'll see some of the greatest design ever, greatest fonts, all the nerdy things that designers go to years to do. You just do it because everything is embodied in the "Is it fun? Is it joyful? How do I shrink the time to get to somewhere or make it inviting?"
That is a designer's perspective, to make choices on behalf of the people that you are trying to serve. That's just so beautifully embodied. Then you overlay the "Towards the future we want to see come to life." You also, as you were talking, so many of your programs embody a core principle that I've been thinking about more and more—we are aligned to try to get more people to feel like they have agency over their futures, over their communities: this idea of build around what's fixed and design around what's flexible.
What I mean by that is if it is relatively, for lack of a better word, fixed that the people you're trying to reach don't have a lot of time, as you said, name it. Name it. You don't have a lot of time? We're going to bring it to you. Design around what's flexible. If you give us an hour, we're going to make it the most fun hour of your week. How do we design to make this thing that we call civic engagement, which, as you said, nobody understands, make it just like the greatest minutes that you're spending with other human beings? Let's get into it. Tell me about Tax Day Carnival.
Evan: Okay. Then there's something I want to mention about what you were just saying. Maybe I'll do that first, and I'll say about Tax Day Carnival because I'll forget otherwise. Two things. One is a lot of what we do is collaborative. I don't want to take credit for everything that we do. It doesn't work unless there's lots of people involved. That goes from design to design of programs, to website, to-- I don't do any of the nerdy coding or any of that kind of stuff.
The other thing I was going to say—and I really realized this when I used to work in the theater, writing and designing and acting—it hit me. I was like, "Man, these people bought a ticket, are paying for a babysitter, and went out to dinner. This is an expensive evening, and they're coming to see a play that I wrote. Damn it, that is a serious responsibility. I want it to be worth their while." I take that really seriously.
With Warm Cookies stuff, even with the board book that I was showing you, mentioning, doing that, I was like, "We're cutting down trees to do that. Does this justify it? Does this justify that the trees that are going to be cut down? Is this interesting enough? Is it worth it?" That is the way that I think about everything that we do and that we make.
Tax Day Carnival, we just had one the last Tax Day, April 15th. We've done it for a long, long time. Tax Day is the national day of mourning. Everyone hates it. You say, "Ugh, Tax Day. Ugh." That is what that is. Then if you think about it, what it could and should be is the day that we celebrate as a community how we fund the things that we want. Now, that doesn't mean you have to love taxes. You could say, "Let's get together and talk about it because I don't want to pay taxes. I think all this should be private." Fine, that's your opinion.
Someone else is like, "I'm proud to pay. I'm a Democrat, and I love it," whatever. That's what it should be, though, is what do you want in the community, and how are you going to pay for it? It's a very realistic thing. We flip it, and we have a carnival. We say, "This is the crappiest day of the year. We're going to make it super fun." Like all of our programs, depending on where we are and who we're with, it looks different. This last one, with our friends in a neighborhood in Denver called Westwood, it's this Chicano punk venue called D3.
We had mariachi, we had lucha libre wrestlers, we had all sorts of carnival performance artists. We have food. We have treats. It is a carnival. Now, the games—this is where it becomes civic—is that we talk with all the tax nerds and the tax and budget organizations and we say, "You should come to this, but you can't bore people. You're not just tabling. We're going to work with you, and we're going to come up with carnival games so that people are having fun. They're playing an actual carnival game. Here's ring toss, or here's Plinko, or whatever it is. This is the opportunity for them to learn about whatever the tax issue is.
Then we have a very short conversation right in the middle, very short, about people's perspectives and feelings on taxes. By and large, in the three hours that went on, it was a three-hour carnival. The games are going on continuously, and then there's a short bit, because that's all you really need, that gets to people's opinion. I also will mention, because when we can, we try to offer direct services, or usually it's what action step could someone take next?
I'm going to admit that I was wrong. This has only happened once, so I'm going to do it now. One of the guys that I was collaborating with, Rito Ramirez, he runs a tax service. He was like, "I'll bring a couple people, and we will do tax extension filings on the day." This is on April 15th. I was like, "All right, cool. Who's going to come and do that?" They ended up doing 27 tax extension filings and 14 people's taxes on the day at this carnival. I was completely wrong. There also was this individual and personal service that we were able to offer too.
