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Questions Shape Our Future

Our lived experiences shape the questions we carry. What we've witnessed, survived, and know to be true gives form to what we wonder about our shared future. Our Voices Unbound is a national civic inquiry with global roots, built on this understanding: the knowledge we need already lives within us. It lives in the space between our experiences and the questions they create.

When we ask "What question do you carry?" we're really asking: What have you lived that makes you wonder? What have you seen that needs to be understood differently? The answers hold profound knowledge about what's broken and what's possible. This knowledge surfaces when we share our questions with each other, when we explore together what experiences shaped them, and when we discover the understanding that connects them.

We ask: What lived experience carries your question? Because in sharing what we know from what we've lived, we surface the knowledge that already exists in our communities. That knowledge, rooted in experience and visible through our questions, becomes the foundation we build on together.

"This isn't a search for immediate solutions. It's an effort to map the civic moment we're in. To wrestle together with what's working, what's broken, and what might emerge if we give ourselves permission to imagine."

— Dr. Ceasar McDowell

Building Civic Imagination

We're creating spaces where communities discover their collective wisdom, make meaning together, and chart pathways toward the futures we need.

Reclaim Questioning

Move beyond personal reflection to collective civic inquiry. The questions we carry, shaped by what we've lived, become the foundation for the futures we can build together.

Shape Meaning

Break free from algorithms that control discourse. Communities deserve spaces to explore what their lived experiences have taught them, where the knowledge between experience and question becomes visible and can be built upon together.

Amplify Wisdom

Use technology that serves connection, not extraction. Surface patterns across difference that help us see ourselves and each other more clearly.

How We Create Pathways Together

This is our invitation to co-create the future. Moving from the lived experiences that shape our questions, to the knowledge revealed when we share them, to the collective understanding we build together.

1

Connect with Partners

Building together with communities

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We're building Our Voices Unbound alongside communities and organizations already doing this work on the ground. This ensures what we create supports what's already happening and amplifies local voices. Through shared learning, collaborative design, and genuine partnership, we're weaving a collective fabric toward our September 2026 launch.

  • Building with organizations already engaged in civic work
  • Co-creating tools and approaches that serve real community needs
  • Ensuring this work supports, not disrupts, what's already happening
  • Learning together as we build toward a collective launch

Real transformation happens when we build alongside communities, not for them.

2

Share Questions

Rooted in lived experience

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Your community's questions become visible: to each other, to broader networks, and across the country. This creates connection, shows you're not alone, and builds relationships across different terrains. We invite everyone to share questions rooted in their lived experiences. Not mere curiosities, but profound inquiries shaped by what they have seen, felt, and survived. Within each question lives knowledge: the understanding born from experience, waiting to surface when we share with each other.

  • See your community's knowledge alongside others facing similar challenges
  • Build relationships and share power across networks and geographies
  • Multiple forms welcome: words, recordings, images, art, song, visual expression
  • Questions are geotagged and thematically clustered, mapping the civic moment we're in

Being heard sparks healing and lays the groundwork for profound connection.

3

Reflect

Discover patterns and possibilities

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Questions flow through the Civic Knowledge Transformer, a community-designed tool that reveals patterns and possibilities across our shared questions. Communities receive their own knowledge reflected back to them, seeing patterns not only within their own voices but connected to larger networks. Through community dashboards, they can explore what emerged, discuss what it means, and consider how these insights inform their ongoing work.

  • Community dashboards show patterns within local voices and connections to broader networks
  • Communities gather to discuss findings and their implications for ongoing work
  • Surfaces connections and tensions across voices without flattening complexity
  • Reveals hidden currents of hope, possibility, and shared concern
  • Uncovers the questions beneath the questions

When communities see their own wisdom reflected back, they can chart their path forward with clarity and purpose.

4

Act Together

Transform insight into impact

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Action begins the moment communities receive their knowledge reflected back. This reflection enables new practices, new ideas, and new understanding. It lays the groundwork for civic imagination to flourish. Communities move forward informed by what they've discovered, mapping the civic moment at local, national, and international levels. This isn't an endpoint. It's the continuation of an ongoing cycle of inquiry, reflection, and transformation.

  • New practices and understanding emerge from seeing patterns in community wisdom
  • Communities across different terrains discover they're asking related questions about the same systems
  • Partner networks coordinate action, share knowledge, and map power together
  • Civic Design Labs prototype solutions rooted in what communities know
  • The cycle continues: each action generates new questions, new reflections, new possibilities

Imagine: communities in three cities see their questions about housing and economic displacement reflected back, discover they're navigating similar power dynamics, and coordinate strategies across their networks. This is the power of collective knowledge meeting collective action.

Questions That Shape Us

The questions we carry aren't just curiosities. They're maps of what we've lived through, what we've witnessed, what keeps us awake at night. When we bring these questions into conversation, we discover we're not alone in what we know. Patterns emerge. Connections form. The knowledge living in our communities begins to find its voice.

Question

"Is there going to be a democracy?"

Question

"Are brands more powerful than governments?"

Question

"Is it too late?"

Build With Us

We're building partnerships, developing networks, and mapping the terrain as we approach the 20th anniversary of the Table of Free Voices. Our Voices Unbound launches September 2026. We're connecting with organizations and communities who share our commitment to surfacing collective knowledge and building civic imagination together.

Interested in being part of this work? Reach out.

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