About Unbreaking

The United States is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand, especially through feeds and updates that atomize our attention. We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs—and the pushback and resilience work already underway—is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.

What we’re doing

In our work at Unbreaking, we’ll help orient and ground our communities in clear and rigorously cited explanations of what’s happening to our government and why it matters. To that end, we’re building a set of pages that will serve as a backgrounders for the issues we cover. Each page is written by and for ordinary people, and conveys essential context, a sense of what’s happened so far, and what countermoves are in play. Our pages will be updated once or twice a week as needed.

In some ways, the work is simple: We assemble lists of events, build out contexts and connections, and write explainers for people without specialist expertise.

In other ways, it’s challenging:

We work together to compile disparate sources, understand and describe the workings of a huge and interconnected government, and make sense of the often chaotic attempts to dismantle those workings.
Then we try to explain the human effects and the ways people are trying to preserve necessary governmental services and functions, protect their neighbors and communities, and build systems for collective survival.
Finally, we assemble everything into living, frequently updated resources that people with busy lives can return to over time to understand what’s happening, why it matters, and who’s trying to help.

…all while setting up the organizational capacity to do the work in sustainable ways that don’t burn out our contributors or make the project vulnerable to ideological capture or editorial drift.

It’s a lot! So we’re starting small, with just a few pages we’ve been using to validate and tune our processes and train our first cohort of volunteers. As the project grows and we welcome more people, we’ll expand our page set, start publishing the timelines we use to build our pages, and begin writing other resources. We expect issue pages—and the timelines they’re grounded in—to remain the core of our work, but we look forward to a future that includes visualizations and ways to keep up-to-date without getting overwhelmed.

(If any of this sounds like something you want to help with, please fill out our intake form!)

What we’re not doing

We aren’t doing original reporting or compiling data: Our work builds on the crucial efforts of the thousands of reporters, editors, analysts, and organizations working to calculate and contextualize the effects of major changes in governance and policy. If we can serve as a source of coherent overviews and links to deep explanations, we’ll consider our work a success.

We do not and cannot accept leaks or whistleblower disclosures. Please don’t send them to us; we’ll delete them unread.

We don’t cover international affairs, including international aid and foreign policy. We also don’t cover state and local governance except in the most glancing ways, as they interact with federal governance. These areas are vitally important, but covering domestic policy—and the domestic effects of things like trade policy—at the federal level is an enormous undertaking, and we recognize our limitations. We invite teams situated to take on international and state- and local-level work to adopt and adapt our structures and materials whenever they’re useful—everything we make, including our tech and content, will be available under a CC-BY license, and we’ll do our best to document our work in ways that can help other efforts.

We don’t use LLMs or chatbots to generate content or do research. Everything we produce is made with human hands, human care, and human judgment.

Who we are

Unbreaking is a project of the Raft Foundation, a fiscal host that shares our alignment and hopes to an almost unbelievable degree.

Inside the project, we’re organized by a collective of six founders, plus a growing cohort of volunteers who help us build out timelines of events and make sense of what we’re seeing. The founding members bring experience from journalism, tech, mutual aid, large-scale volunteer-powered knowledge projects, and community organizing of many kinds, and our volunteers are already expanding our expertise and capabilities in ways that will be necessary to achieve our ambitious goals.

We practice collective decision-making and collective sensemaking, because we believe those are the best tools available—and because this is not the kind of work anyone should be doing alone.

Our founders

Mandy Brown
Mandy is a reader, writer, and work coach helping people do their best work. Since 2008, she’s written about work, reading, and technology at A Working Library.

Sydette Harry
Sydette is a technologist working on information systems and community access. Professionally it has been around software and civic technology. Personally, she focuses on putting hats on babies.

Erin Kissane
Erin was co-founder and co-runner of The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic and works on the social internet at wreckage/salvage. She was a founding member of OpenNews and has been trying to make the internet better for humans for a long time.

Yvonne Lam
Yvonne works on software infrastructure and helping people figure out how to work better together.

Liz Neeley
Liz learned the hard way that data don’t speak for themselves. Ever since, she’s been helping scientists find the courage and language they need to create change. She’s the founder of Liminal, a co-founder of Solving For, and a member of Openscapes.

Chris Xu
Chris works on accessibility for work, and sometimes corrals internet strangers into collaborating for fun (previously Bed-Stuy Strong, Letters for Black Lives, Awesome Foundation).

FAQs

Q. Who funds Unbreaking? Is it the Raft Foundation?

The Raft Foundation is our fiscal host (also called a fiscal sponsor), which means that our work is done under the umbrella of a larger 501(c)(3) non-profit, but the Raft Foundation doesn’t fund our work. Right now, we’re funding it ourselves by paying for the running costs out of our own pockets, and everyone who works on the project is an unpaid volunteer. Once we have the project fully up and running, we intend to raise funds to make the work more sustainable. When we do, we’ll list funders on our site—probably right on this page.