Turning the Tables: An Interview with Sam Pressler, Chief Tissue Officer
A serious and silly Q&A with Sam on membership, relationships as essential goods, and our generational moment of civic renewal
Yesterday, we officially launched Connective Tissue membership, a self-sustaining member network to realize our generational project of civic renewal. Please consider checking out our announcement post and joining if you haven’t already. Today, we’re doing a special Q&A with our Chief Tissue Officer, Sam Pressler, to learn a bit more about Connective Tissue membership — but, more so, what inspires this work and the tensions within it.
As Connective Tissue begins a new chapter, we wanted to pull back the curtain a little bit and explore our roots. Who is this millennial bro who can lowkey hoop, wax poetic about community and civic engagement, and appreciate J. Cole on a deeper level than most?
Meet Sam Pressler: Connective Tissue’s co-founder and Chief Tissue Officer. While in undergrad, Sam founded the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP), a creative community where veterans thrive through the arts and comedy. He launched the series of projects that is now Connective Tissue in 2023 while creating the Connective Tissue Policy Framework, which provides policymakers with an organized, actionable starting point for regenerating connection in American communities. Today, Sam is the driving force behind Connective Tissue’s writing and strategic direction (to the extent there is one).
and I () have both been supporting Connective Tissue for the past year, and we sat down with Sam to pick his brain about his own complicated relationship to community, why Connective Tissue is launching this membership network, and what it could mean for the long term vision of this project.If you have more burning questions for Sam (why DOES his sister have way more friends than him?), we’re also hosting an AMA with him at 4PM ET today. We wanted to give Sam a chance to explain himself. Come clean. Bare it all. Where did he come from? Where is he now? Where is he going? Now, let’s get to the Q&A — we hope you enjoy it.
- Margo
Margo (M): Give us your personal why: Why do you feel so deeply committed to reinvigorating community in America? How does community show up in your life?
The people who focus on this stuff most are often the people who are most uncomfortable with groups, community, and belonging. My sister has hundreds of friends and she’s completely at home in any group or room she’s in. She doesn't think about this stuff. Meanwhile, I’m the weirdo who has this deep need to belong, but as soon as I have the safety of that belonging, I immediately want to rebel against the group I feel I belong to.
M: Okay, but can you answer the question?
Fine. I grew up in a community where I was deeply known — for better or worse. I was the third generation of my family in Wayne, NJ. My grandpa and grandma were founding members of our synagogue and the (now defunct) Jewish Y in our town. My dad graduated from the high school across town, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins all lived within a mile of me growing up. Family, and by virtue, the friends of our family, were always there — and I took this level of social support, rootedness, and “knownness” for granted. I even resented it at times. Being that rooted can feel small and provincial, and being that seen and that known kinda sucks when you're 16 or 17 and you just want to hide under your Jewfro. All I wanted was to get away and become independent.
When I started the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP), I rediscovered the importance of community anew as an adult(ish). I spent seven years building what is now the nation’s largest community arts organization for veterans and their families. And I can’t describe that work as anything other than sacred. It’s a spiritual act to bring together groups of people who are strangers to one another on the front-end of an eight-week class — who have no reason to be in the same room together beyond this somewhat arbitrary identification of “veteran” — and who, on the back-end of that class, are willing to support each other unconditionally.
In this hyperindividualistic culture, it takes a spiritual turn to realize our fundamental belongingness to one another. It takes a spiritual turn to recognize there is no “relational ledger” — we’re born into and will die with relational debts we can never fully repay. And, here, in this community was a group of people sharing each other’s joys and burdens: celebrating birthdays, marriages, and child births, and accompanying one another through failures, illness, loss, and grief. People who give and give and give — and ask for nothing in return.
I think for me, that experience was like, “Oh, this is the thing.” It wasn't about veterans per se, nor was it about the arts or comedy. It was about connecting or reconnecting people to the communities, commitments, and connections that make our lives worth living.
