America in One Room inspires communities to ignite civic engagement, fostering collaborative solutions for their most pressing challenges.
Our projects are designed to reinvigorate democracy in an era of unprecedented challenges. With democracy facing global challenges and growing mistrust in institutions, we believe that the power to strengthen our democracy lies in the hands of everyday Americans. We create transformative spaces where diverse citizens can engage in constructive dialogue, bridge divides, and address the critical issues that shape our nation's future.
Our projects generate diverse outcomes focused on addressing the root causes of polarization and democratic decline. We aim to build a society where polarization gives way to understanding, institutional reform is driven by collective wisdom, and democracy thrives through active participation. By fostering civic education, promoting authentic engagement, and amplifying diverse voices, America in One Room aims to break the cycle of partisan conflict and empower individuals to become agents of positive change.
Through narrative, experiential, educational, and institutional initiatives, we work to catalyze systemic changes that elevate empowered citizens, influence policies, and reform governance structures to be more inclusive, transparent, and responsive.
America in One Room is a Helena Project.
Our Story
In September of 2019, the original America in One Room (A1R) brought together a nationally representative sample of 526 Americans to engage with policy issues central to the 2020 campaign. The event was conducted in partnership with Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab and NORC at the University of Chicago.
A1R was widely covered in the media and garnered the attention of global leaders including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. The event demonstrated the enormous potential for carefully structured democratic deliberation to reduce crippling polarization and to provide thoughtful and representative public input into policy. A follow-up study one year later proved this deliberative effect was durable. Since 2019, we’ve brought this process to a series of issue-specific Deliberative Polls that included “A1R: Climate and Energy” (2021) and “A1R: Democratic Reform” (2023). Both events reinforced the depolarizing effects of the A1R experience and its ability to increase civic discourse and engagement among participants.
America in One Room: The Youth Vote, our latest installment, made history by convening the first-ever statistically representative sample of 17- and 18-year-olds voters for deliberative polling in the United States. The groundbreaking project tapped into a demographic frequently discussed but rarely engaged directly, as they faced one of the most consequential elections in US history.
About Helena
Helena is a global problem-solving organization that seeks to implement solutions to critical societal challenges through nonprofit, for-profit, and legislative actions. Helena’s nonprofit projects include America in One Room, which garnered the attention of President Barack Obama and The New York Times; Biosecurity in the Age of AI, which focuses on risks emerging at the intersection of AI and biotechnology; and The COVID Project, which supplied tens of millions of units of medical supplies and personal protective equipment to frontline responders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since its founding in 2020, Helena Special Investments has supported innovations in grid-scale energy storage (Energy Vault), AI controls to dramatically reduce energy consumption in industrial processes (Phaidra); and an innovation in Digital Twin technology enabling chronic disease reversals (Twin Health), among others. Helena operates its projects alongside a diverse group of multidisciplinary leaders called Helena members.
526 people were asked to talk politics. The response tested American democracy
