Can 50 Nonprofits Really Build Something Together? A Hopeful Idea Begins to Spread

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For an industry that works for the common good, the nonprofit world can be unkind. There’s the elbow thrown while jockeying for a donor’s attention. The disparaging remark about a group seen as a rival. And the reality that the humble and nice aren’t always rewarded in the funding scramble.

All that seems forgotten as 50 or so nonprofit leaders gather here at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, which sits on a hilltop bathed this evening in the setting sun’s glow. They are part of a long-standing pact in which each has pledged to help the others advance their organizations. The next day, in an exercise akin to a barn-raising, a few will present a dream project and seek help — advice, connections, partnerships, money.

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“It’s mutual aid on steroids,” says Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, the event’s organizer.

The gathering is the 41st meeting of the National Civic Collaboratory, which began more than a decade ago to bring together leaders of groups with different missions and ideologies. Offshoot pilots have taken root in a handful of cities, among them Atlanta, Chicago, Lexington, Ky., and Wichita, Kan., as well as for all of Arizona. Anyone could do this, Liu says.

The group this night convenes for a welcome reception and dinner in the museum’s three-story, glass-walled pavilion, where Reagan’s Air Force One is suspended from the ceiling. Among those attending are a nationally renowned documentary filmmaker and a New Orleans librarian. A MacArthur “genius” grant scholar and a Marine veteran of Iraq. An executive at the conservative Hoover Institution and a founder of the ultra-liberal MoveOn.org.

The coasts and liberal progressivism are well represented, but a scattering of people come from conservative quadrants as well as flyover country — Arizona, Kentucky, Michigan, Oklahoma. In years past, the roster has included Tea Party members and Black Lives Matter leaders.

Each has responded to a simple invitation, Liu says: “Let’s build something together. And let’s build someone up together.”

A ‘Civic Evangelist’

Liu is a public intellectual with nine books to his name as well as Ted Talks with more than 2 million views. In between his undergraduate days at Yale and earning a Harvard law degree, he did a stint in Bill Clinton’s White House as a whiz kid speechwriter, returning later as a domestic policy aide.

Liu, 55, stands a few inches over five feet, with glasses, hair cropped close, and a runner’s lean build. At the dinner and throughout the next day’s events, he radiates optimism, genuineness, and the vigor of someone far younger. Sanda Balaban, a collaboratory member and longtime advocate for youth civic programs, remembers her first meeting with Liu. “He put into words so many things that I was thinking.”

This evening and throughout the proceedings, Liu tells the group that their strength lies in shared bonds of trust and love. As sappy as the line could seem, it draws affirming nods and applause. “There are few places in the world — particularly as a social entrepreneur, activist, and organizer — where you really feel like the values you hold dear are lived,” Deepti Doshi, co-director of New_Public, says later.

Citizen University began in 2012 as a two-day conference and now runs programs nationally to awaken Americans to their power — and obligations — as citizens. Liu, a second-generation American, was born to parents who fled the Communist revolution in China, first to Taiwan and then to Poughkeepsie, N.Y. A self-described “civic evangelist,” he aims to show Americans exactly what they can do to help their communities and mend the tattered social fabric.

Leigh Vogel

“True patriotism doesn’t require that we all join the military,” he wrote in 2019. “It does require us all to show up more, contribute more, participate more, be more useful to more people. To vote, volunteer, serve, listen, learn, empathize, circulate power rather than hoard it.”

The collaboratory began in 2013 as a way to ignite a collective civic effort. The inaugural event’s headliners — Bill Gates Sr., and former Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — ensured a robust turnout, but Liu says participants edged away when talk turned to putting time and resources into a project. People were more interested in meeting Gates and O’Connor than working together.

Citizen University retooled for the next meeting. It did away with headliners and focused not on a single project but on commitments to help each other. “The incentive to come should not be to get something,” Liu says. “The incentive to come should be to give something.”

Breaking Out of Bubbles

From the collaboratory’s beginning, Liu has recruited from all corners of the nonprofit and political worlds. “It cannot be that one side of the political spectrum thinks it owns democracy and democracy renewal,” he says. “You can’t write off nearly half the country.”

Explore ideas, conversations, and solutions for a fractured country.

At one point, Liu pitched the collaborative to conservatives in a Washington, D.C., meeting. Rich Tafel, founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, a grassroots gay and lesbian organization, remembers that Grover Norquist, the famous anti-tax advocate, denounced the effort as “leftist.” (Norquist didn’t respond to interview requests.) But Tafel decided to give the group a try, intrigued that Liu linked a citizen’s duty and patriotism. “Those are words that can be quite alienating for progressives.”