Lisa: Oh my gosh. I love it. Even just that notion of like, "Let's flip it on its head. You hate that day? Let's make you love that day." It reminds me, our very first podcast was with my dear friend and talented leadership coach, Rae Ringel, who teaches leaders about reframing. She has this great story about just capturing how you can turn something that annoys you into something that you can be grateful for. She said, "Just notice anytime you hear a siren, it's so loud, you want to hold your ears." She said, "Instead, say, 'I hope they get there on time. I hope they get there.'"
Just like this day that, oh, it feels so hard, it's overwhelming—how do we make it joyful? How do we actually provide services to people in their community? I think it's worth saying, just in case people don't realize, you're in rural areas. This is not like huge cities where there's stuff happening. You're creating opportunities for people to really get to know their neighbors and be joyful and learn from each other.
Evan: In the rural areas, and this isn't my expertise, my conspirator, Adrian Molina, he comes from a rural area, and he runs all of our rural work. I will say there, it is a different context for a lot of reasons. Getting to know your neighbor is less of the thing. It is in some places. There might be super generational rifts like we have in cities and in neighborhoods. Actually, I see so much hope in rural areas because we worked for five years on a project in Denver to try to establish participatory budgeting.
It was through arts and all this weird stuff. Our main goal was to get someone in the mayor's office to take notice. That was a big thing we were trying to do. When we're in rural areas, they're like, "Oh, the mayor? Yes, Donnie. Donnie's over there. He's eating a sandwich." To your point, I think I might even go one step more with this idea of listening to something. You could also hear a siren. You could think a lot of things. You could be annoyed by it, and then you can be like, "Hey, I hope they get there on time." Then you could be like, "I'm glad that exists." Then you could go even deeper and be like, "Wow, that is cool that it exists."
You can also be like, "Is that maybe a failure that we have to call someone, that we have to set up a system, that there isn't some other way to deal with something, that a siren--" These opinions could be different or changed depending on context. I think the point, and I think this is what you're making, is if you are willing to go deep with something and maybe even flip it, tease it out, rip it apart, what something means, you're then at a place where you can put it back together in a really weird, interesting, different place. Sometimes it's going to fail; that's fine.
Specifically, if you are concerned about something in the community, whether you think your community is changing for the bad or you want it to change, you need that type of creative thinking, and you need that laboratory of it. That's what I have always thought of Warm Cookies as: we don't have our beakers like scientists do. We don't have ingredients and spices like cooks do, and frying pans and fire. In our civic life, what is that? By and large, it's being with our neighbors and experimenting with bringing up new ideas or crafting legislation or just jumping in and doing something.
I think it's necessarily extremely creative. Also, if I can go for another second here, every example of what I would say is civic, maybe progress, or an expansion of democracy in this country, which I think is a positive. There are people who don't, but I think it's positive. Every example of that, by and large, started with a small group on the margins or somehow not in part of power who came up with some new way of doing something. By that, I'm thinking of abolishing slavery and women's right to vote, getting rid of child labor laws, the environmental movement, the disability rights movement, gay rights movement. You can go on and on. Civil rights movement.
Pretty much all of those started with groups of people that didn't have power, that saw an injustice. They were creative and pushed. Usually, even the political realm of it, the legislative realm, started then in either they just did it, and then a third party pushed it. The final thing is 51 senators voting on the Civil Rights Act or something like that. It's actually exactly creativity in civic life that not only has been the best thing in history, but it is our hope for the future, I think.
Lisa: Hallelujah. I agree. I'll add a few more Cs to that creativity. Earlier in the podcast series, we spoke with Jennifer Dulski, who used to be the president of Change.org. She actually wrote a book called Purposeful. She may have to write another one just so she could write about you, but I'm going to write about you in my book. She talks about the summary of what it takes to move an idea into impact and action.
She talks about courage. That's another form of creativity: being courageous enough to be like, "Yes, we're going to make Tax Day fun. Yes, we're going to have a cool event called Civic Stitch 'n Bitch," which we are going to talk about. How do we bring community together so you're not just like a solo person on a pulpit yelling at people? How do you have commitment over time? I think it's unbelievable that you've been doing this work for over 12 years, one of the first of its kind.
