In 2024, New Pluralists staff, funders, partners, grantees, and founding Field Builders collaborated on a refreshed vision and strategy to anchor New Pluralists’ role in a rapidly changing environment. 

The result is our 2030 Strategy, which seeks to address three pernicious barriers to pluralism: dehumanization, as groups considered to be threats find their humanity denied; disconnection, as frayed social ties lead to loneliness and isolation; and distrust, as many of us are losing faith in institutions and each other. 

Since New Pluralists launched in 2021, we’ve seen practitioners, researchers, and storytellers effectively addressing these barriers through practices that reinforce norms and narratives about the inherent dignity of all people, create opportunities for meaningful connection across differences, and bring diverse groups together to co-create solutions for mutual benefit.

Our core challenge is to identify how everyday interactions across our differences — microcosms of pluralism—can grow into a renewed civic culture across the United States where we feel profound belonging, trust our neighbors’ integrity, and cooperate across differences to make our communities better. 

Over the next five years, we’ll invest to help promising practices break through from small pockets of success to durable change, establish shared measurement, and amplify compelling stories of impact to drive deeper philanthropic coordination and investment.

To realize our strategic vision and continue to meet the needs of the emerging pluralism ecosystem in 2025 and beyond, we will:

  • Continue to focus on culture change: We invest together in the growing ecosystem of people, organizations, and ideas working to bring pluralism to life in communities across the U.S.

  • Remain a pooled fund: We serve as a re-grantor that invests resources to strengthen and catalyze the pluralism ecosystem.

  • Maintain our role in strengthening the ecosystem: Through a combination of grantmaking, learning and evaluation, and convenings, we will drive momentum and coherence.

  • Recommit to funding that is responsive and practical alongside our long-term priorities: We are committed to the enduring work of culture change while remaining timely and relevant to the present moment.

We’ve also made some changes to our approach:

  • We are moving from a broad to a more focused mandate to discover how promising practices can break through to become more durable, adaptable, and scalable.

  • We are evolving from a closed cohort of founding Field Builders and funders that explored strategic collaborations and guided the first three years of New Pluralists to a network that engages, invests in, and learns across all of our grantees, funders, strategic partners, and sister networks.

  • We are re-envisioning our funder engagement and governance models so that we can expand our funder community. We’re offering differentiated paths for learning and, instead of tying governance to giving level, we are welcoming all funders who make multi-year commitments to share in decision-making equally.

In January, New Pluralists served as a funder and an organizing partner of Pluralism in Action, along with More in Common, The Greater Good Science Center, Over Zero, and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. The cross-ecosystem convening, which brought 175 practitioners, researchers, funders, and communicators together, reflected both the work we've done to date and how we will continue to serve the ecosystem moving forward.

More specifically, here is what you can expect from New Pluralists over the next several months. We will be:

  • Welcoming new funders as we collaborate to develop and launch the first investment initiative under our new framework. We expect to share more details in the coming months. 

  • Reflecting on Pluralism in Action, including a report summarizing insights from the convening about how to strengthen our collective work together to advance pluralism in the U.S. The event had limited capacity, but we and our partners are committed to sharing the insights and outputs widely. 

  • Supporting more effective coordination, communication, and knowledge-building across the pluralism ecosystem, including seed funding for early-stage ideas that emerged from the Ecosystem Hackathon, which took place as part of Pluralism in Action.

  • Harvesting lessons from our Healing Starts Here initiative, including a round-up of stories, resources, learnings, and a final impact evaluation that will surface the power of locally led pluralism work.

This is a pivotal moment for New Pluralists, and it comes at a critical time for our country. We are excited to embark on this new phase of work, and we are committed to growing and deepening relationships with funders and the field along the way.