On the final episode of “In the Making,” host Baratunde Thurston joins PolicyLink President Ashleigh Gardere and CEO Michael McAfee to discuss becoming the founders of a democracy that works for all, at the 250th anniversary of our nation. 

This episode brings the series full circle, moving from fixing what's broken to building what's next. 

They explore the often erased history of Indigenous democracy that existed on these lands before European colonization—the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's Great Law of Peace, which centered women in governance, reciprocal relationship with nature, and seven-generation thinking. For 250 years, the people excluded the most—Indigenous peoples, Black abolitionists, suffragettes, Civil Rights advocates, immigrant rights activists—have done the work to bring us closer to that promise. 

The conversation gets into what this re-founding requires: remembering our power without romanticizing the struggle, designing for all so identity-based complaints become unnecessary, and understanding that mutual aid, charity, and systemic redesign must happen in tandem. They draw lessons from global movements for truth and reconciliation, from post-Apartheid South Africa to post-Holocaust Germany, for ideas of what it could look like to reckon with our past in order to build a new future. We end on the fact that the future we want and deserve, a real democracy where everyone has what the need to thrive is in the making right now—and it’s our work to do together.