Each time you're putting points on the board, you're helping people realize that there's another way to do this work versus anger or opposition, that you can notice it and then invite people to get involved in a different way. That creativity is not only about the idea. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that your participatory budgeting over those many years, first of all, just naming it was to get attention. That's a big deal. People don't think about that, that that's important. I think you called it This Machine Has a Soul. Was that?
Evan: Yes.
Lisa: You weren't like, "Hey, everybody, show up to the purple table and do some participatory budgeting." You're like, "This machine has a soul. Let's go."
Evan: It was literally the opposite of that because we wanted to win, and we knew that we were going up against a mayor that didn't want it and city council didn't want it, like no one until we got a couple. We had these very strategic things of we need to train city staff, we need to get more residents involved, and we need to make spectacle so that we get press. Come to the participatory budgeting meeting, we didn't even start with the individuals. This is a good example, maybe, of the way we approach stuff.
We knew, to even start, you need a friend or a neighbor to be like, "Hey, come to this thing." That means the thing needs to be interesting enough. We needed to make an event that had all accessibility issues taken care of. It had all language interpretation, it had food, it was at a time of day that worked, like child care. That's number one. Then it was like, "Okay, this is our chance to get people." If you say participatory budgeting to a regular person, hell no.
The first thing we did was build these two machines inside of suitcases. One was a Rube Goldberg machine which showed how the system worked for most people. We would tell the group, "Hey, this is what we're doing. This coin is $1 million. The 20 of you talk about how you would spend a million dollars in your neighborhood right now." They talk, and then they come up with their idea, "Oh, we're going to fix the roads," whatever it is.
Then we say, "Okay, put the coin into this machine." They put it in, [blips] all this crap happens. Then the final thing in this machine was a piece of paper. It came out, and we could put whatever we wanted on it. Usually, we put City of Denver letterhead, and it said, "Thank you for your comments and concerns." That was showing the system as is. It's cynical, but it's true. Most people are like, "Come to this thing. It's important. We're gathering community feedback. Put a sticky note on the wall. Tell us what you want."
Then people are like, "I went, and then I left. I don't know what happened." We're like, "That's the system as is." Then we built this other one in a big steamer trunk, and it was representing participatory budgeting. It was fun. It was hard. They got to decide what happened. They needed experts that were involved as well. There was a whole bunch of series. You could just tell by people's body language. The first one, it was like, they talked, one person went [blips] and they watched it.
The second one, they're all up in it and doing it. We knew that needed to be the first thing. Then we needed to get coverage of it. If you can change culture, it's like comedy. It's like the kid in a classroom who can make the joke can clown everything. That wins. Trump, the first time around, that's what that was. It's very second-grade version, but it was very much like, "Oh, yes, well, you're an idiot." Yes. Everyone was like, "Yes, you are an idiot." Getting culture, getting people to be so excited about something, then it's done. The policy will come later. If you can get people behind something, it's over.
Lisa: I love that, Evan. I often think when I'm asked to design an experience, I often say, "Tell me about what happens after the experience. That person is going home to their family member, to their partner, and what are they saying? What was cool about it? What was fun?" Starting with the end in mind about the feeling, Evan, so much of what you're sharing reminds me a lot of the work that I did with the student athletes. When I first started, I recruited one of my students, and I started designing some programming that spoke athlete and spoke coach, not spoke civics, but it's like, "Hey, let's meet you where you are."
To this one student, I said, "You only have one job. Your job is to tell me if what I'm creating bores you. If it bores you, we're done. You don't need to say anything else. If this feels like your grandma's civics, we're done." That rubric, although it was simple, was so helpful. It was just so liberating. I think that so much of the work you're doing is to liberate from what we thought was civic work or voting work that has heaviness and continues to be just pounded that it's like an "Eat your beets" thing. You're changing the whole paradigm of it. I want to maybe talk through a few more examples because I think they're really helpful. Can you talk about The Huddle?
Evan: Yes, The Huddle, we meet in sports bars, and we have a conversation only at halftime. This goes to what you were just saying about speaking sports or speaking the language of whoever you're working with. When I'm being honest, I think I may have started Warm Cookies, wanting The Huddle, because I'm a sports fan, and I'm in the theater world, the arts world, and lefty politics.