Sam Wolf (SW): You often write about thinking and doing and the thinker-doers. You also emphasize that many people tend to do far too much thinking and not enough doing. How does this tension play out in your work with Connective Tissue?
In the last few years, I've been much more of a thinker than a doer. I feel a great deal of tension — and even some hypocrisy — in writing and doing research about community, but not fully practicing it right now.
But Pete Davis once shared a quote with me that helped me feel less shitty about this tension. It’s from Robert Unger, who said something along the lines of: “The best way to live life is to alternate between the battlefield and the monastery.” In my mind, my seven years building ASAP were the metaphorical battlefield — I’m a veteran of veterans — and my last five years have been the metaphorical monastery (and, at times, the actual monastery).
Hopefully, what we're trying to do now with Connective Tissue is be on the battlefield and in the monastery at the same time — or at least creating a tighter feedback loop between the two. Here’s what I mean. The newsletter has largely been me hanging out in the monastery with a Wi-Fi connection: I’ve been “learning out loud” through my own research and writing, and through my interviews with community-builders, neighbors, thinkers, and the like. Our new membership is an opportunity to accompany those on the battlefield — helping these thinkers and doers connect with, support, and learn from one another, and helping them organize, experiment with, and work toward new approaches for civic renewal. Our learnings and provocations from the newsletter will (hopefully) continue to inspire the work of our members, and the work of our members will certainly continue to inspire what we write in the newsletter.
SW: A caste of warrior-priests.
Yes, that's exactly it. That's who you all are: hot warrior-priests.
M: Let’s get into the membership conversation. You've written and talked at length about how civic life has been overly professionalized and privatized. So why are we creating a paid Connective Tissue membership? Why are we doing it now?
There's a practical reason we're launching membership and there's an idealistic reason we're launching membership.
The practical reason is simple: Our subscribers want it. We've done close to 40 interviews with subscribers this year and no one wants more content. What people want is a peer network, and ideally they want to move from a digital network to an in-person peer network. So you hear that enough times and you're like, “Okay, let's try that out.” Let’s see if we can build a network of practitioners, policymakers, funders, neighbors, and community curious people to seed and cultivate our civic renewal movement.
The idealistic reason is a challenge to practice what we preach around membership, civic alignment, self-sustainability, and self-governance. Honestly, this is the part that scares me more, but it's also the opportunity to put some of the theories and examples that we've been writing about to the test. The hope is that we can build a model that is self-sustaining and doesn't need to rely on outside funding sources. The hope is that we can create a governance structure where members feel that they have agency and ownership. The hope is that we can build the type of aligned network that we want to see in the world.
The execution of it is probably going to be messy. It's probably going to have fits and starts. People are probably gonna get mad at me, and I'm probably gonna get mad at them, and we're gonna devolve into name-calling and cursing. But then we're gonna come back together. It’s going to be nice.
In all seriousness, I'm excited. It's been cool to see how the practicality of what people want aligns with the idealistic view of what we hope to see.
SW: What's the ultimate vision for Connective Tissue membership?
We don't just need one community. We need lots of overlapping webs of association. If you think back on the civic life of old that Putnam or Skocpol write about, we had several overlapping webs of membership — religious institutions, associational life, unions, political parties, neighborhoods, families, and more. Part of the challenge today is that many people either have no webs of association or they maybe have one, and the consequences of losing that one are much higher because you have nothing else to fall back on.
The hope is that the Connective Tissue member network can be one of many networks that's working towards a renewal of our civic, communal, and relational lives. The big vision is to have a network that is national or international in scope, but driven by people who are rooted locally or who are supporting local work. In the near term, we want people to meet each other and build relationships. We want people to collaborate around areas of shared need or shared interest. We want people to get inspired by what others are doing and experiment with it in their own communities. And we want to create a feedback loop where members are sharing their learnings to facilitate even more local experiments.
