What Are We Building?

A children's book about community and roles arrives at the exact moment America is being asked to choose which version of that question it wants to answer

The book is thirty-two pages long. It is written in rhyme, illustrated in watercolors and gouache by an artist in Buenos Aires who rescues birds and makes pizza in her spare time. It is aimed at children aged three and older. It costs $18.99. In the current American moment, it may be one of the more quietly subversive things being published.

We Are the Builders, written by Deepa Iyer and illustrated by Romina Galotta, arrived in September 2024. Its premise is simple: it is Community Day in a diverse neighborhood, and children are discovering the different roles they can play to help one another. Some are builders, restoring old furniture for new neighbors. Some are caregivers, nurturing friends who are sad or lonely. Some are frontline responders, preparing for emergencies. What they discover is that there is a place for every person regardless of their skills or interests, and that collaboration — the recognition of each person's specific contribution — is what makes a community strong.

Iyer is not merely a children's book author. She is a strategist, lawyer, and racial justice advocate who created what she calls the social change ecosystem map — a framework for identifying the different roles needed to bring about change in the world. The map went viral during the wave of social change movements in 2020. Since then, individuals and organizations around the world have used it to think about how they organize, what roles they occupy, and whether those roles serve the communities they are part of. We Are the Builders is that framework rendered in rhyme for a three-year-old. Which is to say: it is an argument about what we are building and who we are building it for, stripped to its most essential form and handed to children before the world has had a chance to teach them otherwise.

That argument lands differently in 2026 than it might have in a quieter moment. Because the question Iyer is asking — what is my role, and what am I helping to build — is also the question that the systems surrounding her readers have been answering, loudly and without apology, in a very different direction.

Consider the role of David Venturella. He spent twelve years at GEO Group, the largest private immigration detention company in the United States, and was paid over $6 million by the company during that time. In February 2025 he returned to government as a senior DHS advisor, hired by Tom Homan — the White House Border Czar who had himself worked as a GEO Group consultant — and was granted an ethics waiver exempting him from the standard one-year prohibition on working with his former employer. The waiver was granted by Homan. Venturella was subsequently appointed acting director of ICE — the agency that writes GEO Group's contracts. Since his return, GEO Group has reported a 700 percent increase in profits and its largest single year of new business in company history.

Venturella has a role. He is building something. The question Iyer's book presses — what are you building, and for whom — is one the architecture of his position is specifically designed not to ask.

Inside the facility his former employer operates in Newark — Delaney Hall, a $1 billion fifteen-year federal contract, the largest immigration detention center on the East Coast — men and women who have not been convicted of any crime cook meals, clean corridors, and repair infrastructure for as little as $1 a day. They have roles too, in the system's accounting. They are the product that makes the arrangement profitable. The story the system tells about them — they are detainees, they are cases, they are line items in a contract — is precisely the kind of story that Iyer's book, in its quiet way, refuses to tell. In her neighborhood, everyone has a name. Everyone has something to contribute. Everyone belongs to something worth belonging to.

Consider the role of Stephen Miller. He is the deputy chief of staff for policy of the United States government. In May 2026 he appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime and described James Talarico — a cisgender, heterosexual man, a state representative, a Presbyterian seminarian, an eighth-generation Texan — as the Democratic Party's first transgender Senate candidate in Texas. The claim was false. He then said that when Talarico gets a blood test, soy milk comes out instead of blood.

That is what a senior White House official chose to do with a national platform. Not engage Talarico's actual policy positions. Not address his argument that Christian nationalism is a theological betrayal of Christian values. Not reckon with the possibility that a Democrat who is visibly comfortable with his faith and his advocacy might represent a genuine political threat in a state Republicans cannot afford to lose. Instead: a false label, delivered at speed, followed by a dairy product used as a metaphor for insufficient masculinity.

Miller has a role. He is building something. The question is whether the thing he is building — an information ecosystem organized around contempt, a political culture in which the false label travels faster than the correction, a public discourse in which a senior government official can misidentify a man's gender on national television without consequence — is something that strengthens the communities his power is supposed to serve. Iyer's book has a word for people who use their position to diminish others rather than build something worth inhabiting together. It does not use that word. It doesn't need to. The contrast is visible enough without it.