Those things could not be traditionally more thought of as different than the NFL, which is the most racist and homophobic and capitalist, militaristic group/corporation, but I love it. I had the most passionate and fact-based conversations with men in sports bars—usually men, not only, but by and large. I thought that was really important. Only halftime. We don't do it long. We're smart about it. We're in Denver, so we wouldn't do it at a Broncos game. We would do it in a game that real football fans who like any kind of football would go to.
We pick a theme that's related. Once you get there, once you start, you notice that everything's related. Just as an example, the last one we did was for the Champions League final, so not the World Cup, but the club championship, the best teams in the world. We were discussing a proposal that the city of Denver was going to purchase land that a new stadium was going to be built on for the women's professional soccer team.
It was a great conversation because it got past the first thing, which is like, "Should public dollars be spent on stadiums?" You got into this nuanced, difficult thing of the neighbors that are there, the way that it's being proposed, that it is a women's professional team, and it would be the first one that would have the stadium here. It also got into real dollars, the real decision-making. It was like, "Okay, $70 million." The mayor had just announced that the city will be $250 million in debt over the next two years.
It's like, "Do we want to spend money on this? Is it the same bucket of money?" It was a great way to be able to get to something that was real. I'll show it again. This is just for people who are watching this. We make a little kid's mat for-- If you can see this, it's like you sit down, and it looks like a kid's menu. There's a little word find, and there's a place you can draw, and there's fun stuff to do.
Then there's facts about soccer, facts about this program. There's action steps. There's things that you can do. You can go to this meeting and have your voice heard. Again, this is trying to hit people with all senses. It's not just for people who like to talk, but they can see, they can smell, they can taste, a little bit of all that. We always say, too, that when we're planning an event, this is something you'd be interested in, Lisa, because you do this kind of thing, is we want stuff for people's heads. We want stuff for people's hearts. We want them to be able to connect.
We provide stuff for their bellies with cookies or food. Then for their feet, we want action. We want them to be able to make a move. We want to give them hands-on things, too. We give them little things that they can do. That's The Huddle. That was a long explanation. It's basically sports connecting to issues around sports, in sports bars.
Lisa: Designed so thoughtfully. One of the things you said, almost as a not quite throwaway line, but I just think it's worth highlighting, is that these events allow multiple identities to come together. You're a sports guy, lefty guy, and someone who lives here and is going to be impacted by the traffic. This is a bit of a non sequitur, but this summer, I have been listening to an incredible podcast series that came out a couple years ago by Roman Mars of 99% Invisible, who talks about urban design and infrastructure, celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, which is the book that Robert Caro wrote about Robert Moses, who is the single most influential city master planner, master eviler.
It really goes into detail about what happens when power isn't shared, when power is consolidated. I just have that in my mind when I hear the total opposite way that you're thinking about it, starting with designing for the people that will be most impacted by it. I just think it's extraordinary. Do you have a favorite program?
Evan: It's funny, I lean towards the stuff that is sometimes the least technical, the least civic-y, because I think it's the stuff that is underneath it all. A Sunday School for Atheists, I really enjoy because we get to talk about issues of forgiveness and friendship and obedience. These things that are pretty damn important that I think, at its best, organized religion provides that or has provided that. I don't know that, for many people, there's been an alternative in their lives.
I'm always into that kind of thing. I just like anything that is surprising, that really surprises people, and when they come, they're like, "Whoa, I didn't know what to expect. That was so cool." They think about something. I enjoyed what we did with this How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse because that was very surprising. It was about coalition building, but people wouldn't have known that until afterwards, which is the point.
I think, to this point that you were just bringing up about power and shared and how it works there, the thing that I'm tripping out on a little bit now is what is civic life in the age of trillionaire? We have a trillionaire now. [chuckles] I saw something the other day that was like, "Elon Musk, he'll be a trillionaire one day and then not another. It's all just based on values of stocks."
The amount of money that his net wealth will increase or decrease in a day now is about the amount that Bill Gates is worth. That is hard to conceptualize. I don't know that we can escape. When we're talking about naming things, pointing it out, I don't know that we can escape that. If you're talking about civic life, you're talking about who makes decisions. With budgets and with how we want our communities to be, when you have power consolidated and money consolidated in a way that we can't conceive of, that is the ultimate challenge for civic life. We have programs that would be good at that.
