Communities Fix What’s Broken as Washington Brawls

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For many self-styled “pro-democracy” advocates, their fight is in Washington. It’s often against President Trump, whom they see as a would-be despot. And it’s for reforms of elections and governing institutions, which they believe lock politics in savage partisanship.

But beyond the Beltway, people and groups are trying to save democracy another way — lots of ways, actually. In Reading, Pa., one of America’s poorest cities, they are building after-school, English as a second language, and early-childhood education programs. In swing-state Wisconsin, where red-blue tribalism runs deep, they are promoting mental-health resources. And in Arizona, where disputes over the 2020 election still rage, they’re working to strengthen education, protect the water supply, and create jobs.

Against the backdrop of a Washington ablaze with division, this movement argues that Americans will come together for the common good — or specifically, for the good of their community. These advocates from dozens of cities — like Denver; Shreveport, La.; and Tallahassee, Fla. — are part of a small movement that’s gaining attention and modest philanthropic investment.

They typically eschew the words “democracy” and “civic,” which research shows Americans see as abstract or ideologically loaded. They want to counter the narrative that the country is hopelessly divided, and they want to give people an avenue to make change outside national politics, where division has a stranglehold.

Most important, perhaps, they want to build the culture and vehicles for people to work together to fix what matters to a community, whether that’s fixing sewage or schools or civic culture. It’s a very deliberate intervention to create what used to happen organically in a now-frayed network of civic associations, churches, labor unions, and the like. The hardest part isn’t helping people strip away caricatures of others as evil, says Liz Joyner, founder and president of Village Square in Tallahassee. “It’s getting them in the same room.”

The political and culture wars touched off by Trump administration policy certainly can make the work harder. “Everyone’s got their hackles up,” says Richard Young, founder and executive director of CivicLex, a civic-engagement group in Lexington, Ky. Also, advocates report that immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and others who feel threatened by Trump administration moves are increasingly balking at their efforts to bring communities together.

But Washington’s acrimony also is prompting a surge in interest from both average Americans and funders. “We have more of an opportunity today than maybe at any other time I’ve been doing this work,” says Rich Harwood, whose nearly 40-year-old Harwood Institute for Public Innovation is helping the Reading community develop an education agenda. “We’re at a point at which things have become even more clarified that we’re on the wrong track as a country, as a people, and as a culture.”

CivicLex

New Investments

Funding of local approaches to strengthen democracy has lagged national efforts. In 2023, institutional funders put $2.5 billion toward place-based work, according to the Democracy Hub database. Nearly three times that total went to election and governance reform and programs to counter authoritarianism.

But recent years — and even the months since Trump’s election — have seen a shift. Notable investments include:

• A cross-ideological group of funders last year launched the Trust for Civic Life, which will put $50 million over five years toward community-building in rural areas. Charlie Brown, the executive director of the collaborative, says this year’s fundraising has been strong.
  
• In October, Reimagining the Civic Commons — a funder collaborative that invests in parks, community centers, and other public spaces as civic hubs — announced nearly $10 million in grants over the next three years. It’s the third round of funding for what launched in 2016 as only a three-year initiative.
  
• The Knight Foundation, a longtime backer of projects aimed at bolstering community health and engagement, has signaled that it continues to see that work as critical despite the 2023 retirement of longtime chief Alberto Ibargüen. “The power to create change isn’t lost — it’s local,” Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, the foundation’s new president, said at the grant maker’s media forum earlier this year.
  
• The Lilly Endowment announced in February a $22.4 million grant to Weave, an Aspen Institute program. Weave — founded in 2018 by New York Times columnist and author David Brooks — plans to partner with 75 community-based organizations and distribute grants to 6,000 individuals and small groups. “It’s a huge jump in scale,” says executive director Frederick Riley. Weave at present works only in Baltimore and Wilkes County, N.C. “Time and time again, we have seen that neighbors working together to address an important local need can heal fractures and correct misunderstandings in a community,” Clay Robbins, Lilly’s CEO, said in a news release announcing the grant.

(The Lilly Endowment is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

From the Hip Photo

Some 60 grant makers joined a recent Harwood Institute webinar — “more than we’ve ever had,” Harwood says. New Pluralists — a pooled fund that opened in 2021 and plans to raise a total of $100 million over a decade — is finding interest from new types of donors. Its initial backers sought to promote pluralism, says interim executive director Liz Vogel. More recently, grant makers have wanted to apply pluralistic approaches to build bigger coalitions for their cause-specific work.

“There is a recognition among funders that local practitioners are leading some of the most transformative work in this space,” Vogel says.

Daniel Stid, who ran the democracy program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation from 2013 to 2022, says these new investments represent a break with orthodoxy for many grant makers. “In essence, it’s about how national funders can get money with a minimum of strings attached to people doing innovative things at the local level. I think that’s a really fresh and remarkable inversion of the traditional philanthropic approach.”

The place-based efforts also are a departure for a pro-democracy philanthropy like Hewlett that focused chiefly at the national level, Stid says. Those efforts, he adds, have “kind of run out of a head of steam.”

A Reckoning

The growing popularity of local democracy efforts coincides with a reckoning among advocates in the wake of Trump’s victory and the defeat of several election reforms at the state level. “It has become evident that existing strategies are not working,” wrote Scott Warren, founder of Generation Citizen, a civics-education organization, in Fulcrum, a news outlet covering democracy efforts. “Americans are not buying the form of democracy this field has been selling.”

