Relationality

How Moving from Transactional to Transformational Relationships Can Reshape Our Lonely World

by David Jay

For readers of Together and The Art of Gathering

How moving from transactional to transformational relationships and organizations can save our democracy, nurture our connections, and make us happier and healthier.

Powerful institutions, from schools to tech and social media companies, create breeding grounds for isolation by failing to invest in relational work. This obstacle stands in the way of our fight for racial equity, economic justice, and climate resilience.

In Relationality, leading asexuality and relationship activist David Jay brings clarity to the crisis with a fresh perspective that expands upon the fundamental idea that all entities in the universe are connected. Jay draws from a range of vivid personal experiences, including his time spent helping tech workers and policymakers reform social media.

This book is for people who believe in the power of relationships and want to see increased investment in relational work. Its scientifically grounded framework will help readers foster conversations about relational work, establish conditions for relationships to thrive, and quantify the impact of them.

Equipping professionals and activists involved in nonprofit, political, and other types of relational work with the knowledge they need to fight for and utilize resources, Relationality shares valuable insight on:

• The history of why institutions fail to invest in relationships
• Reimagining ROI calculations to account for relational work
• Using tools of prediction and emergence theory to build communities
• How stories and data about relationships can help us direct resources toward relational work
• Relational economics and the redistribution of wealth

With isolation and loneliness on the rise in a post-lockdown world, Relationality offers a roadmap to nourish our connections toward a better, more liberated world—personally, organizationally, and in community.

David Jay is a community organizer with a background in physics born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. From founding the Asexual Visibility and Education Network to working in the heart of the tech reform movement, David has centered the work of building relationship as a tool of healing and driving social change. His research and writing centers on the reasons why these important relational tools so often go underappreciated and underfunded and on how that reality might change. David is regularly invited to speak at conferences and universities on topics ranging from asexuality to movement organizing to tech reform to queer family structure. David lives with his two co-parents and two children in Oakland, California.