This is a weird way into another favorite program of mine is The People Vs. It's a mock trial. We put on trial things that never go on trial. Recently, we were in a bunch of rural areas where we've been putting AI on trial. We put the media on trial, having children, our economic system, the idea of public education, these giant drones—things that have just appeared that we didn't have a say in.
The idea of trillionaires, I think that we need that. We need to put that concept on trial, and we need people to prosecute and defend it because that's a way that you'll know where you stand. If you do even just a mock trial once where you have to be like, "All right, shit, I need to say, are they guilty or innocent? I'm going to talk with people about it." You're going to walk out of there having thought about, "What does it mean? Do I agree or not? Do I want this or not?" I think people will be less willing to accept many of the things that's being forced down people's throats right now.
Lisa: Do you have that written up somewhere? If people wanted to do their own-
Evan: The People Vs?
Lisa: -People Vs.
Evan: I'm glad you asked because this is the huge project that I'm working on right now, which is I'm making a cookbook. This is going to take our recipe. It's a cookbook, and it will be a large format, like any other beautiful cookbook that you get. It's going to be our recipes. It's going to be fun and different, a little surprising. There'll be anecdotes and stories, but there'll also be really nuts and bolts, "Here's the recipe to do The People Vs. Here's what you need. Here's how you should approach it. Here's who you should ask. Don't forget trash bags."
From the concept of it down to a checklist of what to do to clean up. We're going to have that for many of our programs, with the idea of this is in physical form for people, and then we'll have an online version that then people can use. This is a massive undertaking, but that is the thing. It's in response to exactly what you just asked. We've had people around the country ask us for this all the time. Right now, actually, as a cool in-between, this fall and winter, I'm not going to be making any programs. I'm just going to work on this.
Then the Denver Public Library in Denver is going to run programs of ours through some of these recipes. The Rocky Mountain PBS is going to do it around the state. Then we have folks in some other states who are going to be trying out some of these recipes before it's published as test cases to see what it's like when we're not really at the center of things.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. First of all, I'm seeing a How We Future test case. Evan, if you want to try one out with our peeps listening, you want to put one out there; I think we could get you some feedback for sure. Also, talking earlier with some of the people that came together at Stanford for the Future's Happening: Democracy Edition, which I architected a couple of years ago, was exactly to help bridge these different efforts so that it would be a phone call with someone like Shamichael Hallman, another guest on How We Future in the Civic Futures, who is creating programming for 200 public library systems across cities, which equates to almost 3,000 individual sites.
Rather than make up what to do, just go to the cookbook. Just go to what works. Customize it just like any cookbook. You're like, "Oh, I don't like garlic, but I'll put in shallots." Like, "Oh, I can't do this, but I'll put that in."
Evan: Precisely.
Lisa: The starting from scratch is so hard, first of all. Unfortunately, it still is people's instincts. I think I even said this at the Future's Happening, where I was like, "My goal is for you to meet each other, learn each other's stories. Do not start something new from scratch; that is too hard. There are bright spots out there that you can build on." I really hope that educators listening to this are like, "What can I do? What can I do?"
I stumbled upon this, becoming an accidental civic educator and catalyst myself ahead of the 2020 election when, at Stanford, I created that program Designing the President, same kind of idea. I'm like, "What if we're going about this voting thing all wrong? What if instead of, like, 'Hey, are you a Buttigieg guy or a Bernie person? You better vote'" I'm like, "Why don't we remind people that when they're 18, they become a hiring manager of the most important position in the country, if not the world?"
Just because you're 18. That's incredible amount of power and responsibility. Who are you hiring? What do you care about? What leadership qualities do you care about? It was a totally different conversation. What I found in that program, not being from the civics world, but being a designer, is that just being willing to challenge how we were doing things, adding some fun, adding some connectivity, taking down the heat, amping up the empowerment, I could get more done in 90 minutes than teachers could get done in a year of teaching the way that they've always been taught.
I'll just say one more thing about this, which is what I think you're doing. I had an aha moment when I started to bring it to civic teachers, where I had a teacher in Georgia who said, "You know what, it just made me realize when young people learn to drive," if they learn to drive anymore with all the Waymos, whatever, "but we don't say, 'Go memorize the engine, here are the keys, go drive.' We say, 'Drive for 40 hours, then--'"
Democracy is a way more complicated machine. Why are we saying, "Go memorize three branches of government and do this?" Why aren't we giving them practice to really talk about, which was, like you said, People Vs, how to reframe what we want to fund and not fund. I think these experiences just have such a ripple impact of positive impact. Individuals feel empowered. Communities are making better choices. They have different standards of what should be okay and not okay just because you designed a different intervention.
