Progressives, We're Sabotaging Ourselves

The Progressive innovation problem, and the pattern that's costing us our best strategic minds.

Innovation is trending in the Progressive Movement. But there's a gap between celebrating breakthrough thinking and actually supporting the people doing it.

The reality of innovation is that it's not just about generating ideas, it's about consistently tending to possibility. Believing, holding, and nurturing futures that don't yet exist.

For those like myself, when those futures don't materialize, it doesn't just feel like rejection. It feels like loss. And for independent strategists whose livelihoods depend on that work, it is a real loss.

You don't have to call yourself an innovator when you've lived what innovation actually demands. Creating out of compulsion and necessity, ahead of your time, without institutional support, amplification, or adequate resources, and often without credit.

The progressive movement needs innovation, but often fails to nurture actual innovators. Instead, they reward those who package existing ideas palatably rather than those who generated them originally. This pattern isn't unique to my experience, I've heard similar stories from strategists, consultants, and independent contributors across the movement. The truth: the industry doesn't know how to properly engage with breakthrough thinking. Innovative approaches often get dismissed as too ambitious or unrealistic, and many times the people behind them face pushback when their ideas challenge established approaches. These innovations are then quietly adopted later when they prove successful. By then, the original work gets diluted and the people who developed it get left out of the conversation.

This creates a devastating cycle. The self-censorship becomes real. As much as it pains us to hold back valuable insights, it's even more painful to watch extracted ideas get executed poorly and without context. When innovators know their work will be taken and misapplied, they stop sharing altogether - and the movement loses access to real breakthroughs.

For many of us, real innovation is a labor of love and a result of solving for problems we are deeply connected to. These innovations live in shared Google drafts, unreturned messages from potential collaborators, frameworks that never got funded. Ideas too early, too inconvenient, ‘too ambitious’, or too unfamiliar until someone else made them safe.

I've watched this pattern play out repeatedly. Strategies and tools I developed that were declined for institutional or organizational funding - months later, finding myself in conversations where people described eerily similar concepts, sometimes using my exact language.

The innovation gap in our movements isn't a lack of good ideas. It's a lack of infrastructure to support visionaries, especially early on when their work is still risky, not after it becomes comfortable. It's also the result of concentrating resources and decision-making power within established systems that inherently reward familiarity over breakthrough thinking. When funding flows primarily through networks that prioritize the well connected, we systematically exclude the very voices most likely to generate transformative solutions.

What's particularly frustrating is watching the same structures and institutions that created these problems rebrand themselves as 'innovative' while offering nothing more groundbreaking than updated terminology for familiar approaches. Meanwhile, genuinely transformative work continues to be sidelined or appropriated without the resources needed to implement it properly.

For example, I recently saw a major progressive organization promise "fearless innovation" in their latest announcement. When I actually read through what they were proposing, to my disappointment, what was listed was the exact same work that every competent strategist is already doing. What struck me was that they weren't naming any of the actual problems we're facing as a movement or in the digital space, which is what real innovation should address. Same approaches with fresh marketing language, nothing more.

The contrast is striking. I recently spoke with someone who told me he'd 'randomly' received funding and development support for similar work that I had been working on for years and actively seeking grants for. He wasn't working in the field and had no background in this area of work. He simply had the right connections when someone with money wanted the work done. Meanwhile, despite having strong case studies, working prototypes, and proven results, securing resources for an originating innovation remains an uphill battle.

If we're serious about progress, we have to get honest about the cost of ignoring the people who've been innovating all along. Our ideas get diluted, our strategies get slower, and the future we say we're fighting for slips further out of reach.

Innovation can't just be a rebrand or a buzzword. What we need is to back strategists and visionaries fully and early, when their ideas are still risky, to test and grow alongside them, and not just when they become trending topics, or mere months away from an election.

What we need are concrete and systemic changes within this industry. This includes independent decision-making processes that actively seek out unfamiliar voices, and solutions that are actually aligned with the problem. We need mentorship and guidance systems that connect innovators with experienced advisors, not people who extract knowledge under the guise of "picking your brain," but genuine mentors and systems invested in your success.

We need intellectual respect and protection that actually protects. When someone shares ideas and strategies, frameworks, and training materials, there should be transparent processes and understanding for how that knowledge will be used and credited. This means clear attribution standards, licensing agreements that innovators can trust, and consequences for organizations that appropriate without permission. This includes protections against uploading our content into AI systems without our consent.

We need hands-on learning opportunities where innovators and practitioners can enhance skills while problem solving alongside peers, rather than working in isolation, or receiving irrelevant, out of date ‘guidance’ from those removed from the problem or strategies.

Most importantly, we need new power structures. When the same institutions that stifle innovation are the ones who are deciding who gets resources and what counts as innovation, nothing changes. We need different people making these decisions, people who actually understand what transformative work looks like and aren't threatened by it.

This isn’t about fairness, it’s about strategic effectiveness. We've sustained broken systems that celebrate the concept of innovation while completely failing both the problem-solving and the innovators themselves. We've created an extractive ecosystem that forces our best innovators to choose between self-preservation and sharing breakthrough work. We're literally weakening our own movement by driving away the people who could help us win.

I'm sharing this because recognizing this pattern is the first step toward building the infrastructure we actually need. We can't fight for justice while practicing injustice within our ranks, nor practice innovation theater without actually supporting true innovation. The choice is ours: we can keep sabotaging ourselves, or we can finally build systems worthy of our innovators and worthy of the change we're fighting for.

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