Catalyze: Connected Futures
Our cohort-based approach to bridging divides to create the relationships, skills, and structures needed for positive change in the U.S.
Helping people move across active divides to take action toward common goals.
Differences are a normal part of a pluralistic society in which multiple distinct groups coexist while maintaining their unique identities within a single, unified political structure. Divides emerge when those differences harden into mistrust, contempt, fear, or disconnection that make it harder for people to listen, work together, share power, or pursue common goals.
Connected Futures, launched in 2026, is focused on organizations that can help people cross that harder terrain, because solving systemic problems requires more than diverse participation—it requires rebuilding the conditions for people who may not otherwise see one another as partners to build trust, develop shared capacity, and take action together.
We invest in organizations that build trust, strengthen collaboration, and create ways for people to act together when mistrust, polarization, exclusion, or disconnection would otherwise keep them apart, and prevent them from solving problems together.
We support organizations that are bridging divides by:
- Building the skills needed to engage in productive dialogue, conflict, and civic participation.
- Cultivating relationships rooted in trust, understanding, belonging, and mutual accountability.
- Creating structures for collective action, co-design, problem-solving, or shared decision-making.
Connected Futures organizations are working to bridge divides between people with differences in backgrounds or beliefs, for example: political, racial, ethnic, economic, religious, geographic, generational, or ideological differences.
These organizations may work in the health, economic mobility, democracy, and/or education sectors. What connects them is not a single issue area, but a common approach to bridgebuilding: creating the relationships, skills, and structures people need to work together toward positive change.