The United States is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand, especially through feeds and updates that atomize our attention. We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs — and the pushback and resilience work already underway — is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.

What we’re doing

In our work at Unbreaking, we’ll help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters. To that end, we’re building a set of pages that will serve as backgrounders for the issues we cover. Each page is written by and for ordinary people, and conveys essential context, a sense of what’s happened so far, and what countermoves are in play. Our pages will be updated once or twice a week as needed.

In some ways, the work is simple: We assemble lists of events, build out contexts and connections, and write explainers for people without specialist expertise.

In other ways, it’s challenging:

• We work together to compile disparate sources, understand and describe the workings of a huge and interconnected government, and make sense of the often chaotic attempts to dismantle those workings.
• Then we try to explain the human effects and the ways people are trying to preserve necessary governmental services and functions, protect their neighbors and communities, and build systems for collective survival.
• Finally, we assemble everything into living, frequently updated resources that people with busy lives can return to over time to understand what’s happening, why it matters, and who’s trying to help.

…all while setting up the organizational capacity to do the work in sustainable ways that don’t burn out our contributors or make the project vulnerable to ideological capture or editorial drift.

Unbreaking.org

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Teams

Offices