Riley Institute’s Bryan Boroughs and Claudia Winkler provide opinion piece on collective agency

Last updated December 11, 2024

In an opinion piece appearing in the Greenville News, Furman University’s Bryan Boroughs and Claudia Winkler provide a pathway towards getting essential political action done. Bryan Boroughs is the executive director of The Riley Institute at Furman University. Claudia Winkler is the Riley Institute’s director of marketing, communications and strategic alignment. Due to the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with the American political system, together they wrote about a potential solution on how to move forward productively.

Their answer rests on gathering a collective will to demand better from ourselves and our political representatives. Their first step recommends actively choosing to consume information from across media outlets and to interact with people that hold different political opinions. This allows for serious consideration of issues that matter to all Americans such as the economy, quality public education, and health care access.

“Americans are unhappy. Fixing what’s broken isn’t solved by a descent into chaos or entrenchment into camps.” Boroughs and Winkler wrote. “It’s done by rolling up our sleeves, listening to each other’s very real, lived challenges, and doing the hard work of demanding better for ourselves, for our neighbors and for our future.”