Aaron Loewenberg. New America, February 14, 2024
It’s no secret that we’re living in a time of political polarization. And the reality is that a likely Biden vs. Trump presidential rematch means this polarization might actually get worse before it gets better.
Amid this atmosphere of hyperpartisanship, it felt like a breath of fresh air to come across the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families. The Collaborative convened a group of experts that span the ideological and political spectrum and met monthly over the course of a year in an attempt to find common ground when it comes to policies to support family flourishing in America. The final result was a Blueprint for Action that includes policy recommendations to better support children and families with low-to-moderate incomes across four dimensions of flourishing: improving economic outcomes, strengthening relationships, boosting resilience, and expanding choice.
To learn more about the Collaborative, I talked via email with Abby McCloskey, the director of the Collaborative and founder of McCloskey Policy LLC.
The blueprint notes that the group was inspired by the bipartisan National Commission on Children that was established in 1987 and published their report in 1991. Why was 2023-2024 seen as the right time to bring together a diverse group of experts to address family policy?
I certainly would have brought this group together earlier if I could have! But in many ways, it was the perfect time to convene. America has historically high levels of polarization and this has certainly impacted family policy. We convened the group in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, in the wake of Build Back Better, and after pandemic-era supports to families had expired. We are in the shadow of the 2024 presidential election. This makes the power of a cross-partisan group of people all the more countercultural and impactful.
There’s also widespread recognition that we are not supporting American families as well as we could - and changing that is going to require a broad cohort in a country as divided as ours. Most think tanks and media outlets are set up to defend their point of view, not work towards consensus. This was a unique space to actually come together and understand and learn from each other in a politically neutral space. I can’t think of a more important time to do that than in 2024.
On a related note, what were your goals for the group as the project was starting to launch?
My primary objective was to form relationships where there previously weren’t any. There’s this great quote by FDR in the last speech he wrote before he died, “If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together.” This was a very small step in one policy area of doing that. I don’t think our problem is a lack of ideas; I think it’s a lack of relationships.
We intentionally chose people for the group who have testified against each other, had CSPAN debates, and who actively write against each others’ positions. Shockingly, many of them had never met each other outside of that type of context. This was a chance to get to humanize each other, share meals, joke together, and open up about why we have the viewpoints we have.
At the beginning, we had extended debates about what work is, what family is, what fourishing is, and I thought the relationships might be the only thing to come out of it. But I’m so proud to say that we also discovered so many areas where we agree and came together on a decently long report! We developed a new framework for family flourishing which I think is very powerful in addition to the recommendations for policymakers, philanthropy, employers, and communities.
It’s become a truism that we’re currently living in a hyper-partisan environment characterized by entrenched political positions. Due to this, were you wary of bringing together experts from different political backgrounds in a search for common ground around family policy issues?
One of the joys of this project was working with a professional mediation team. David Fairman is managing partner at the Consensus Building Institute along with Ona Ferguson. Their extremely skilled facilitation felt like “couples therapy,” I often joked. But it kept any single voice from being too loud and ensured that everyone’s points of view were heard. This was unique from other groups I’ve been a part of. In the think tank world, normally the project facilitator is someone at the institution, there for their substance expertise. Having folks there explicitly for their mediation expertise was invaluable.
We also tried to structure the group in a way that was as politically balanced as possible. Sometimes bipartisan groups are all liberal with one conservative, or the reverse, and this can make it difficult for people to open up in a vulnerable way. We tried our best to capture and balance the diversity of viewpoints in this space.
The Collaborative convened monthly for a year. I know there were lingering policy disagreements even after all these meetings, but did that type of frequent, face-to-face interaction help get to the common ground outlined in the blueprint? It seems like it’s a lot harder to view someone with antagonism when you’re frequently collaborating with them around shared goals.
I think it was really important that we started by establishing a framework for flourishing. Too often we policy wonks jump into these conversations with our pet policy projects and forget the bigger picture of what we’re trying to do. This helped get people out of siloed thinking and to agree on the end point.
And yes, our in-person meetings were where most of the hard work and thinking happened. There’s simply no replacement for sitting across a table from someone, sharing a meal, being there with a professional mediator who has no dog in the fight, and talking through hard things. And then doing that again and again.
This type of work is expensive, time consuming, and the product isn’t always immediately obvious. This is why I’m so thankful for the generosity of our Collaborative members and also to the investment from the Packard Foundation.
Now that the blueprint has been released, are there any next steps we should be looking out for?
Thanks for asking! We have so many exciting things in the works. To start, our work nicely dovetails with the bipartisan, bicameral paid leave working group on the Hill and the bipartisan child tax credit negotiations since many of our members are in those conversations.
We also have events in the works to share our findings with employers, state governments, and the early childhood education community, among others. Convergence is a small, nimble, bridge-building organization. The projects they run are organic and tend to take on a life of their own based on the members. In our group, we had members from think tanks, but also employers, nonprofits, child care providers, physicians, and more. Each of these folks has a different network that the report can be shared with.
I think this breadth is really important. The reality is it’s not just federal policy that will change life for families, or one firm changing its practices. It’s going to take widespread action from across a lot of different actors to truly change the environment for families with young children in America.