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which spearheaded the creation of the Trust for Civic Life, supports many efforts to reform government and elections. But democracy “is nurtured in our communities, in our everyday experiences with each other as citizens in our democracy,” Rockefeller Brothers CEO Stephen Heintz said in a recent Commons in Conversation interview with the Chronicle. “Over the years, because trust in the national level of democracy has eroded so substantially, we came to see that we were not going to be able to restore that trust from the top down.”

It’s time to recognize that American democracy is rooted in the community and individuals, says Young of CivicLex. “The trend of the past decade has been building national movements and national efforts and national things. And I can’t think of anything that meets this moment less.”

In an interview, Warren — a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins working with conservatives on democracy issues — said some advocates have concluded that the pro-democracy sector “shouldn’t exist because it’s professionalizing something that needs to be inherently organic and local.” Warren says he doesn’t agree, but “let’s have a debate on some of this. Let’s just not be dogmatic in terms of what we think the solutions are.”

Lisa Inks

Crazy Quilt

On the ground, efforts are a crazy quilt of approaches. In Walworth County in southern Wisconsin, a half-dozen “uniters” guided by Urban Rural Action, a national group, recognized that the county, which is hours from a major medical center, lacks resources for individuals suffering severe mental-health issues. The group started promoting counseling and other nearby services, hoping greater awareness and prevention might head off crises.

Recently, it brought together police and parents of children with mental-health issues. Families came to understand law-enforcement policies and tactics when responding to mental-health emergencies, says Maryann Zimmerman, a Walworth resident who’s coordinating Urban Rural Action’s work in the county. Police, meanwhile, left with ideas for change.

Liberals in Walford’s towns and conservatives in its rural areas are “always butting heads because the political divide is so great,” Zimmerman says. “But everyone has had that drive to just want to be better themselves and to be a better community.”

In Arizona, the Flinn Foundation, a family grant maker, made what it calls “civic health” a top priority more than a decade ago when it recognized that polarization was tying up its investments in such seemingly neutral areas as bioscience. “Philanthropy needs to protect its investment, and sometimes it means that it has to go clean up the ecosystem,” says Dawn Wallace, its vice president for civic health. “There’s a self-preservation aspect to this.”

Through a fellowship program, the foundation has helped create pathways to public service for more than 500 leaders who commit to working across the aisle. Those individuals — what Wallace calls “sentries at the gate” — now include a member of Congress, state legislators, judges, political advisers, and local officials. The foundation also joined in a partnership with the Center for the Future of Arizona, which through extensive Gallup surveys has identified the top policy priorities for state residents, including many related to education and jobs.

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Together, the two organizations are now gathering an ideological cross section of organizations and leaders to advance the policy from the common ground identified in the surveys. Interest has only grown since Trump took office, says Kristi Tate, director of civic-health initiatives at the center. “The case-making for the need for civic health has been presented very urgently and clearly.”

In Denver, Warm Cookies of the Revolution aims to reverse Americans’ retreat from civic life. Civic engagement, says founder Evan Weissman, “has been co-opted to mean only voting and elections,” and people have come to believe that the ballot box offers their only means to change their communities.

Warm Cookies aims to build easy on-ramps for people who might not typically get involved in their community’s civic decisions — working-class individuals, young people, immigrants. To draw them in, it mixes entertainment, fun, and even silliness with introductions to community issues. A program titled “Where Does Your Poop Go?” featured a magician and a wastewater-management expert. It hosts an April “Tax Day Festival” with carnival games, circus performers, and ice sculptors along with discussions of the value of taxes from different perspectives.

“A lot of times people see our stuff and they’re like, ‘Wow, that is different, that’s funky, that’s fresh,’” Weissman says. “And we’re deadly serious about that part of it.”

Stevie Selby

Grassroots Power

All these efforts are relatively small and wrestle with how to expand beyond one city or region. At Warm Cookies, which has grown to include rural areas outside Denver, Weissman says there has been “an explosion” of interest in its work from localities nationwide. It has built tool kits to share, and it’s working on a plan to scale, Weissman says. But “we’re not trying to be the Chipotle of civic engagement.”

Philanthropy’s modest investments so far need to grow, says Brown of the Trust for Civic Life. “If everybody comes in with small grants, we’re gonna get small results.”

Advocates say they’re planting seeds that will take years to grow, and they worry that funders will move on — a particular concern next year, when the midterm elections heat up.

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

Still, they point to research that suggests work to improve local communities is the most fertile soil to strengthen democracy. When asked how they want to engage with people different from themselves, most Americans said they prefer working together toward a shared community goal, according to research by More in Common. Also, polarization is blunted in small communities — particularly those under 50,000 people, according to a CivicPulse survey of local government officials. “There is not a Democratic or Republican way to put in a sewer,” said an official in a Midwest town.

Whether the crisis is World War II, a natural disaster, or the Covid pandemic, Americans rallying together at the grassroots level have been the country’s source of strength, says Riley of the Weave program. “If you look at every major transition our country has gone through, every major big hurdle, it’s always been the people on the ground in the neighborhoods who have locked arms with one another to go forward.”

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