The year 2026 will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. government has an official commission for the anniversary, and we can expect to hear the usual patriotic narratives. It will be impossible to miss — God Bless America, fireworks, the red, white, and blue. But several prominent women-of-color social movement leaders are proposing something different: a truer, more forward-looking endeavor. 

Aimee Allison, Saru Jayaraman, Valarie Kaur, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour and others are co-leading an initiative with hundreds of other movement leaders to use the anniversary to assert our unity and interdependence and come together to win concrete changes for the country’s next 250 years. They seek to not only tell an inclusive, complete history of the country but create a future based on issues — such as common-sense gun control, fair wages, and environmental protection — that data shows an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on despite the constant drumbeat about today’s supposed political polarization. Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage and Director of the Food Labor Research Center at UC Berkeley, says as Americans, we are not polarized from each other, but from the 1% and their elected officials. The initiative, which will include millions of people from across the country, is our chance to prove it. To coalesce on what we agree on as the country moves into the next 250 years. 

In this excerpt from a Bioneers panel discussion, Jayaraman and Sarsour, a Brooklyn-raised Palestinian Muslim-American and multi-award-winning racial justice and civil rights activist, discuss the initiative and how we can all play a part.

SARU JAYARAMAN: Linda and I both sit on the board of the Kellogg Foundation’s initiative called SCoRE, the Solidarity Council on Racial Equity. We’ve been on the board for three or four years. It was created after Trump was elected to bring together some of the leading racial equity voices in the country.

As the two organizers in the group, we were increasingly frustrated. We had these resources and this incredible group of scholars, thinkers, and leaders, but we weren’t sure how to leverage them during the Trump years to push forward a proactive agenda. This frustration culminated during a board call the day after the Uvalde, Texas, shootings. Everyone on the call was emotional, heartbroken, and angry. We were angry because there are several issues in this country—like common-sense gun control, fair wages, and environmental protection—where data shows an overwhelming majority of Americans agree. Yet, we’re constantly told we are too polarized to do anything about these issues.

During that call, it became clear to us that we are not polarized from each other but from our elected officials, who are not listening to the majority of Americans. This realization led Linda and me to propose something forward-thinking to SCoRE and Kellogg, aiming to assert and demonstrate the collective voice and power of the majority of Americans who agree with us.

Our proposal generated excitement on the board. The pivotal moment came in June last year when the Kellogg Foundation took us to South Africa for a gathering of Kellogg grantees. Unbeknownst to us, they asked us to share the stage with Albie Sachs, the writer of the South African Constitution after apartheid. Initially, we were confused about why we were sharing the stage with someone of his stature. However, once we started sharing, it made total sense.

We are proposing to use the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to write a new future for the United States, based on what most Americans agree on. The Kellogg Foundation’s decision to put us on stage with Albie Sachs was a suggestion to not think small about this initiative. This could be as significant as rewriting the South African Constitution—an opportunity to establish a new set of values for the United States as it enters the next 250 years.

The potential is immense. We have a couple of years before this 250th anniversary. We’re clearly in a moment of crisis and being told we’re polarized. But we have an opportunity to say that we, as Americans, are not polarized from each other. We are polarized from the 1% and their elected officials who are preventing us from achieving what we mostly agree on.

LINDA SARSOUR: 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s going to be everywhere—God Bless America; Happy Birthday, America; red, white, and blue; military parades; fireworks. It will be impossible to miss.

The idea of the Next 250 has four key components to help you visualize our vision. The first is retelling the story of the first 250 years. The United States government has an official commission for the 250th anniversary, and we can expect to hear the usual patriotic narratives. But we know many stories will be left out. Our goal is to intervene—not to create an alternative narrative, but to ensure inclusivity. This retelling will take many forms: crowdsourcing, reading lists, curricula, movies, films, and documentaries. We want people to understand the full scope of the first 250 years, including those often excluded.

This isn’t about making the first 250 years look bad, even though there were and are many issues. It’s about including everyone’s stories in the narrative.

The second component is co-creating a new Declaration. The original Declaration of Independence was crafted by a few white men using a powerful model of crowdsourcing ideas across different states. Our idea is to create a Declaration of Interdependence to guide us into the next 250 years.

The third piece involves organizing key policy platforms. Saru will elaborate on this because, as organizers, we love visionary ideas, but we also need concrete plans. How do we take visionary principles and values and turn them into actionable policies that improve people’s lives? That’s where the policy platforms come in.

Finally, as an organizer who loves to mobilize, I see 2026 as a perfect opportunity. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we can come together for a massive mobilization. We’ll talk more about what this will look like and represent, but the goal is to bring people together to celebrate and push for the changes we envision.

SARU: Many of us are fighting for critical issues that most people agree on. For example, I work on minimum wage, which is incredibly popular in the United States. I’ve worked in both red and blue states, and do you know that an increase in the minimum wage has never failed on any state ballot, red or blue, in over 50 years? It’s universally supported. People overwhelmingly agree that when you work, you should be paid enough to avoid needing public assistance.

