Building Together 2026: Reflections from Council on Foundations’ Conference

Council on Foundations’ Building Together 2026 conference was energizing and inspiring, with conversation after conversation affirming that working together across differences is essential to a shared future. 

Spending three days convening with the people and organizations we’ve supported, partnered with, and learned alongside for years was a hopeful immersion in the very world we’ve been working to create. We were proud that 7 of the 10 skill-building workshops at Building Together were led by New Pluralists grantees, and that every mainstage plenary featured a New Pluralists field leader or funder. The seeds we’ve helped plant are growing into a deeply connected ecosystem of practitioners, researchers, storytellers, and funders; sparking deep collaborations; and advancing new ways of thinking. 

Our intermediary role–both funder and practitioner–makes New Pluralists uniquely qualified to recognize trends and signals impacting pluralism work. Here are a few post-conference reflections from our team about what we saw, and what lessons we’re carrying with us as we move forward.

A maturing ecosystem

We witnessed many encouraging signs of how far the pluralism ecosystem has come over the last five years. The gathering itself, for example, was sold out; and 87 percent of attendees were first-time participants of Building Together!

Another hopeful sign: Measurement is becoming more clear and visible. This reflects growing momentum among leading practitioners, researchers, and funders who are moving the field away from isolated metrics and toward a shared understanding of impact. We saw examples of this in practice at Building Together, with insights from organizations including the Center for Inclusion and Belonging, Trust for Civic Life, and Trust for Public Land.

Transforming often messy and complex relational work into credible, aggregated learning and evidence is the field’s next major milestone, and we’re investing in it. We’ve funded six projects focused on strengthening pluralism-related measurement, as well as a Community of Practice that gathers leaders to help transform measurement from a set of individual efforts into a more unified, coherent ecosystem of tracking impact.

We were also encouraged by the number of conversations that moved beyond ideals and into the skills that can advance bridge-building in the real world. The Belonging Colorado initiative, for example, shared stories of what it looks like to bridge divides (between African immigrants and African American communities in Denver). A plenary session from The One America Movement tapped faith leaders from multiple backgrounds to share how, in the wake of October 7, 2023, fidelity to their own religious principles inspired both deep organizing within their communities and the hard work of building bridges with those their community might see as enemies. And our team led a workshop highlighting what we’ve learned over the last five years about how to effectively invest in pluralism. 

Sometimes pluralism and bridging can be written off as “soft,” but these examples and others showed the challenging and rigorous side of this work.  

Photo credit: Council on Foundations

Pluralism work takes time

Philanthropy can (and should) hold a long-term view. Often, we’re investing in connective tissue–something that can be hard to define and sometimes hard to justify. We don’t always know what the outcome of our investments will be, but we know that connecting leaders and practitioners is not just worthwhile; it’s a vital part of advancing the work of pluralism. 

At Building Together, we reconnected with several grantees who took part in our 2024 Healing Starts Here retreat in New Mexico. Two years later, they shared that the connections started at that retreat are still bearing fruit. A conversation sparked in New Mexico, for example, led to additional funding for one grantee; a local leader met a national partner who changed the trajectory of his spiritual and community-building work; another told us the retreat was one of the best experiences of his professional life. These outcomes are challenging to track, but they hold incredible value over the long term.

We need to have the hard conversations

The most common concern at the conference—surfacing in nearly every conversation—was a feeling of tension between social justice and pluralism. We can’t afford to gloss over that. If we’re serious about widening the circle—and we are—then we must address that tension directly. We’ve been paying attention to and working on this, and our growing understanding tells us that effective pluralism means finding the balance and interdependence between social justice and social cohesion. 

Building a better future together requires us to keep showing up across ideological differences, and to keep ourselves in conversation, even–and especially–when it’s hard. That effort is necessary to create durable progress on complex problems, and a shared future that works for all of us.

Photo credit: Council on Foundations

What we’re holding as we look forward

Building Together reminded us how vital convening is for deeply relational work. So many of the connections and ideas sparked at the conference couldn’t have been engineered in advance. Putting bridge builders in the same room–and giving them space to share their ideas and experience–builds trust and community intelligence that can drive wise action and collaboration.

For three days, we got to experience something closer to the world we’re trying to build–a world where people speak about interconnectivity and strength across difference as a matter of course, where unlikely partnerships feel possible, and where what was countercultural five years ago is becoming the shared work of a growing ecosystem. We’re proud and amazed to see it coming to life. And we’re more motivated than ever to keep planting, connecting, and tending.