Why We’re Redefining the Tradition of Coming Together

By Carmen Berkley Anderson & Gregory Allan Datu Cendana

Photo credit: Ulysses Curry

We’ve been in a lot of rooms.

Boardrooms and church basements. National convenings and neighborhood block parties. Strategy sessions with funders and late-night hotel lobby conversations where the real work actually happens. Between us, we’ve spent more than four decades designing, facilitating, and moving through the spaces where movements get built, strategies get shaped, and trust gets earned, or lost, one conversation at a time.

And here is what we know. The tradition of coming together is broken.

Not because people stopped showing up. Not because the work stopped mattering. It is broken because too many rooms are still built around a fantasy of sameness, the same background, the same language, the same comfort, the same way of speaking, processing, and being.

That sameness was never real. It was just centered.

And when a room is built around what is centered instead of who is actually there, people start negotiating with themselves.

Can I tell the truth here?

Can I bring my whole self in here?

Do I need to shrink, code switch, perform, or stay quiet to make everybody else comfortable?

We do not believe that should be the price of participation.

That is why we started Culture of Convening.

We are not interested in a shinier version of the same old room. We are after a different tradition of what it means to bring people together.

A tradition where every identity, experience, and perspective belongs in the room, not as an afterthought, but as part of what makes the room honest in the first place.

A tradition where the convener is not the center. The people being convened are.

A tradition where design goes beyond the agenda and into the actual experience of being human, bodies, histories, nervous systems, grief, joy, culture, power, and difference.

A tradition where care is not fluff, it is strategy—and where belonging is not a vibe, it is structured.

This is not abstract to us. Carmen brings two decades of experience in political strategy, organizational development, and culture shaping. Gregory brings years of coalition building, leadership development, and facilitation, all rooted in joy and treated as a strategic advantage. Together, we have seen what happens when rooms ask people to edit themselves to belong. We have also seen what becomes possible when a room is built with intention, truth, and care.

The difference is not minor. It is the difference between attendance and connection, between participation and investment, and between being present and actually belonging.

Why now? Because people are tired of rooms that conflate control with leadership and performance with professionalism.

And because the pandemic changed something real, people lost some of the social muscle it takes to be in a room together. Many are still walking into spaces carrying more anxiety, more awareness, more grief, and less patience for pretending.

At the same time, a generation of leaders has emerged with different expectations for what a room should feel like. They expect to be seen. They expect their identities to be honored, not managed. They expect more care, more clarity, and more room to be human.

They are right to expect that.

This publication is our response.

Some pieces we will write together, sharing frameworks, tools, language, and questions for people who bring others together for a living or because they simply cannot help it. Some pieces we will write individually, Carmen from the crossroads of strategy, culture and soul, and Gregory from the quiet discipline of holding space and strategy.

All of it is grounded in one belief. The tradition of coming together can be redefined.

And we believe that work starts with belonging, real belonging, structural belonging, felt belonging, the kind people can sense in their bodies.

That is what we are here to explore. That is what we are here to build.

Welcome to Culture of Convening.