“The question that draws me in this next phase of my work is a different one: not simply what I have done with my life, but who I have become while living it. This project is an effort to transform hard-won lessons, meaningful sacrifices, and years of lived experience into something that carries meaning beyond a single life. In that sense, it has felt less like a personal ambition than a responsibility.”
Alula Asfaw is an author and civic leader based in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He is the founder of Bonds of Union, a nonprofit building the research and innovation infrastructure that the country’s most persistent civic challenges have long lacked. Its premise is simple and, until recently, largely untried: that the work of strengthening civic and democratic life deserves the same disciplined research and development, anchored in universities, tested across regions, and held to real evidence, that the country routinely brings to medicine, technology, and industry. Across more than a decade of work spanning the nonprofit, philanthropic, academic, and public sectors, his efforts have engaged some of the nation’s most significant civic and philanthropic institutions.
Beneath that work is a single, enduring preoccupation. For years, he has thought and written about purpose, obligation, sacrifice, and the demands of democratic life and, more personally, about what it asks of a person to live one coherent moral life across every domain of existence in a world that often rewards fragmentation. That question is the thread connecting his civic work to his writing, and it is the heart of his first book.
That book, Between Justice and Reality, which he is currently completing, is a work of literary nonfiction organized around a single governing question: What happens to a person who tries to live coherently when reality stops cooperating with that coherence?
His second book, Because of Them, is a children’s picture book about goodness, inheritance, and the people whose sacrifices make our lives possible.
As an extension of nearly two decades of civic work and writing, he is developing Conversations Between Justice and Reality, a series of gatherings designed to create space for people to reflect together on the tension between ideals and circumstances, conviction and consequence, in their own lives.
A graduate of the University of Washington, the University of Cambridge (M.Phil., Politics, Development, and Democratic Education), and Yale Law School (J.D.), he delivered the Distinguished Alumnus Address at the University of Washington’s commencement in 2023.
He is the father of four daughters.
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