Description

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For readers of Together and The Art of Gathering

How moving from transactional to transformational relationships and organizations can save our democracy, nurture our connections, and make us happier and healthier.

Powerful institutions, from schools to tech and social media companies, create breeding grounds for isolation by failing to invest in relational work. This obstacle stands in the way of our fight for racial equity, economic justice, and climate resilience.

In Relationality, leading asexuality and relationship activist David Jay brings clarity to the crisis with a fresh perspective that expands upon the fundamental idea that all entities in the universe are connected. Jay draws from a range of vivid personal experiences, including his time spent helping tech workers and policymakers reform social media.

This book is for people who believe in the power of relationships and want to see increased investment in relational work. Its scientifically grounded framework will help readers foster conversations about relational work, establish conditions for relationships to thrive, and quantify the impact of them.

Equipping professionals and activists involved in nonprofit, political, and other types of relational work with the knowledge they need to fight for and utilize resources, Relationality shares valuable insight on: 

• The history of why institutions fail to invest in relationships 
• Reimagining ROI calculations to account for relational work
• Using tools of prediction and emergence theory to build communities
• How stories and data about relationships can help us direct resources toward relational work
• Relational economics and the redistribution of wealth

With isolation and loneliness on the rise in a post-lockdown world, Relationality offers a roadmap to nourish our connections toward a better, more liberated world—personally, organizationally, and in community.

About the Author

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David Jay brings a lifetime of experience building fulfilling relationships that drive social change. At 18, David founded the world’s first large online community of people identifying on the asexual spectrum. He has since gone on to play a leading role in the movement to reform social media. Through this work, David came to appreciate how the work of forming relationships is both a powerful tool for social change and invisible to many of our most powerful institutions. To make this work more visible, David has spent a decade developing novel approaches to relational measurement. He regularly advises social movements and political campaigns that want to understand how to create the conditions for relationships to thrive and measure when their efforts have been successful.

Praise For…

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"In a time of general malaise and epidemic loneliness, David Jay offers a vision of a more connected, less isolated social experience. His willingness to look squarely at our failing social dynamics is bracing, and his notion of relationship is at once radical and sensible, with the potential to mitigate a great deal of sadness and pain."
—ANDREW SOLOMON, author of Far From the Tree

"This is not a glib call for community, or a dire portrait of a world in which loneliness has reached epidemic proportions. David Jay offers a clear-eyed telling of what happens when we invest in relational containers—and the consequences when we don't. Relationality is an indictment of a society and an economy that has consistently undervalued and underinvested in real relationships and settled for its commodified imitations. And it is a playbook shared by one of our generation's most studied movement leaders about how we might do better, and how we might redirect the resources required to make it so."
—LENNON FLOWERS, founder and executive director of The Dinner Party

"Relationality offers insight into the transformative power of relationships and calls attention to the well-being deficit many face from chronic loneliness and disconnection. I commend David for his work in breaking down these concepts to get to the heart of what we all desire and what we need now more than ever—meaningful relationships."
—JILLIAN RACOOSIN, executive director of the Foundation for Social Connection

"A wake-up call to institutions that fail to understand the importance of relationships. Whether we succeed together or fail together depends entirely on the quality of our relationships. This book is an invaluable map to improve them."
—AZA RASKIN, cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology