I’ve been doing labor and community organizing for the last 20 years. As we all have, I’ve seen firsthand how toxic our politics have become. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I began thinking about what the values of that document mean today - do we even think about it anymore or value things in the same way. So I started a podcast called “the pursuit” as a platform to interview regular people about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the 21st Century.

The teaser for the podcast can be found here. My hope was to see if we still share the values of democracy - personal freedom and duty to community, voting and civic engagement, accessible voting rights, respecting and representing the rights of the minority, etc.

In just a few episodes, it became clear that conversations within personal networks weren’t going to get past the fact that guests were on “one side” of the social and political divisions we face - my circle is largely highly educated, urban, and white.

If we are going to truly explore whether these values of democracy still run deep, we need to have the conversations on a broader scale, through multiple mediums, and begin at a micro level. 

That’s where the idea for this project came in.

Contact:

Chad McKenna

mckennachad@gmail.com

218.606.2891