When the world's problems feel enormous and your bandwidth feels small, worry without action becomes exhausting. Jama Adams, coalition-builder, community founder, and host of People in Common, shares her answer: stop trying to take on the whole world. Bring it back down locally. That is where things actually start.
This episode is a little different. Jama's friend and Innovators community member Jon Bonanno turns the microphone around and interviews her -- and they end up going somewhere unexpected.
Two years ago, Jama co-founded a monthly gathering in her hometown: entrepreneurs, builders, and community leaders, once a month, helping each other work through real problems. No budget. No pitch. Just a tight structure, a room full of generous people, and one rule: bring something you haven't figured out yet.
One meeting became a community of 44. Twenty-two gatherings. Ten structured problem-solving sessions that changed real businesses, careers, and civic projects. A restaurant owner raised non-dilutive capital weeks before opening day using an idea the group generated in 45 minutes. A founder navigating a complex merger said a single session was "one of the most impactful things that shaped my trajectory as a leader." A group on the other side of the country adopted the model using Jama's documents, and held a successful first session without ever having seen it in person.
The conversation covers how the community started, the "Help Me Solve This" framework, and what 25 years of coalition-building at the highest levels (Giving Pledge, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the launch of a national Responsible AI Framework) taught Jama about what actually moves people. The answer keeps coming back to the same thing: values, trust, and showing up for each other.
Near the end, Jama says something she keeps coming back to. When enormous stakes make any effort feel inadequate, the antidote is not doing more. It is doing something local. That is where it all begins. And it is replicable anywhere -- including your town, this week, with people you already know.
Jama Fitzgerald Adams builds coalitions that move the world, and her own hometown. She raised $1.8 billion in 12 weeks for clean energy technology at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, grew the Giving Pledge from zero to $1 trillion with nearly 100 billionaires as the initiative's first employee, and co-developed the startup ecosystem's first practical Responsible AI Framework with the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. She holds degrees from UCLA and Harvard Kennedy School, where she was valedictorian and Kennedy Fellow. Jama is the founder and host of People in Common and the co-founder of Innovators, a community of helpers and doers who believe good people working together create lasting change.