At dinner the first night, Tafel found himself sitting next to Pete Peterson, a conservative and dean of the school of public policy at Pepperdine University. The two struck up a friendship that eventually led to the creation of the American Project at Pepperdine to consider the future of the conservative movement.

Tafel also met Annabel Park, a Korean American documentary filmmaker, activist, and co-founder of the Coffee Party as a liberal alternative to the Tea Party. Despite profound ideological differences, the two bonded. “She has become one of my best friends in the whole world,” Tafel says. Today, Park is president of the Washington, D.C., church where Tafel is pastor.

Jamie Bennett, interim CEO of Americans for the Arts, has attended collaboratory meetings almost from the beginning. He says it’s an opportunity to connect with leaders outside the arts world and the progressive liberalism that dominates philanthropy. To his surprise, he became friends with Janet Tran, director of the Reagan Library & Museum, and stood up in one meeting to support the anti-government regulation argument of a scholar from the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

“In my first two, three, four years, it was probably the only trans-partisan space I was ever in,” he says. “I really began to meet people all across the political spectrum, all of whom were committed to this country working better.”

A $10,000 Flash Commitment

On the second day of the collaboratory at the Reagan library, the group moved from the gauzy Air Force One pavilion to a relatively spare, get-down-to-business auditorium. With their fellow members grouped together at round tables, leaders take to a stage to spell out their vision and needs for projects to bolster civic and community strength.

Becca Kearl, head of Living Room Conversations, outlines an effort to build trust in elections through community discussions. Doshi from New_Public asks for help identifying and supporting digital “community stewards,” residents who run online platforms that connect and strengthen neighborhoods and towns. Sanda Balaban of the civic youth group YVote and Uma Kalkar of the U.K-based Longview Philanthropy pitch a national expansion of the Democracy Camp for high schoolers that YVote runs in New York City.

Hudson Chou

After each presentation, a microphone is passed around and offers of help roll in. Some members promise to consult. Others pledge to talk up the projects among their networks. Amy Labenski of the public television and radio outlet WETA in the Washington, D.C., metro area pledges to spread the word about the projects with other stations that might want to collaborate.

More tantalizing are offers to connect the project leaders directly with people of power: celebrity influencers, the superintendent of a major school system, members of Congress, former members of Congress, and, perhaps most important of all, funders.

Altogether, the three projects attract more than 60 commitments. “This gets me really, really fired up,” Liu says.

The Democracy Camp attracts perhaps the most tangible support. Changeist, a youth civic group in Los Angeles, pledges to create a satellite version of the camp. The Skirball Cultural Center later offers to partner with Changeist. David Hsu, an executive with the Omidyar Network, says he will connect Balaban and Kalkar to funders at REI and Patagonia. Cheryl Hughes, a philanthropy consultant and former executive with the Chicago Community Trust, says she will make introductions with several community foundations as well as the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Ian Simmons, co-founder of Democracy House, makes the biggest splash with the promise of $10,000 in seed funding. The room erupts in applause.

‘Secret Sauce’

Not all the members at collaboratory meetings make good on their promises. One former presenter told Balaban that no one had delivered on their commitments after his presentation. A few weeks after this session, however, those who had pledged support appeared to be delivering. The Democracy House grant, for instance, arrived as promised.

Collaboratory members talk about intangible benefits of the mutual-aid proposition. “I love this model so much,” says Hughes, a regular at meetings. The nonprofit world, she adds, is quick to tear down ideas. “Here, for the 45 minutes we’re in the room together, we believe in the idea.”

She recalls sending a quick email to the head of Chicago’s public television station asking if she’d be interested in meeting with filmmaker Sam Ball, a fellow member. That two-line message set off a chain of events that helped Ball secure funding for his movie American Creed, one of the most widely carried PBS documentaries of 2018.

Hughes launched the first local version of the collaboratory, in Chicago, and a similar effort among fellow winners of Harvard’s famed Loeb Fellowship.

Collaboratory members also have created an Atlanta franchise, now its second year with more than 70 members. In meetings, members have pitched more than 15 projects, including efforts to improve health care access and local journalism.

Local collaboratories enjoy some advantages over the national version, says Ayesha Khanna, an executive with CARE Enterprises, the Atlanta-based for-profit gender impact investment arm of the international aid group. Members can easily assemble or just meet for coffee. In Atlanta, the group toured transitioning West Side neighborhoods to consider the benefits of revitalization and the downside of gentrification. Its meetings also regularly feature experts on Atlanta issues.

“We’re finding opportunities to have more of a sustainable discussion” than at the national collaboratory, Khanna says. One topic where there appear to be seeds of collaboration for the group: affordable housing.

“They’ve really got something going there that’s rich,” Liu says.

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