W- how do you account for the success of the first initiative, the preschool initiative, and the challenges in confronting that second cha- uh, uh, objective?

S- s- so there's a lot in there, and, um, I think what you're referring to is the, you know, the difference between kind of Issue 44, which was a municipal ballot initiative that was designed to basically raise taxes that, in a way that would fund and drive resources to the, um, poorest communities in Cincinnati to support universal preschool for all kids, um, versus a statewide ballot initiative that Undivided also wanted to get... become a part of, that was working on questions of, of, um, police violence and incarceration.

And, um, they were g- they got more support within Crossroads to work on the m- the i- on the universal preschool initiative than to work on the statewide initiative.

And so there's some things that are embedded in that that have to do, that have to do with things I think are that, are outside the control of Undivided.

For example, the difference between a citywide initiative versus a statewide initiative.

You know, Crossroads is a church that was grounded in one city in Ohio as opposed to the whole state.

Um, so there are some things like that that are part of it.

What are the, what are the key lessons of this story of the Undivided Initiative in Cincinnati?

What was the methodology for community organizing that the leaders of the Undivided Initiative developed? And what made it distinctive?

Yeah, that's a really good question.

And so just to provide a little bit more background.

So Crossroads is an evangelical megachurch.

It, at the time, probably had about 30,000 people a week that were showing up in person.

Now it has about, I think, 40,000 people per week that show up in person, about 500,000 people that tune in online.

So it's got this enormous scale.

And many of the institutions of social media magnify that because you're not just confessing something that you might be ashamed of to a close friend, but you're confessing it to potentially millions upon millions of people.

Just to say, I hadn't heard that definition from MLK before, and I've jotted it down, so you will no doubt hear it again on this pod.

And like we all might have different purposes.

This is not predetermining or prejudging what one's purpose should be, but do I feel like I'm someone who can be an architect of my own future? And I think so often the kind of invitations that we offer people invite them to essentially outsource that question of purpose to other people.

You know, I do most of my work kind of working with organizations that are trying to get people involved in public life, politics, like different things like that, and often the invitations they offer people are things like, "Sign a petition, send $5, come out and vote." You know? Where basically it's like, "Look, let the professionals decide what we're gonna do with your money."

Yeah

... invest in early childhood education.

Couldn't get it done.

And so finally Troy comes along, and he's like, "All right.

But how did you come to get engaged with this set of people? I'm intrigued by that.

Yeah.

So I am not from Cincinnati and I did not grow up in an evangelical tradition.

And so this is not a community that I necessarily had any natural reason to to be linked to.

But I was in Cincinnati doing research on a 2016 ballot initiative.

And the reason why I was researching it was because it was unusual from the standpoint of political science in that.

In 2016, which is the same election that Trump won the presidency, he won the state of Ohio.

So where these megachurches are flourishing, what is it that they're doing that is enabling them to – both bring people in, but then to go back to what we were discussing earlier, kind of transform them in the way that we see some of the main characters in Undivided being transformed.