A Message from the Founder

I am seventy-five years old. I have spent a lifetime following this country's politics — voting in every election, staying informed, occasionally fired up about a particular issue. By most measures, I am an engaged citizen.

My friends think I should do more. They have a point. I try. Something always stops me.

It isn't the partisan part. Partisanship I understand — people disagree, sometimes deeply, and democracy is the system we built for working through that. What I can't navigate is the adversarial part. Getting engaged seems to mean joining a side — or being claimed by one. Adopting a tribe's whole view of the world, its enemies and its allies. That posture is at odds with everything the word civic is supposed to mean. I am not built for it.

Then something started to shift.

I have friends whose television is reliably tuned to Fox News when we visit. One of them also composts and saves rainwater. I used to think those two facts were in tension. I'm no longer sure they are.

That moment — small, ordinary — stayed with me. It made me wonder how often I was reading my fellow citizens the way the partisan media wanted me to read them. How often I was missing the actual person in front of me.

Before I built anything, I wanted to test the instinct.

I interviewed fourteen people, one at a time. Conservatives, liberals, in-betweens, the politically tired. Almost every conversation surfaced the same beat: when I showed them the actual data on what Americans across party lines agree on, they said some version of, “I didn't realize we agreed on that.”

Several of them said it produced hope. One — a Republican woman — said she nearly teared up. “I felt recognized,” she said.

That's when I knew the instinct held.

Common Ground is what I built from that.

The premise is simple: Americans agree on far more than our politics reflects, and the system — not the other side — is what's failing the country. There is something we can do about that. Not by joining a side. By making what we already share visible, measurable, and usable.

I did not want to build a movement. I wanted to build infrastructure. Like electricity or water — something that just works, that anyone can use, that has no agenda but the public's.

If any of this resonates — if you've felt the same wall, or the same wonder, or the same quiet refusal to write off your fellow citizens — you are not alone. You are part of something this country has not stopped being: a citizenry that holds more in common than the noise allows us to see.

I am building Common Ground because I believe this. I'd value your company.

— Keith Lietzke, Founder