Rethinking Democracy Work: A Recap of Halloran and Hulawale’s Call for Stronger Strategy and Learning

Brendan Halloran, an independent consultant specializing in strategy and learning for democracy organizations, and Suvarna Hulawale, Senior Director of Strategy and Learning at FairVote, have co-authored a discussion paper calling on the pro-democracy field to significantly strengthen how it develops strategy, measures impact, and learns collectively in the face of ongoing democratic backsliding. Their paper argues that many democracy organizations rely on vague Theories of Change and narrow output metrics that fail to capture whether their work is actually shifting the systemic conditions that produce democratic decline. The authors offer concrete frameworks — including evaluative thinking, systems change models, and participatory Theory of Change development — as practical tools organizations can adopt individually and in coordination with peers and funders. The paper speaks directly to NCDD's mission by urging the broader civic field to treat collaborative learning and adaptive strategy not as organizational luxuries, but as essential infrastructure for sustaining democracy.

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As the United States navigates what many observers describe as its most serious democratic crisis in generations, the organizations working to safeguard and strengthen democracy face a critical internal challenge: ensuring that their strategies, metrics, and learning practices are actually equal to the complexity of the moment. A newly published discussion paper by independent consultant Brendan Halloran and Suvarna Hulawale, Senior Director of Strategy and Learning at FairVote, takes up this challenge directly. Published through the Expand Democracy Substack, the paper makes the case that pro-democracy organizations — individually and collectively — need stronger, more adaptive approaches to how they think about change, measure progress, and share what they are learning across the ecosystem. The stakes, the authors argue, are too high for strategic vagueness or isolated effort.

​At the heart of the paper is a critique of how many democracy organizations currently define and measure their work. Too often, strategies rest on unstated assumptions about how information will move audiences to action, or how discrete organizational outputs will add up to meaningful democratic change. The authors advocate for explicit Theories of Change — not as rigid blueprints, but as living frameworks that name obstacles, surface assumptions, and connect the "what" and "how" of reform in ways that can be tested and revised over time. They also push organizations to move beyond easily counted outputs — reports published, events held, petitions signed — toward a more rigorous account of outcomes and systems-level impact. Drawing on tools from evaluative thinking and systems change frameworks, the paper offers practical resources for organizations ready to build that deeper analytical capacity. The argument is not that measurement is simple, but that avoiding it has real costs.

Perhaps the paper's most urgent argument is about shared learning across the democracy ecosystem. Individual organizations are learning constantly, but the incentives, resources, and spaces for joint reflection are rare — and the competitive pressures around donor funding can actively discourage transparency about what is not working. Halloran and Hulawale call on both organizations and their funders to invest in collective strategy sessions, shared learning agendas, and jointly commissioned evaluations that could sharpen the entire field's focus and coordination. For NCDD members engaged in dialogue, deliberation, and civic capacity-building, this paper offers a timely and rigorous framework for asking harder questions about strategic contribution and field-level coherence. The full discussion paper is available through the Expand Democracy Substack at https://expanddem.substack.com/p/strengthening-strategy-and-learning