Evan: What you were just saying is something that I've been kicking around for a couple years now and wanting to solidify. It has to be done in a very thoughtful way with the right people, but it's specifically around coming-of-age ceremonies. What would a civic coming-of-age ceremony be in a community? In the same way that someone's bar mitzvah or quinceañera is as meaningful or non-meaningful as they are.
Like you're saying, kids become adults somehow. How intentional are we doing it? For some people, it is getting their license. It's having sex. It's taking drugs. It's voting. It's joining a gang. Who knows what the thing is, but there is a thing where kids switch. I think if we had a set of principles and a set of ceremony that was not the same everywhere, not even in a community, I think that would be the wrong way to go about it. If you had the city of Denver's civic coming-of-age ceremony, you're going to get the wrong people doing it.
If you have community leaders from different cultures, elders who can think about, with youth involved, what would this look like? What are the principles and values of what it means to now be a part of this community? For me, I had a bar mitzvah, and parts of it were not meaningful, but there was a part that was meaningful in that I knew, from a younger age, this is what you're going to do. You're going to need to do these things, and then you're going to be a man.
Now, I was far from a man when it happened, but you're going to be a man, and you get to sit over here. You get to wear this. If called upon, if we need you and we need men for this thing, you're going to be part of it. It did mean something. I think if there was even more intention and more thought in our civic life, I think you would see giant, giant, giant changes. That's something that I've been kicking around for a while, and I want to figure out how to best take that on. Put the time and the investment in now, and I think for our civic life, if we can do that at a younger age, would reap a hell of a lot more benefits.
Lisa: I totally agree. I totally agree, which is why I feel like maybe I should just stop everything I'm doing this fall and just go to be your front person, going school to school, "Hey, do you know about Warm Cookies of the--"? We can't get that cookbook out there fast enough because, again, not only does it give people ideas, but then it gives them agency like, "Oh, what if we did create this?"
I'll just say one thing that really captured my attention when I stumbled into Designing the President, now called Vote by Design, we ended up hitting thousands of particularly coming-of-age voters, was learning about some of the creative things that people were doing in school. There was a school that I found that just celebrated that you could vote, that you became 18. They had a celebration, not just like, "Hey, these are all the people that can vote this year. That's amazing." Just really encouraging them to pull towards a better feeling versus, I feel like, all the hammering that we do.
I'll just say, maybe in summary, Evan, for now, because I could talk to you for hours and hours. I just absolutely love what you're doing. You're not shying away from tough stuff, but you're inviting us to think about a different way, that the kind of real civic engagement, first of all, requires constant attention. It's a health club. It's not one and done. You have to continually invest in it if you want to be healthy, and that we can do it joyfully with others, and we'll be better for it.
Thank you for being the sunshine that we need so desperately, and for continuing to be creative, courageous, building community, sticking to it. I just really hope everybody listening here goes to your website. I can't wait for that special How We Future prototype of your cookbook that we're going to [chuckles] share. Did you see that? Did you see how I slipped that in there?
Evan: I like that.
Lisa: We're going to make it happen and just grateful to be in your orbit. Thank you so much.
Evan: Lisa, I'm rubber, and you're glue. That's what I'll say to all of that. Thank you so much for having me on here. I really appreciate it. I could talk with you forever and ever. Super fun. What you're doing is just incredible. Thank you. Thanks for chatting with me.
[music]
Lisa: Evan is so great at helping us reframe civics as an opportunity for joyous, unexpected connection. One of the things I'm taking away from our conversation is the importance of really meeting people where they are. Whether that's at a sports bar, a carnival, or a conversation about something we all care about in our community. I hope you'll check out Warm Cookies of the Revolution and explore Evan's work.
As you do, I'd love for you to ask yourself what's one thing in your community that you could approach a little differently. What could we make more joyful, more welcoming, or more participatory? Let me know your thoughts in the comments so we can all learn together. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and I'll see you next week on How We Future.
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