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Gita StulbergOctober 31, 2017
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Gita StulbergOctober 31, 2017

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Funding Request · Book Proposal From the Co-Founder of MyVote Project · 2026
Me , We
Essays on gathering, belonging, and the civic life between us
By Gita Julianna Stulberg
From the opening essay — "Free: The Listening Room"

In The Tipping Point, Gladwell describes Connectors as people who move easily between worlds — who know many different kinds of people and create the conditions for those people to meet. Standing there, holding two tickets, I realize I've always understood myself that way. Someone who brings people into rooms.

But this feels different. Because here, no one is being pulled in. They're arriving. On purpose. And the work isn't spreading something outward. It's holding something still.

Everyone falls silent. The first track plays. We're all in. Whole selves in. Different lives. Different money. Different everything. Same sound. Same surrender. We believe in it — not loudly, not collectively. Just individually, at the same time.

— Gita Julianna Stulberg, Me, We (in progress)

The Book

Me, We opens in a backyard in Los Angeles on a Tuesday night — Miles Davis, strangers, and a narrator who bought two tickets just in case. It ends with a generation of young organizers who didn't know they were becoming one until they already were.

In between: essays on the people who know how to make others feel like part of something — a listening room, a dance floor, a makers studio, a running club, a karaoke night, a supper table. And woven into each, quietly and without announcement, one small thing the reader could do before the next essay begins.

Why This, Why Now

Civic trust is collapsing. Formal institutions generate obligation, not participation. And yet, in unremarkable rooms across the country, cultural organizers are doing the thing political life keeps failing to do: making people feel like part of something.

This book maps what they know — and names it — before it disappears unrecorded. Its literary companion, Just Lead (working title), is a documentary series currently in development.

Some of the Voices — Cultural Organizers & the MyVote Generation

FreeIntentional listening sessions, LA & NY
JohnSade Night Monthly DJ night, LA
EliClub owner & DJ, NYC
DeniseAdult makers collective, LA
TerrellCultural art gallery, LA
ErwinLifestyle brand studio + café, community space
AutumnArtist, LA
NathanGlobal supper clubs
DanKaraoke nights
Nona & RobFan festival — identity as participation
HeidiFriends From NY Dance Parties
MarianneRunning club turned community, LA
Michael & YukaAcupuncture clinic as gathering space, NYC
NinaRestorative Justice Circles
Small World BooksBook club, Venice
DougD Evan Surf Shop, Costa Rica
SariParkland → March for Our Lives → MyVote → Capitol Hill
MyVote AlumniMaria, Maddie, Gracie, Anna — the gatherers in formation

Comparable Works

The Art of Gathering (Priya Parker) · Bowling Alone (Robert Putnam) · Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown) · Palaces for the People (Eric Klinenberg) · Tribe (Sebastian Junger)

Me, We sits at the intersection of these books — but it is reported from inside the rooms, not theorized from outside them.

The Ask

Support for research travel, interview production, and writing time to complete the full manuscript — moving across cities and spaces to document the organizers already building the civic infrastructure America needs, and the young people watching them and becoming the same.

TBD Let's talk

Gita Julianna Stulberg — Co-Founder & Executive Director, MyVote Project

Twenty years in political organizing, electoral campaigns, and civic engagement.

Direct relationships with every voice in this book.

MyVoteProject.com gita@myvoteproject.com
"We didn't just prepare them to participate in democracy. We taught them how to build rooms people want to be in."