Was reading Anton Jager's Hyperpolitics on the plane recently and he has a chapter called Putnam From The Left, where he revisits Robert Putnam's 2000's era bestseller Bowling Alone, which if you haven't read it, is quite the temporal shift from today's absurdity-as-politics.
Jager realizes for as much as Putnam ignored -- namely, capitalism's excesses as a contributor to the problems of social erosion he outlined -- there was much foretold what we experience today in spades. Namely, the lack of social cohesion through clubs, community organizations and the like. It's one thing to volunteer for a cause here and there, but having an entirely social architecture of religious organizations, fraternal groups and even local youth sports that businesses can donate to and create cross-pollinating effects have deep impacts on everyday trust.
Right now, so little of that exists the way it once did. Groups are either dissolved or operating on their last legs. I spent from 2023-25 as board president of a local chapter of a national non-profit AIGA that's started in the early 20th century as an org for designers. Through a series of questionable financial decisions in more flush times, the group experienced the cascade of decline accelerated by 1) said poor financial decisions of past boards 2) the pandemic of the 2020s and 3) designers losing their jobs even before AI took what was left of them. Portland's chapter was doing better than the legions of chapters around the country that were dying.
Jager's point about capitalism is the right starting point but the mechanism is more specific than that. The coordination work these organizations did -- the scheduling, the communication, the reputation-keeping, the reason you showed up even when you didn't feel like it -- got unbundled by platforms and sold back as services. You don't need the Elks Lodge to put together a softball team when Meetup exists. You don't need the chapter newsletter when Slack exists. You don't need the church bulletin board when there's Nextdoor. Every one of these substitutions felt like convenience at the time. What it did was strip out the infrastructure these organizations were actually providing, which was never the stated thing. It was the relationships the stated thing required. Once the coordination left, the relationships followed. The organizations that remained are mostly shells now, running on the labor of people who remember what it felt like when the thing worked. AIGA's story isn't unique. It's the Rotary story and the union local story and the PTA story
Still, AIGA wasn't even a social organization by charter, the social activities largely functioned as networking for people in various stages of their career journies, something I found rewarding to experience designers looking to connect and yet, the lack of jobs in this market and more broadly made this an increasingly depressing thing to rally people around.
Getting people to volunteer is tough. Not every group knows how to marshal volunteers. People love to sign up for stuff, they're often less interested in actually doing things. Even if you're fortunate to find people who are interested in doing things, you need really good volunteer management structures to make it easy for them to actually contribute or else you waste their time, talent and motivation to keep participating.
I liked the idea building board and volunteer roles that coincided with organizational needs and the interests of the people themselves. This made them likely to come back. I think you also have to give people a stake in what they're participating in, depending on what you're asking of them. When I started and ran the Portland Digital Corps experiment last year, so much of figuring out how to move forward was knowing what to do with all of the people who said they wanted to help.
I'll be honest, I could've done a better job with that. Some of the problem was not having enough work, because we launched before we had projects, so a lot of people went unused.
But I digress.
The cascading power of actually winning something
I think we're reaching a point where have to accept that things are different, and really invest in bringing people together to solve what we can right in front of us.
I like sports because it gives you tangible ways to take life lessons and wrap them inside of something where you won't really think about it the same way, because you're playing a game. The stuff sports can teach you -- about being bad at something, working with others -- is immeasurable, even if your team isn't very good, and you have coaches who aren't the best.
So even if you're losing a lot, the real trick is figuring out how to stop. First, you think about the ways to lose better. Maybe losing by less than you did the time before. After that, it's figuring out how to learn how to win. That can start in practice by creating scenarios that foster winning, Eventually, there comes a time when you finally put it all together and you win. It feels great.
The hard part is winning again and again.
I think we have to get better at measuring success through small wins and frankly, looking at where we are and finding ways to make stuff better.
When I first moved to Oregon, I started coaching high school tennis as a way to connect to something I've done most of my life (tennis) while being part of a community. When the team told me how Oregon's HS tennis format post-season worked, I was pretty annoyed about it.
With a deep experience with systems and bureaucracy, I learned how the process for changing it worked. Needless to say, it's not easy. High school sports are governing by a non-profit organization comprised of member high schools statewide. Getting everyone to agree is difficult even under the most ideal circumstances and the committee that approves such decisions meets every four years to discuss and recommend changes.
That backdrop left my original efforts foiled, but I became a state tennis rep to the coaches association, and kept working on the plan in concert with some coaches who've been in Oregon trying to push this idea through for well over 30 years to no avail.
Well, it's 2026 and after many years of working on various proposals, discussions and maybe a handful of blog posts from me, the OSAA state championship committee is recommending a team championship starting in 2027. I worked with a lot of folks around the state for this to work, tennis coaches around the state, athletic directors and other leaders.
There's something extremely rewarding about the convergence of timing, growth and collaboration to make something that once seemed impossible to actually happen. In this case, it was around participation. The OSAA took on the task of realigning its "championship thresholds" essentially figuring out sport by sport, how many students/teams were able to qualify for a state tournament.
In our effort to propose this team tournament, we pointed out that only around 10% of students statewide qualify for state tournaments in tennis, versus over 40-60% in other sports like basketball, baseball, softball, and football. This massive inequity is further exacerbated by the fact that tennis teams often qualify more students from the same school, meaning that participation is further constrained.
This was the breakthrough we needed to garner seriously consider this proposal, but even with that, there were lots of questions. Expanding the tennis season is a non-starter, the existing schedule is pretty compact and March is often very rainy and can set teams back on their own competitive schedules.
We provided lots of data around how to run this tournament, how to overlap it with the regular season to some extent and learned from other states around the country who had recently implemented a team tournament -- large states like Colorado and North Dakota -- to learn how we could benefit from their lessons.
Eastern Oregon might as well be another state with regard to distances in Oregon -- sometimes 4-5 hour drives from other metropolitan areas -- and this proposal caused lots of concerns from that area. For over 30 years, invitational tournaments for tennis that essentially create this same format already exist, so there's lots of good modeling on how to organize and successfully run a team-based tennis tournament. The problem with unsanctioned events like this, is they're not actually true state tournaments in their representation -- only schools that can afford to travel can participate -- and for years, they've only included boys tennis teams, there are no comparable girls tennis events anywhere in the state. They're expensive to run, entry fees cannot cover all the costs and it's not viewed as a "real" state championship.
For all of these reasons, it was necessary and timely for the OSAA to implement a team-based tournament. But the real reason I've written about a lot, is the fact that the points-based model the state currently uses to pick the "team" state champion for tennis means you only need 1-3 top players to claim the "state team title" or even a trophy at state. There are exceptions to this too, when my team won State in 2022, we sent 7 players or more than half our team to state tournament (12 players make up a varsity team) but over the past few years, there have been instances where 4 schools have tied for 2nd place or schools with just 1 entry at the state tournament take home a trophy.
The story here is, stick with impossible things that have a niche audience. When you're working in systems that don't change that much, all you need is a window of opportunity and a willingness to provide the data. You also need allies and collaboration, but most of all there's gotta be a north star.
This is not one of those achievements I can put into a resume, and it's even a mouthful to explain to people. But I'm prouder of getting this done than anything I've done in the last year, because it felt like something that would never happen here in Oregon.
The last thing you need are people -- and processes -- that are build for listening and action.