I Almost Didn’t Start Project 2045

... and told folks I thought it would fail

I want to tell you the real origin story, not the polished version.

In January of 2024, I was sitting in a room with a group of leaders of color. The question on the table was simple and enormous: what is the lie of our time? After a long conversation, the group landed on an answer. The lie is that we can’t all flourish together.

I was one of only two white people in the room.

I remember asking myself, sitting right there in the middle of the conversation, what is my part in this work. What followed was close to an out of body experience. I stayed fully present, fully participating, and somewhere in that same sitting I sketched out the first draft of an idea. I even gave it a name that day: Project 2045.

A few months later, a very different Project surfaced in the national conversation. Project 2025 hit the zeitgeist, and the timing felt less like coincidence and more like a sign.

Then I sat on it. For the next year and a half, the idea chased me. There were real moments of clarity in that stretch. I spent time at a monastery working through the plans. I walked friends and colleagues through the idea to see if it held up outside my own head. I flew to Atlanta just to get honest feedback from people I trusted.

And in between those moments of clarity, I had excuses. I told myself I didn’t have the money to start a nonprofit the way it would need to be done. I was in the middle of learning a whole new professional life as a self-employed contract worker. There was my family to think about, the ordinary weight of a full life.

Those were all true. None of them were the whole truth.

The real reason, underneath the practical ones, was that I was scared of the relational cost. I want to let that sentence just sit there, because it took me a long time to be able to say it plainly. Starting this meant risking relationships. It meant asking something of people, including myself, that not everyone would want to give.

The money excuse disappeared first. When my dad died and we sold his house, I asked my wife if I could take a portion of what came from it and use it to start Project 2045. It was not a small amount, not in the context of our life and our finances. She said yes.

I used that money to gather a group of advisors. That process alone turned out to be one of the more meaningful experiences of the whole journey, sitting with people willing to think seriously about this with me.

I have joked, more than once, including directly to my founding board members, that the most likely outcome of all this would be that I’d shut it down in eighteen months and have wasted my family’s money in the process. I said it as a joke, but underneath it was a real fear I wasn’t fully willing to name at the time.

We are now almost ten months in.

In that time we have published Substack articles, including eleven articles that the group insisted I write about my own story, a step I needed to take just to get all of this out of my own head and onto a page where other people could actually see it. We are compiling those into a manuscript, aiming for publication in early 2027.

We are running a pilot cohort, with two more Skill-building cohorts already in the pipeline. We have already started planning a second stage cohort. There is a real lead on funding a storytelling project. And slowly, I am starting to see evidence that the big assumption underneath all of this may be true: white Americans are more ready for 2045 than they appear. What’s been missing isn’t the will to flourish together. It’s the competence and confidence to begin.

I could be wrong. Eighteen months was never a scientific number, just a fear wearing the costume of a joke. But this feels like it has life past that mark. And the truest thing I can say right now is that I am not doing this alone, and I am deeply grateful for the people journeying with me.