Consider the role of every accommodator we have documented in these pages over the past months. The Republican congressman who declines to investigate the stock trading and tells himself he is protecting his majority. The cabinet official who extends his financial relationship with his former firm and tells himself the ethics rules were always theater. The attorney general who pursues the president's personal enemies through the courts and tells herself she is faithfully executing the law. The senator who says nothing about a $400 million foreign aircraft and tells himself that foreign policy is complicated.

Each of them has a role. Each of them is building something. They are, in the precise vocabulary of Iyer's book, builders — just of the wrong thing. The story they tell themselves about that role — pragmatic, necessary, serving a larger purpose — is the story that Iyer's book is, in its gentlest possible way, teaching children to interrogate before it hardens into habit.

The social change ecosystem map that underlies We Are the Builders identifies many roles: builders, caregivers, healers, storytellers, disruptors, frontline responders, visionaries, weavers who connect people across difference. What the map does not include — what Iyer conspicuously does not hand to the children in her neighborhood on Community Day — is the role of the accommodator. The person who has access, who has credibility, who has something to lose, and who uses their position not to build something worth inhabiting but to ensure that the existing arrangement continues undisturbed, because the existing arrangement is working well for them personally.

That omission is not an oversight. It is the book's deepest argument.

The people who have interrupted the systems we have documented — Elizabeth Oyer, the pardon attorney who became a public critic of political influence over clemency after being dismissed; Judge Jesse Furman, who refused to allow a constitutional provision to substitute for legal argument; Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, who resigned rather than fire a Watergate special prosecutor — these are the figures Iyer's book is unconsciously pointing toward. They are not the builders who restore furniture. They are not the caregivers who nurture the lonely. They are something the book captures in a different way: people who understood their role clearly enough to refuse the version of it that the system was offering, and to choose a different one.

That choice is always costly. Richardson lost his job. Oyer lost hers. Furman has faced sustained pressure. The cost of refusing the accommodator's role is real and immediate. The cost of accepting it is diffuse and delayed — but it is the cost that the systems we have documented are currently charging, and charging at scale, and charging to people who have no say in the matter.

Romina Galotta, who illustrated We Are the Builders in watercolors and gouache from her home in Buenos Aires, has said she prefers traditional mediums because they require a different kind of attention than digital tools — you cannot simply undo a brushstroke. What you put on the page stays on the page. The archive, as we have said elsewhere in these pages, does not care what anyone told themselves. It records what was done.

Iyer's book hands children a question before the world has calcified their answer to it. What is your role? What are you building? Who does it serve? These are not children's questions. They are the questions that the people with the most power in the current American moment are answering every day, in their choices about what to investigate and what to ignore, what to say and what to leave unsaid, what to build and what to allow to be demolished quietly while they describe themselves as pragmatists navigating a complicated situation.

The children in Iyer's neighborhood are three years old. They are learning that collaboration makes communities strong, that every person has something to contribute, that the question of your role matters. They will grow up into a world that has been built — or not built — by the choices of people who also once knew those things and, at some point, stopped asking.

The book costs $18.99. It is thirty-two pages. It is, in its quiet way, making an argument that the most powerful people in the country are currently answering with soy milk jokes, billion-dollar detention contracts, and ethics waivers granted by the people they were designed to constrain.

The children deserve a better answer than that. So does everyone else.

Sources: Deepa Iyer, We Are the Builders, Simon & Schuster, September 2024; Deepa Iyer, Social Change Ecosystem Map, 2020; HuffPost on Venturella ICE appointment and GEO Group ties, May 2026; Washington Post on Venturella ethics waiver, August 2025; OpenSecrets on GEO Group political contributions, April 2025; Mediaite on Miller's Jesse Watters appearance, May 2026; The Advocate on Miller's false transgender claim, May 2026; Democracy Docket on Maurene Comey lawsuit, September 2025; PBS NewsHour on Anti-Weaponization Fund, May 2026.