I recently announced a new book tour, and in just over two weeks’ time, more than 90 communities and organizations asked me to come speak. I don’t think it’s because they like me so much. There’s something much deeper happening across the United States that we must pay closer attention to if we want to put this country on a more hopeful path: a need to restore our belief that we can get things done together. We must revitalize our can-do spirit.
Never before in my 30 years of doing this work have I witnessed such widespread and deep discontent. As I travel the country, I am finding people increasingly discouraged and dispirited by our common condition. Just before I was to speak in Rockford, Ill., a man approached me and said, “I have never seen things this bad before in our country.”
Throughout the United States, people are aggrieved. Many feel left out and left behind, invisible to others. Many communities are not ready for sustained and effective action. Many leaders and organizations are entrenched in protecting their own interests and survival rather than promoting the public good.
People are hunkering down — pulling back from our shared lives, closing off from each other, and losing their sense of possibility. Hope is in short supply. Faith in one another is being undermined.
Where Change Will Come From
There is good news, though: People are hungry to hear a distinct and different civic message. I say civic message because so much of our partisan politics is polarized and divided, and because even if this were to miraculously shift — which is unlikely anytime soon — there is work we must do in our own communities to right the nation. Philanthropy is critical to this endeavor.
I keep finding Americans from all walks are hungry to be called back to public life, to bring out the best in us, and to get to work on rebuilding our shared future. It is in neighborhoods and towns where we can reforge relationships, mutual trust, and civic confidence. New norms can take root. And we’ll be in a much stronger position to take on national issues.
This new civic message is not about simply engendering more volunteering, funding more traditional local revitalization projects, or doing better community organizing. Each and all of these approaches have their place. But what’s called for is a more positive, practical path to transform our communities and our lives — and thus put the nation on a more hopeful course.
A Different Conversation
To start, philanthropy can help spark a different conversation in communities across the nation. Too often we engage people on their “problems,” leading to more division, gridlock, and despair; or we create Utopian visions that go nowhere. To get on a more hopeful path, we must shift the conversation to people’s shared aspirations — what is it people want to create, together? When we rediscover what we share, and actively build upon it, we can bridge more divides, heal more wounds, and make more progress.
Doing this takes actively reaching out to people who feel overlooked. We must make room to air our grievances and then be ready and willing to stand in spaces that are uncomfortable. We must embrace the sorrow and pain and rage that some in our society feel. My experience is that when done right, such engagement will not tear us apart but make us stronger.
Looking over my organization’s 30 years of work, our research shows that the greatest progress happens when people can focus on their shared aspirations. This helps people see new openings for shared efforts, tap a community’s innate capacities, and figure out action to take.
Think Trajectory, Not Fixes
Much of people’s dismay today is rooted in a nagging false hope that gets created when we make pledges and promises we can’t keep. Yet we keep doing this. Solutions get imposed upon communities that bear little relationship to local context. Comprehensive plans get designed that fail to realistically take into account a community’s capacities and needs. Philanthropy makes too many promises it doesn’t keep — and never could meet.
The solution is not for philanthropy to back away from putting a stake in the ground about its goals; it is to lean in even more. But let’s be real: For many of the problems we seek to address — poverty, racism, inequitable education, and drug addiction, among others — no easy solutions or quick fixes exist.
Instead, Americans want to know we are moving in the right direction and with accelerating — not diminishing — momentum. Our task is to get on a better trajectory. We cannot “fix” people or communities, but we can get things on a more promising path. It is sustained progress created in America’s cities and towns that gives rise to authentic hope. This is the civic message that resonates today.
Align Action to Community Stage
Reaching a better trajectory takes knowing where a community is starting and what it will take to accelerate and deepen progress. Some years ago, the Harwood Institute discovered that all communities go through five stages — namely, the Waiting Place, Impasse, Catalytic, Growth, and Sustain and Renew — and every community is in one of them at any given time.
Each stage has unique implications for what’s required for change and how change comes about — the capacities a community needs, how fast change can take place, what signs of progress you are likely to see. Moreover, for philanthropy, each stage has different investment strategies; aligning investments to each stage not only increases effectiveness but also protects investments.
The problem is that strategies for change tend to be sorely out of line with the stage a community is in. Most strategies I see are geared for one of the latter two stages — the Growth stage and Sustain and Renew — where a community’s capacities and readiness for change are much stronger. But the vast majority of communities are somewhere within the first two and a half stages — the Waiting Place, Impasse, and Catalytic. In these stages, a community has a much weaker civic culture.
The new civic message that people are responding to calls for establishing clearly where we want to go with a clear-eyed view of the steps to get there. No one wants more empty promises. People want the truth and a realistic pathway forward.
A Focus on Shared Responsibility
Philanthropy has a golden opportunity to be at the forefront of this work by harnessing two potent forces in society today.
First, many people yearn deeply to be part of something larger than themselves. Amid all the noise and confusion, people want to be seen and heard. They seek to restore a sense of dignity and decency in their lives and communities. They long to build things together, wanting to be more connected and engaged. In many respects, people feel that they have been robbed of control over their lives, and they want it back.
Second, solutions to many of our challenges require marshaling our shared resources. Neglected children, the opioid crisis, inadequate public schools, and the like beg for a collective response. No single organization, no one leader, and no single group of citizens can tackle these problems on their own. We need each other.
Here, then, is the opportunity that I see. Acting on one of these factors alone is not enough. Rather, philanthropy must actively combine these two elements in an approach of “shared responsibility.” We can — we must — bring together community resources in ways that enable us to solve problems and harness people’s yearning for genuine engagement. To be sure, this is not about starting more “collective impact” efforts; instead, it is about reimagining how communities as a whole come together to act on collective challenges.
A New Can-Do Narrative
The biggest hidden factor I have seen in whether a community moves forward is the stories people tell themselves and others about their community. These stories shape our mind-sets, attitudes, behaviors, and actions. In so many of our communities — and in the nation as a whole — the stories we are telling each other are ingrained negative ones.
The answer is not to undertake communications or public-relations campaigns to persuade people of some new alternative narrative. Nor is it to simply tell more feel-good stories. Such efforts only breed more cynicism, even contempt. The path forward is to nurture a new can-do narrative based on authentic stories of change emerging from the community itself.
Moving Forward
Still, much of the change we create in communities is invisible, including to those helping to generate the change. To restore our sense of belief in ourselves, we need to make more visible the change that’s emerging along the way.
It is from the stories we tell each other that we can imagine ourselves as actors and co-creators in public life, and we can gain a sense of possibility for what we can do, together. This is critical for sustained philanthropic support. It is an investment in our can-do spirit.
In the time that it took me to write this piece, more speaking requests for my book tour have come in. I suspect they’ll keep coming. People are hungry for a new civic message.
Our contentious partisan politics is wearing us out, and people are yearning to hear a distinct civic message that breaks through all the noise and confusion. One that actively calls on people to rediscover what we share in common and to find ways to actively build upon that. To help people see what is often invisible progress in our communities. And to lift up a new can-do spirit and narrative — fuel for hope.
We need philanthropy in this moment to help us restore a sense of belief in ourselves and in our can-do spirit.
Richard C. Harwood is author of “Stepping Forward: a Positive Practical Path to Transform Our Communities and Our Lives.” He is president and founder of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, in Bethesda, Md.