The problem is that, even with such popular issues, those of us working on them—like many of you working on climate change—haven’t had the power to get these initiatives across the finish line. For me, one of the greatest outcomes of this project is to finally aggregate power across movements to win these very popular issues. Wages are one key issue, and I’m a bit biased here, but I will tell you that for 2024, the top issue for young people and people of color across every electoral poll is the rising cost of living and jobs with living wages. The affordability crisis is the number one issue in this election, even though it’s not being prominently discussed by candidates. This is what people on the ground are saying.

Economic inequality, climate change, and gun control are also universally popular. Tufts University’s Circle just did a national poll of youth voters, showing these as the top three issues: more than half said the rising cost of living and jobs with living wages were their top concerns; climate change was second; and guns were third. These are the popular issues we need to demonstrate power on, and they happen to be the top concerns for the next generation.

The idea is that after this four-year project (which we started thinking about two years ago), we will continue beyond 2026. We aim to take the power amassed through the project and push it forward to achieve federal minimum wage increases, federal climate change policies, federal gun control, and anything else we can win. We will do this by tying our policy platforms to everything we’re doing here.

LINDA: The retelling of the first 250 years is crucial for us because the resources, stories, people, and communities are already out there. The issue is that many communities of color and marginalized people lack a platform. The idea is to use the 250th anniversary, which will be a highly commercialized and branded campaign with specials on Netflix, Hulu, CNN, and other platforms, to amplify these voices. We aim to work not only through popular media but also through the education system. Partnering with city and state governments and the U.S. Department of Education, we want to ensure the curriculum is infused with the stories of the first 250 years.

This is particularly timely and important because, especially in the last year and a half, we’ve seen book bans and the erasure or reframing of Black history, the removal of queer stories, and other such actions in our education system. We see the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to intervene and center these stories in curriculums, films, and TV. Documentarians and others will also have the chance to fill in gaps where stories haven’t been told.

For example, as a Muslim American, I know that 25-30% of enslaved African people were Muslims, a fact many in the United States are unaware of. Muslims came to this country before it was even called the United States, as expeditionists—Moors and Turks. There’s a wealth of history within this small segment of the population. Similarly, we often focus on the negative aspects of Asian American history, like the Chinese Exclusion Act or Japanese internment camps, but there are also stories of resilience, art, and culture that aren’t widely known.

This retelling is not just important; it’s highly participatory. There’s so much out there, and bringing together this narrative will help create a fuller picture of what America truly is and has been over the last 250 years.

SARU: In 1776, we had a Declaration of Independence to break away from a colonial empire. In 2026, we’re in a different place as a country. We don’t need to declare independence from an empire or a colonizer; instead, we need to acknowledge that we are now the colonizer and declare our interdependence with each other and people around the world. This moment calls for a shift from the narrative of polarization to one of unity.

We’ve been told repeatedly that we are too polarized to accomplish anything. But most of us believe in our interdependence. We believe in living wages, a sustainable planet, and safe schools for our children. We believe everyone deserves a good life.

Rather than having a small group of people dictate what we need for the next 250 years, we decided to co-create a new declaration with input from as many people as possible. A Declaration of Interdependence must include everyone’s voice. We’ve already started this process, and Linda will share the first steps we’ve taken. We’ve been working with base-building groups across the country to hold listening sessions and gather feedback on our top values and what we want in a new declaration.

This collaborative effort involves co-convening, co-authoring, and preparing to launch the new declaration next year, leading up to the 250th anniversary in 2026. We kicked off this initiative with a major convening last year.

LINDA: What’s beautiful about this project is the involvement of organizers—people who bring others together. When this declaration is revealed to the world in the next year or year and a half, you’ll see who’s behind it. These are people who look like you, who feel like you, and who live the way you live. We’ve been intentional about including groups that organize others, not just individuals. For example, it’s not just a Muslim person participating, but a Muslim who organizes other Muslims. This ensures we reach entire communities.

The room included Black-led organizations from the South, statewide issue-based organizations, South Asians, Asian Americans, workers, LGBTQ organizations, youth organizations, climate activists, Jewish organizations, Sikh organizations, and more. We aimed to be as representative as possible, geographically too, so we included people from the East and West Coasts, the Deep South—like Alabama and Mississippi—the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. This way, no one can say they were left out of the process.

We held a convening in Detroit, one of my favorite cities in America. It was a beautiful experience to have all those groups together. I’ve been to many convenings, and there was something uniquely powerful about that space. It was inspirational; people were crying. The participants, all from marginalized communities or working on issues impacting these communities, are usually focused on immediate fights—abortion rights, immigrant rights, and so on. But here, we asked them to envision something for 250 years from now, even though we won’t be around then. This allowed them to think about what they want to leave behind.

When people look back at the 250th anniversary, we want them to see that a group representing millions in this country proposed a new vision. One that includes all of us and fulfills the ideals upon which this country was founded, making it truly the greatest nation on Earth. This process involves using universal language that brings us together.

We’re rejecting the intellectual left’s tendency to use jargon that not everyone understands. Instead, we’re focusing on universal values—dignity, respect, inclusion—words that resonate with everyone. This approach ensures our message reaches people with multiple degrees as well as those in our communities who may not have formal education or for whom English is a second or third language. We want the final declaration to be truly reflective of and accessible to anyone who reads it, regardless of their background.