A harvest is measured at the table, not in the field.
The technology for abundance is arriving: artificial intelligence, clean power, new ways to grow food and make things. Ownership decides who gains. Today the bottom half of American households own less than 1% of the nation's stocks.
Changing who owns the new systems takes people who trust one another enough to act together, and the ties between people are fraying. Americans spend a third as much time with friends as they did twenty years ago, and only one in six feel very attached to their local community. Lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.
So we work on both fronts. Technological innovations put the new systems within reach of people and communities. Social innovations—new forms of shared ownership, new ways of deciding together, new places to gather—turn neighbors into partners.
As a charitable project, we are raising philanthropic funds for our first initiative, Community ROOTS, which helps communities own and run the infrastructure being built across America today.
What becomes possible
Ownership rooted in place and community opens a world of possibilities.
When people own a share of the new systems, a better life for everyone comes within reach: in every home, across every town, for generations to come.
- In every home,an AI advisor that answers to the family alone, keeping personal data and knowledge at home and working for the people who live there instead of mining their data for someone else.
- Across the town,power, water and transport covered for residents, paid for by what the town sells to the world, and year-round community gardens, pools, libraries and gathering spaces, warmed in winter by spare heat from the town's own data center.
- Across the region,farms making fertilizer from air and sunlight, oil-field crews drilling for heat instead of oil, and a creek once dry for generations flowing again.
- Across the country,a network of communities that owns a share of the nation's power and computing, bargains as one and sends help within hours when disaster strikes.
- Across generations,a share for every child born in the community, in facilities that become community-owned by the time that child grows up.
Illustrative · AI-generated
These ideas are a few of the possibilities we imagine. More important than any one idea is how the future becomes real: communities connected, with the power to choose, build and own what comes next.
Why ROOTS, why now
America is building at a scale not seen in a generation.
Investor-owned utilities plan to invest more than $1.1 trillion between 2025 and 2029. Construction spending on data centers grew about eighteenfold in ten years, and nearly four in ten of the data centers now in development are headed to counties that have none today.
And yet few of the communities hosting this buildout hold any stake in what is built. Among more than 3,600 U.S. data centers, researchers found only eight signed community benefit agreements.
Neighbors are organizing. Local groups opposing new data centers grew from 142 to 843 in little more than a year. Ownership could give that energy something to build.
A lesson from history
The last time America built at this scale, communities owned much of what was built.
In the mid-1930s, nine in ten rural homes had no electricity, so farmers formed cooperatives to bring power to their own homes and farms. Electric cooperatives still own about 42% of the nation's distribution lines.
The farmers did not invent electricity. They changed who owned the lines.
Our first initiative
ROOTS helps communities own and run the technology systems they depend on.
Community ROOTS (Rooted Ownership Of Technology Systems) works across the systems this century runs on—energy, intelligence, land and water, fabrication and production, and built spaces—so that the value of new infrastructure stays with the people who live and work there: owners and renters, residents and workers alike.
In each community, ROOTS builds toward three outcomes.
Wealth
Income, jobs and services that stay local.
Agency
A lasting say over the systems people depend on.
Cohesion
Places and systems that bring neighbors together.
Most efforts to share the benefits of new infrastructure stop at money. ROOTS goes further and puts social cohesion at the center, because neighbors who know one another look out for each other, act together and weather hard times better.
The path
ROOTS begins with discovery for everyone, then builds with one community at a time.
Discover
We show what is possible and bring together the people who can help.
Once, for all communities
Scope
A community works with independent experts to design infrastructure projects its residents will own.
Build
The projects are financed and built under new forms of community ownership.
Train
Local people learn to run and maintain the systems.
Share
What each community learns goes to the next, so each new one starts further ahead.
Where we begin
The Discover phase begins by listening.
We start with conversations in communities across the country, with community leaders, residents, workers and experts who know what the new infrastructure means for the places they live.
A convening then brings community members and experts together around shared tables, to describe what is possible and to shape the first project concepts, each rooted in a real community.
Everything learned in this phase is published as open resources, free for anyone to use, with every source shown.
ROOTS grows the way trust does: one honest conversation at a time.
Who leads the work
Deploying new technology at scale, by bringing people, capital, institutions and innovators to one table.
The Quantum Harvest Project is led by Brant Richards, who co-founded and was a member of the executive board of energy-storage pioneer Younicos, and led Third Derivative as Managing Director of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).
Younicos built Europe's first commercial battery park and the world's first island grid capable of running on 100% renewable energy. Third Derivative, the climate-technology ecosystem and accelerator founded by RMI and New Energy Nexus, built a global network of startups, investors, corporations and experts. Since 2020, the network has supported over 280 climate tech innovations, which have created over 4,400 jobs and mobilized over $3.7 billion in capital.