Long-term, we see this as a love child between Strong Towns and the Chamber of Commerce, but for civic life. I’ve been inspired by Strong Towns’ ability to leverage media — blogs, podcasts, and the like — to cultivate local networks of people who are changing policy and practice in their communities. And I think there’s inspiration to be taken from the Chamber of Commerce in building a federated, member-driven network that is rooted, funded, and governed locally, but horizontally connected within their states and nationwide.
Every community needs an institution with a core function of connecting residents to one another, residents to civic life, and civic groups to one another. If we could work toward building a network of these institutions — both those that already exist like CivicLex in Lexington, KY, and those that will be created by our member network — we can create one of the missing pieces of infrastructure that’s needed to power the civic renewal movement. We may not get close to that vision, but that shouldn’t stop us from imagining what’s possible.
SW: You talked about the spiritual element showing up in your experience of the ASAP community. How do you want that spiritual turn to show up within what Connective Tissue is doing?
There are a lot of people out there who say we should be in a community in order to achieve XYZ outcome. “We need community to prevent deaths of despair. We need community to promote economic mobility. We need community to save democracy.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for preventing deaths of despair and I’m not against economic mobility. But these measurable outcomes are not why our relationships matter.
Being in relationships with others is an essential good. Friendship is an essential good. Theologians and philosophers have written about this for millennia. We don't need to anchor the essentialness of relationships and friendship on something that is tangible within the lowercase-”p” political realm. This instrumentalization diminishes the importance of the very thing that we're talking about.
What we're hoping to do here is point to the inherent and sacred good of what Martin Buber would call that I-Thou relationship — our relationships defy categorization and matter as ends in and of themselves — and we’re hoping to do that without taking ourselves too seriously. Because, to quote Vonnegut, “We're here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
SW: Let’s stick with this spiritual thread. How has your time in the “monastery” — particularly writing with Connective Tissue — changed your relationship to your community?
I’ll start with the past. These last few years have forced me to look back at my experience with ASAP in a new light. It has crystallized some of the really good things we've done. We injected humor, irreverence, and joy into so much of what we did. We built leadership pipelines for the veterans from our programs to then become the mentors and instructors of those programs. We created an authentic community — it didn't feel like we were trying to be anything other than what we were. Some of the pieces that I've written have helped me reflect on these good parts.
In the here and now, it's been an exciting challenge to take what I’m learning and writing about and put it into practice in my community. For instance, I’d been hearing about all of these microgrants to bring neighbors together, like Boston’s Block Party Initiative and Warm Cookies’ Civic House Parties microgrants. And I'm like, “Why not try this out in the place that I live?” So we launched this microgrant program in Charlottesville in April and May, where we gave $3,000 to 30 people from across the region to host different gatherings that brought neighbors together around the theme of “possibilities for our shared place.” So much has already emerged from this little experiment — some neighborhoods have organized to create play streets, others have organized to host summer block parties, our neighborhood is hosting a goth-themed ice cream social soon.
When I think about the future, this work has helped clarify my principles for what it means to live a good life. Last spring, I was at my favorite monastery, Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville, Virginia. While I was there, I wrote a letter to my 40-year-old self about what I hope and pray my life will feel like at age 40. I wrote about my hope to feel grateful for the family I helped create and raise. I wrote about my hope to feel embedded in a community of care and support, and to feel like I am stewarding a particular place. I wrote about my hope to live out a deep and active spirituality. And I wrote about my hope that, more than anything, my life feels full, thick, substantive, and imbued with meaning.
SW: Connective Tissue has written a lot about the problems with elite institutions. But part of your time in the metaphorical “monastery” involved attending the Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford Business School. How do you contend with this tension?
This goes back to the tension of belonging to rebel and rebelling to belong, right? I went to a fine public high school and I did well. I went to William & Mary, which was the best college I got into, but most people outside Virginia hadn’t heard of it. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I probably needed the validation to prove to myself that I can get into schools like Stanford and Harvard. But as soon as I got there, I found them to be empty, vacuous institutions. They were also largely transactional places: Many people seemed to be there to use the place to advance themselves.
