We’re redesigning what it feels like to stay open, informed, and engaged.
Our mission is simple: To inspire public imagination about what’s possible by creating ways to engage with social, scientific, and environmental issues that align with how our minds and lives actually work.
The Plenary, Co. is a 501(c)3 arts & education nonprofit that designs creative, collaborative, and engaging pathways through our collective knowledge. By cultivating a culture of curiosity and openness, we are committed to building a more equitable, sustainable, and beautiful future for people and the planet.
Ok, so what do we actually do?
Social and civic engagement are in desperate need of a 21st century update.
Today's challenges — from violent cultural divides to climate change — are complex and high stakes. They require all of us to stay open and informed, yet our options can be polarizing or oversimplified.
We are often limited to one-dimensional sources that are difficult to access. We consume knowledge passively from select few experts in the comforts of our echo chambers. We are overloaded with information without any guidance on how to make sense of it all. And we are rarely supported in translating what we read into meaningful actions we can take towards change.
Our approach is rooted in neuroscience, and shaped by communities.
BUILDING A BETTER ECOSYSTEMFounded by neuroscience, psychology, and education researchers, we dug deep into the decades of research, scholarship, and lived experiences. Scattered across fields and lenses, we found a roadmap for how to support more open, informed, and engaged communities, and we plan to use it.
At The Plenary, we focus on perennial issues (the ones that keep coming back) and collaborate with community members, experts, artists, and designers every step of the way.
Our goal is to create a new category of experiences that are one-part exploration, one-part play, and one-part activation.
Our goal is lofty, but our path is clear.
We’re working towards a better ecosystem for exploring and engaging with the issues that impact all of us. We believe that every city, community, household, and individual should have everything they need to responsibly and meaningfully participate in the conversations that are shaping society.
OUR APPROACH
Building vibrant ways to explore critical ideas.
Grounded in insights from neuroscience, psychology, design, and the communities we work with, we scout highly usable and actionable knowledge on evergreen, evidence-driven issues, then design experiences infused with community connection and creative inquiry.
Our mission is to support more equitable and sustainable futures by breaking barriers between critical issues and the communities impacted by them.
01 /Packaging
We seek out diverse fields, perspectives, and approaches to understand he nuances of the issues we cover. We synthesize insights from science, scholarship, popular media, and community conversations.
02 /Pathways
Using insights from communications, human sciences, local voices, and design research, we craft psychologically accessible experiences for the public to explore the socioscientific issues that impact their communities.
We use art, science, storytelling, and play to create interactive and social experiences.
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Insights are often housed in fields and disciplines that are kept siloed. By scouting and synthesizing wisdom and perspectives from across domains, we can get a more multidimensional and comprehensive understanding of a given issue.
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Once we determine what we want to learn, it’s just as important to consider how we want to learn it. Art, design, and learning sciences point to carefully crafted play, social connection, co-creation, story, and multisensory exploration to create conditions most conducive for change, growth, and lifelong learning.
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Too often, information is shared in a way that prioritizes the platform and not the recipient. Talking heads speak in jargon and encourage passive consumption of their ideas. We’re building an ecosystem where communities are at the center of the experience, actively participating in exploration of the issues that they care about.
Our INITIATIVES
We create experiences that dive into four perennial issue areas.
We believe there needs to be a place that focuses on creating energizing, inclusive, and creative ways to survey the issues that matter. We don’t produce fast news; we take our time to process, digest, and represent multiple perspectives on a given issue, to make it a little easier for you to make sense of it all.
Sustainability
Critical relationships between people and the planet
Human Systems
The systems, forces, and biases that shape society and ourselves
Science & Technology
The possibilities, challenges, and ethics of innovations
Nature of Knowledge
Misinformation, media systems, and strategies for navigating claims
Putting theory into action.
We use research and scholarship from across fields to design experiences that line up with how people learn, connect, and stay open to new possibilities.Our approach is based on decades of research on the ways people learn, engage, and change their minds. All of our work is anchored in several frameworks we created to synthesize multidisciplinary research on what does — and doesn’t — engage, motivate, and support adult learning and conceptual change. We design strategies that put evidence to work while making sense for the ways that communities and individuals live their lives.
While anchored in established frameworks, we are constantly experimenting with new ways to bridge the gap between usable knowledge and the people or systems it can serve.
OUR FRAMEWORKS
OUR
VALUES
As a society, we have more access to information than ever before, yet we've failed to prioritize systems that support informed, open, and engaged communities.
At The Plenary, we believe that society's collective knowledge should be technically, financially, and psychologically accessible to everyone.
Explore our values-
Expand What’s Possible.
So much of what we think of as our default systems, customs, and stuff was first imagined. We need to balance out fear of change with the joy of possibility, and embrace creativity and experimentation as we imagine more sustainable and equitable futures.
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Rethink, Rebuild, Repeat.
Societies change. We have to loosen our attachment to the way things have been. Everything we’ve made was once imagined. We can remake it. And hopefully, when we evolve beyond the needs of today, someone else will remake it again.
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Diversify everything.
In nature, the more diverse the ecosystem the more resilient it becomes. In humans, the more diverse our experiences the more wisdom we acquire. And in knowledge-building, the more diverse the inputs, the more likely we are to get it right.
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Let Brains be Brains.
We believe in designing with the the grain of the human brain, not against it. That doesn't mean giving passes for bad behavior. It means recognizing that change is most likely when you design in practical, informed, and psychologically accessible ways. It means navigating the biases that people hold, leveraging the power of social connection, and providing access points and opportunities for growth that align with the realities of how people live and learn.
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Make it Beautiful.
The Plenary believes in building beautiful experiences from the ground up without creative limitations; using every tool available to design multidimensional initiatives that inspire, excite, captivate, and activate.
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Make it Matter.
We don’t believe in reinventing wheels, pushing clickbait, or superficially engaging with ideas. We believe in designing with intention, impact, and possible futures in mind, so that every initiative serves as a gateway for what to do next.
Collaboration is
key to everything
we do.
The Plenary is made up of an ever-growing community of multidisciplinary leaders committed to creativity, informed futures, and the constant re-imagination of what's possible.
From our full-time staff, to our advisors, directors, creatives, contributors, partners, patrons, and more — there’s a place for all to be a part of our Plenary. And we couldn’t do it without each and every individual.
250+
collaborators
AND EVER-GROWING!PROJECT CO-CREATORS STAFF CONTRIBUTORS ILLUSTRATORS STEM LEADERS MIXED MEDIA ARTISTS PAINTERS SCIENTISTS ADVISORS STUDENTS VENDORS COMMUNITIES EDUCATORS CREATIVE MAKERS PARTNERS SPONSORS BOARD MEMBERS COMMUNITY PARTNERS PATRONS STRATEGISTS DESIGNERS
Who We Are
The Plenary is made up of a small core team, a circle of key contributors, and a large community of creative collaborators, experts, and partners.
