I found the letter last week, doing something else entirely. June 2020. It begins: “There is a fine line between persistence and obsession. I've been treading that line for too long.”
It went to the members of Leaders Expedition - LEx, to those of us who lived it - to tell them it was over. Thirteen hundred words written on a day I would not wish on anyone, and then I closed the laptop and did not read it again for six years.
I am putting it in the first essay of a newsletter for the organisation that followed, because I promised UP FRONT would give you everything first and straight, and there is nothing straighter than this. If you are going to give UnitedPeoples your time, your name, and in some cases your money, you are entitled to know that we have been down this road once before - and to know exactly what the road taught us.
Reading it now, I find something I could not see at the time. That letter is not a resignation. It is a specification. Almost every important decision in UnitedPeoples is an answer to a sentence in it.
What we were doing
It started in April 2016, in a room in Toronto, with about twenty-five of us - and before that, with a man called Don Simpson, who had spent a working life in seventy-five countries asking how people of good faith might find one another across every border, and who had made it his business to ask me the same. The invitation to that first gathering posed the question in four words: must we continue as we are?
Our answer was a Charter - non-partisan, anti-extremist, multi-generational, bottom-up - and a search for what we called the new 1%. Not a wealth percentile. A percentile of responsibility: the people in every sector who actually give a damn about the future and were being drowned out by those who shout.
Over four years, about a thousand of them turned up, from more than thirty-five countries. Entrepreneurs, scientists, educators, artists, public servants, civic leaders - young founders in Nairobi, retirees in Vancouver. What they did together was not an organisation so much as an experiment, and the experiment was the point. We prototyped LocalCircles - small groups meeting in living rooms, cafés and on screens to back each other's growth and take on something local. We explored GlobalCircles, joining people across borders around a shared challenge. We ran UnLunches to bring the next person in. We stood up a HUB and kept refining it; by 2019 the LocalCircle programme had been through enough real use to earn a full redesign.
None of it was tidy. It was volunteer-run, under-resourced and powered by goodwill, and it produced the thing that mattered: the early architecture of a civic operating system. The Circle format. The peer-support model. The convening rhythms. The Charter language. Everything UnitedPeoples now runs on was first tried, imperfectly, by those people.
They also told us, on camera and unprompted, what they were actually looking for - and it was never leadership. A member in Ontario said she kept meeting people with genuinely good ideas and watching them struggle to find resources, support, and others to join forces with; working in isolation, she said, it is very difficult to succeed. A member in Costa Rica said it was not enough for responsible people to do their own work - there had to be a way to scale ideas and influence, and to actually support one another, and he added that we were running out of time. A coach in Toronto put it in a single line I have quoted ever since: personal growth is not worth much if we do not grow our society alongside it.
Not one of them was asking to be led. They were asking to be connected - to peers, to resources, to a way of acting together that did not depend on each of them being extraordinary alone. It took me years to understand that this is a description of infrastructure, not of a movement.
Then the doors closed
You remember the spring of 2020. The borders shut, the offices emptied, the hospitals filled, and every one of us was consumed by the nearest thing - a parent, a job, a child at the kitchen table, the next fortnight. LEx had spent four years getting ready to ask for the capital that would match its ambition, and it arrived at that door in the worst month in living memory to knock on it. The letter said we could not get the attention, interest or bandwidth of members or backers “especially in this time”, and that was the plain truth. The moment the world most needed people thinking at the scale of the whole was the precise moment nobody had room for it.
But the pandemic is a comfortable explanation, and I have never trusted comfortable explanations. COVID did not end LEx. It brought forward a date. Here is the sentence in the letter that has kept me awake since:
I regret that we were unable to inspire the substantive - and consistent - commitment and engagement of our membership to build the necessary momentum.
That is the whole failure in one line, and it is not the members' failure. Good people came, and meant it, and then life happened, and the HUB went quiet - while the bill from the platform company arrived every month regardless, growing. A great idea on rented infrastructure, underwritten by one person, is not an institution. It is a hobby with a burn rate, and no amount of caring harder fixes that.
The letter also contains its diagnosis of the world, which I would not change a word of today: that in a culture which prizes focus above everything, “this focus on focusing - of creating smaller and smaller realms of impact” - leaves the macro solutions, the ones humanity actually needs, to extremists and special interests, or to nobody at all. Six years on, that is not a warning. It is the weather.
What the letter specified
When the work began again, it did not begin from the vision. It began from that letter, read line by line, with one question asked of every part of the new design: does this answer what happened to LEx? It began, too, with many of the same people. Alexis Duclos, who was there at the end, is UnitedPeoples' Chief of Staff-elect. David Janzen, a member from the beginning, sits on the board and put his own money behind the foundation's incorporation. Others are on the Launch Team, or among the Founding Voices, or simply still here, having never really left.
Consistency cannot be requested. It has to be designed. LEx asked people to engage; UnitedPeoples gives them a reason to, every day. At the centre is not a feed but a plan - your plan, the THRIVE Plan - for what you want from the next three months, the next five years, and a guide, NAVi, whose only job is to help you get there with your peers. UP makes one promise, and it is testable: you will be better and do better inside this community over five years than you would have been outside it, precisely by helping other people do the same. That is the coach's sentence turned into architecture.
Belief needs somewhere to go. LEx gave people something to believe; UnitedPeoples gives them something to do. Projects - real ones, with owners and outcomes, proposed by members and held by their Circles - are the atomic unit of the whole institution. Belief without a task fades. A task with twelve people who know what you committed to does not.
Never again on rented ground. The liability that made LEx impossible to hand on to anyone was a lesson paid for in full, and it is why the HUB and NAVi are ours, made by people we chose, on terms we set. Nobody will ever close UnitedPeoples by sending it an invoice.
Never again on one person's account. This is the least romantic and most important difference. UP is two institutions - a Dutch public-benefit foundation that holds the mission, and a company that earns the money and is bound by its own charter to send the profit back. The point of that structure is simple: the day any one person can no longer write cheques is not the day the thing dies.
And never again on conviction alone. There is now a gate in front of every phase, a point at which people who are not me look at what has been made and say go, no-go, or not yet. In 2016 I would have called that timidity. I know its real name now, which is respect - for the hours people will give, and for the money that pays for the place they give them in.
None of this makes UnitedPeoples safe. Nothing aiming to bring a hundred million people into one community is safe. It makes UP designed against a known failure rather than hoping past one, and in this work that is the difference between a good idea and an institution.
The last line
The letter ended - as I seem to end everything - with a sentence I had not planned to write: “Truly great ideas don't die - to prevail they evolve.”
At the time it was consolation, the sort of thing you say so the ending means something. It turned out to be the design principle. Everything that mattered about LEx is inside UnitedPeoples: the Tenets, word for word; the conviction that the responsible many, not the fringe, are where the large answers will come from; the Circle; and above all the people, who gave their work to this on no terms at all, keeping nothing back.
Which brings me to the ask I could not make clearly enough in 2016. Don't join UnitedPeoples for the cause. Join it for the next five years of your own life, for the people who will help you live them well, and for the work you will do together that neither of you could do alone. The cause takes care of itself when that happens. That was the lesson. It cost a decade to learn. It's yours now.
Let the journey begin - again.