It was a radicalizing experience. It took actually being there to realize how much of the world's decisions are made by a subset of people who pass through these places, cultivate elite networks, and are wildly disconnected from the rest of society. Honestly, these are the same people who, 20 years earlier, sent my friends to war — to fight, get hurt, and lose their friends and family. And what happened to the people who made these decisions? Absolutely nothing: They’re running foundations, serving as “fellows” at Harvard or Stanford, working for Lockheed Martin, or some mix of the three.
For me, there is a deep-seated feeling that we've created a set of institutions that are extraordinarily disconnected from most people, where we make decisions on behalf of those people, and then we never have to deal with the consequences, while a lot of people suffer as a result. That is a moral failure. I've been so interested in cross-class connectedness and reimagining the adult transition because I want people to make decisions and feel the effects of those decisions. If you vote to send us to war, your son or daughter should have to go. But these elite spaces are built on distance, so you can talk about a thing at the Aspen Ideas Festival or the Harvard Kennedy Forum, make a decision in a private room, and never have to deal with the consequences.
Our responsibility in going to these institutions is to use that credibility and that experience to say, “No, these are empty institutions. They are forming human beings poorly. They are creating an elite that has failed.”
M: As Connective Tissue’s official Gen Z Steward – how should my generation go about “doing the work?” Where do we go from here?
I have no idea; the best I can do is reflect on where my generation went wrong and where we can go from here. I was in college from 2011 to 2015. When we were in school, there was this idea that, if you want to make change, you have to change the world and you do that by “driving impact at scale.” Business schools were talking about things like “social innovation,” funders were creating “venture philanthropy” arms, and “social entrepreneurs” became an archetype modeled after Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Two weeks after I graduated, I got a fellowship from one of these venture philanthropy funds and became a social entrepreneur myself. I was in it.
In hindsight, we said we were about systems change, but we didn’t realize how much we were creatures of the existing system. There was this tacit acceptance of the world as it was. Oftentimes, we were using existing forms and funding sources — venture-backed startups or philanthropy-funded nonprofits, and little in-between. We often saw our job as to produce a fully measurable and tangible form of “impact,” and once we achieved that “impact,” our job was then to scale, scale, scale. But I think a good portion of us Millennial “social entrepreneurs" realized how much was missing from that work. Many of us have turned to the spiritual and the relational because we went in with these expectations that you can change the world in a measurable way, and we left with questions of whether or not we created more harm than good.
My sense is that younger people look at what we did in the 2000s and 2010s, roll their eyes, and want to do the opposite. I’ve seen a real turn toward the proximate, smaller units of change — toward doing something that is tangible in their immediate relationships, in their neighborhoods, or in their towns. I see them turning away from existing and often broken forms — the hyper-professionalized nonprofit, for instance — and trying to experiment with new forms that actually align with their goals for building community. I also see far more openness to the relational, the spiritual, and the enchanted, perhaps in response to the disembodied technological experiment they came up in.
This moment is so weird, in part, because we're basically caught between stories. We have a story of the last 50 years, which is no longer making sense, and the story of the next 50-plus years has not been written. The call for us is to write that new story. It’s a daunting challenge, but it’s also a generational opportunity.
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I resonate with the "generational opportunity" of the moment, and am grateful to be a member of whatever is brewing here! Also, as someone who lives in a monastery (with vowed monastics, and myself as a lay person), I'm intrigued to hear more of what the slow time of a monastery has brought to your perspective and work. I agree that there's an openness to the spiritual and enchanted today, and there are some traditions--monasticism, in my view--that are just waiting there for us to discover the riches of in new ways for our generation. Excited to connect!
100% to the point about human-to-human connection not simply being the means to cure our social problems, but being the valuable ends in themselves!