Jess Scully Joins as Executive Director of RadicalxChange

RadicalxChange is entering a new chapter of our shared experiment in reimagining institutions for a plural, cooperative future. We are delighted to welcome Jess Scully as our new Executive Director.

Jess is a rare and extraordinary synthesis of visionary leadership and grounded civic practice. She has worked across activism, creative industries, local government, and city-making — always weaving together imagination and implementation. Her book, Glimpses of Utopia: Real Ideas for a Fairer World, embodies exactly the spirit we aspire to nurture at RadicalxChange: bold yet practical invitations to redesign the systems that shape how we live, create, and govern together.

“Across hundreds of conversations around the world during the Plurality journey, few people so vividly embodied the practical, hopeful pluralism that RadicalxChange exists to cultivate as Jess Scully,” says E. Glen Weyl, founder of RadicalxChange.

She combines the creative vitality of culture with the institutional insight of governance and the intellectual curiosity of a true plural thinker. Jess brings the leadership experience, intuition, and integrity needed to take RadicalxChange from a pioneering community of ideas into a globally impactful network for institutional transformation — building on the incredible groundwork laid by our former Executive Director, Matt Prewitt. We’re deeply grateful to our board, especially Chair Christopher Kulendran Thomas, and to Vitalik Buterin, Audrey Tang, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and until recently Danielle Allen, for helping us connect with and convince Jess to join us. And to our remarkable team — the true engine of RadicalxChange — thank you for creating the vibrant community that gave Jess confidence to take this leap. I’m eager to work with all of you to co-create the next stage of this movement.

Before joining RadicalxChange, Jess served as Deputy Lord Mayor of Sydney; directed Australia’s largest creative industries festival; worked as a World Bank consultant contributing to urban transformation in Indonesia; and held roles as a ministerial policy adviser, cultural strategist, curator, editor, and radio host. She currently serves as a Non-Executive Director of Parents for Climate, a member of Women for Election’s Political Advisory Board, and a Senior Associate at the Sydney Policy Lab.

With Jess as Executive Director, RadicalxChange has been co-developing a new program and Strategic Pillars to guide our work through 2026 and beyond.

“Every interaction I’ve had with the RadicalxChange community has been invigorating,” Jess shares. “This is an active, imaginative, purpose-driven network — building plural futures across identity, civic innovation, decentralised technology, community practice, and public service. I’m honored to join this creative ecosystem and to help scale its energy and influence toward the fairer world we all glimpse.”

These Strategic Pillars articulate RadicalxChange’s evolving focus on designing life-giving alternatives to the extractive, monopolistic, and polarizing systems that now dominate. They are human-centered fields of inquiry — experiments in collective self-discovery — asking:

• Where are we going, together?
• How can we deepen bonds of association across difference?
• What forms of governance allow us to honor our diverse capacities and shared intentions?
• How do we build systems that ensure contributions, creativity, and perspectives are valued as common wealth?

We see these as the foundations of systemic transformation — the scaffolding through which we can move from theory to lived, plural practice. Across political, technological, cultural, and social domains, RadicalxChange aims to offer tools, models, and stories that empower communities everywhere to design and enact preferable futures.

In that spirit, we invite our community to join us in shaping the next articulation of our core values through a collaborative process on the Agora Citizen Network throughout October. This open dialogue embodies our faith that the next radical exchange is always ahead — co-created, plural, and alive in conversation.