Dear friends,
As 2025 wraps, I wanted to pause and share what this year actually looked like at the Sustainable Media Center. Not a highlight reel. A real accounting of the work, the conversations, and the community we’ve been building together.
This year, SMC doubled down on a simple idea: conversation is infrastructure. We showed up where the debates were happening, brought unlikely voices into the same room, and kept young people at the center of the story.
Here’s what that looked like.
Global, Policy, and Public Square Conversations
We started the year by taking SMC’s work into rooms that shape policy and power. In January, Emma Lembke and I joined Bradley Tusk on the Firewall Podcast to set the tone for the year ahead. A month later, we were in Davos, hosting Putting Children First in Tech Design, bringing youth, technologists, and policymakers into the same conversation when that still felt rare.
Throughout the spring and fall, we hosted deep, sometimes uncomfortable discussions with people who understand how information systems actually work. That included Richard Stengel and Kanika Mehrah on America’s information war, Richard Gingras reflecting on journalism, platforms, and responsibility, we paused to remember Leo Hindery, and his work on media conscience and power.
We did not pretend these were abstract debates. We treated them as design problems with real human consequences.
Youth, Schools, and the Front Lines
Some of the most important work this year happened around schools, parents, and kids. We hosted a widely viewed conversation with Jonathan Haidt and Gen Z leaders on phones in schools, followed by multiple sessions focused on resilience, parenting, and youth well-being with Vaishnavi J, Sarah Martin, Isabelle Sunderland, Schuyler Levin, and others who live this work daily.
Emma Lembke’s voice reached new audiences this year. From her SXSW keynote on why social media harms are not “side effects,” to her Ignite talk at NEXUS, to intimate dinners and parent conversations, she helped push the narrative from panic to accountability.
Substack Live and the Weekly Public Square
One of the biggest shifts in 2025 was consistency. Through SMC Substack Live, we created a standing, trusted space for weekly conversation. Over the summer and into fall, we hosted dozens of live discussions covering journalism, AI, loneliness, youth safety, policy, and platform accountability.
Guests included Scott Galloway, Nicki Petrossi, Sarah Gardner, Arturo Bejar, David Bauder, Aidan Kohn-Murphy, Logan Mercer, Schuyler Levin, Matthew Allaire, and many others. These were not panels for show. They were working conversations, often with Gen Z board members and fellows in the room asking hard questions.
By late summer, it became clear we weren’t just reacting to the news cycle. We were shaping it.
Community, Culture, and Showing Up for Each Other
Not everything this year was a stage or a livestream. We hosted smaller gatherings that mattered just as much. From Friendsgiving to our Holiday Party, from dinners and youth-led sessions to culture-driven moments that brought new people into the tent.
One of my favorites was Hot Literati Summer Book Bingo with Hailey Colborn. It was smart, fun, and deceptively important: a reminder that culture is where norms get rewritten, and that building healthier digital life is not only policy and platform accountability. It is also community, attention, and what we choose to spend our time on together.
That choice paid off. Our community is stronger, more intergenerational, and more aligned than it was a year ago. You can see the full list of our 2025 events here.
2025, by the numbers
In 2025, the Sustainable Media Center hosted a remarkable 35 public convenings. That included 12 in-person events, talks, and community gatherings, and 23 livestreamed or Substack Live conversations. These numbers reflect our public-facing work and do not include private briefings, off-the-record dinners, advisory sessions, or planning meetings.
Looking Ahead
If 2025 was about building momentum, 2026 will be about architecture. The questions are no longer whether social media harms are real. Courts, parents, and young people have answered that. The real work now is coordination, standards, and systems that actually protect kids while preserving free expression.
We’re ready for that work because of you.
Thank you for trusting us, challenging us, and standing with us in a year when the stakes became impossible to ignore.
If you’ve donated in 2025 — thank you! If not, it’s not too late to Donate or Pledge.
Onward.
Steve Rosenbaum, Executive Director
Emma Lembke, Director of GenZ Advocacy
The Sustainable Media Center
