AN INVITATION TO A NEW CIVIC FUTURE
Can you feel it?
In the face of our country’s many crises, new seeds of civic renewal are beginning to take root. In neighborhoods, parks, libraries, and houses of worship across America, neighbors, parents, and volunteers are cultivating a new civic future. They are finding new ways to break out of the story we’ve been told for the past 50 years: one that assumed our communities were better managed from afar than built together in the places we call home.
But our communities know better.
While our political parties struggle under the weight of partisanship, our communities are discovering new ways to connect around shared needs and shared possibilities. While our national political institutions crumble under their own ineffectiveness, our communities are finding new ways to solve problems together. While distant experts, managers, and tech entrepreneurs chase technocratic fixes to community ills from the outside, our communities are experimenting with new ways to renew themselves from within.
National headlines may tell us that we are lonely, divided, powerless, and hopeless, but our communities are showing us something else: a future that’s rooted in the local, neighbor-led civic life that has sustained this nation since its founding. America is now at the start of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew our civic life.
But moments of genuine renewal can be fragile. They can be nurtured — or they can be captured.
If we want this one to flourish, we need to be honest about what threatens it.
The threats are already visible, and they’re following familiar patterns. New nonprofits are attempting to “solve problems” for communities that they’re neither embedded in nor accountable to. Funders are searching for “scalable” programs that prioritize national reach over local durability. Experts are offering pre-packaged answers to problems they’ll never live with. These forces may not intend harm, but they shift attention, power, and resources away from communities and toward distant agendas, displacing local stewardship rather than strengthening it.
It’s this opportunity for renewal — and the possibility it could slip away from communities — that’s brought a small group of us together over the past year. We come from different political traditions, different geographies, and different kinds of work but we are bound by a shared commitment to renewing civic life in the places we live and by a shared belief that this renewal can only be rebuilt from the ground up.
As we’ve met, we’ve asked ourselves: What kind of shared civic life are we called to grow together?
Here’s our answer: One where people feel agency over their lives, where neighbors are connected through relationships of trust, and where communities have the power to shape their own future.
We believe the seeds of this shared civic life must be rooted in five foundational beliefs about how we must shape our future:
Participatory: Everyone deserves a hand in shaping their community’s future
Alive: Civic life must restore the joy, culture, and full humanity that make it worth living
Proximate: Renewal must be led by people rooted in the places they serve
Relational: Trust is built through long term relationships that hold communities together
Generational: We commit to work that outlasts us
These principles may feel basic, but they point us towards the civic future we hope to build — and the one we’d like to invite you to help shape.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF CIVIC RENEWAL
Participatory: Everyone deserves a hand in shaping their community’s future.
For too long, we’ve outsourced civic life. Across the country, communities have been treated as clients to be managed instead of places to belong. Professionals design the programs, boards approve the plans, and residents are left to receive or reject what’s been made for them. People are invited to consume decisions as “stakeholders” instead of growing their own future.
In our civic future, that story changes. People aren’t recipients; they are members deserving of full participation in our shared lives. In our civic future, communities become the laboratories of democracy we’ve always imagined them to be: places where neighbors who don’t think or look alike work together to solve problems and make meaning. Nothing is done for communities, to them, or even with them. It’s done by them.
What does our participatory future look like? Relearning the practices of membership we’ve forgotten: cooperation, shared responsibility, and mutual accountability. Neighbors coming together for dinners and gatherings. Recognizing and supporting the local leaders who already help their communities thrive. And removing the practical barriers — time, transportation, resources — that make participation harder for many people.
Alive: Civic life must restore the joy, culture, and full humanity that make it worth living.
We’ve drained civic life of its humanity, turning it into something that’s efficient, procedural, and dull. We’re told that it's serious work that must look serious, and that the path to a better community is paved by following best practices and quantifiable metrics instead of collective imagination and wisdom. Our most enduring civic traditions — picnics, parades, potlucks — arose because people naturally gather, share meals, laugh, mourn, and celebrate together, not because someone stumbled upon a successful “intervention.” Joy, creativity, and the human condition are not distractions from civic life — they are its lifeforce!
In our civic future, people are drawn into participation not out of obligation, but because they actually want to be there. When people show up, they aren’t reduced to a single issue or identity — they show up as full, complex human beings. That makes civic life something people want to belong to. Civic life can be magnetic. It can be irresistible.
What does our living future look like? Shared meals in kitchens, church basements, and on front porches where people experience laughter and sorrow. Communities gathering at their own block parties, festivals, and cultural rituals that are rooted in their own histories and traditions. People experiencing a full range of emotions side by side, remembering what it feels like to be fully human.
Proximate: Renewal must be led by people rooted in the places they serve.
Too much of our civic life is built from afar. When civic work is led by those who are neither rooted in nor accountable to the people they serve, people and places become commodified and disposable. Communities and their leaders become abstract anyones and anywheres instead of the storied, rich, and real cultures they are. Working in a specific place brings commitment and accountability that cannot be faked.
In our civic future, renewal is led by people rooted in their particular places. When leaders live in the places they serve, know their neighbors by name, and stay long enough to see the results of their work in the next generation, it brings an undeniable accountability and commitment. In our civic future, “scale” isn’t achieved by top-down replication, but from the bottom-up by millions of rooted leaders cultivating civic life in tens of thousands of particular places.
What does our proximate future look like? People discovering their self-interest, rightly understood, by recognizing their own flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of their neighbors. Distributed networks of leaders who are deeply embedded in their communities, but connected in mutualistic relationship with others doing similar work elsewhere. Models for sustainability that don't rely on constant outside funding, where communities have real ownership and can govern themselves.
Relational: Trust is built through long term relationships that hold communities together.
Too much of our civic life has become transactional. We treat relationships as means to other ends: to advance goals, prove outcomes, or get the scale we need for investment. We build fields instead of friendships, host convenings instead of seeking communion. All of this can leave us with an aftertaste of feeling used.
In our civic future, relationships are not a strategy or tactic to advance some “more important” measurable outcome — they are the substance of the work itself. In our civic future, our work is built on a foundation of long-term reciprocity that strengthens both people and places. It is this relational commitment that earns trust that lasts.
What does our relational future look like? Slowing down to cultivate relationships and community at the speed of trust. Saying no to opportunities that would stretch your community too far. Choosing depth over breadth, knowing there is simply a limit to how many people and communities one can be in vulnerable, responsive relationships with at once. Sacrificing your short-term ambitions for something more durable — relationships and trust that can bend without breaking, hold complexity without collapsing, and be carried by many over time.
Generational: We commit to work that outlasts us.
Too much of our civic life is built for quick fixes. We chase silver bullets and saviors: the new politician that will heal our divisions, the new technology that will reconnect us, the new program that will finally make things right. But these quick fixes often replicate the same distant, abstract, transactional patterns that weakened our civic life in the first place. While the moment may feel urgent, the transformation we need takes time — because trust takes time.
In our civic future, we trade urgency for durability. We work with intention, building structures anchored in loyalty to our neighbors and adaptability to their changing needs. We ignore the noise of trending solutions and instead develop communities that can endure.
What does our generational future look like? Building systems of accountability that help you stay the course when the work gets hard, and revenue and governance structures that sustain you through it. Embracing experimentation and learning in public, documenting what works and what doesn't so others can build on your experience. Bringing local institutions along with you, inviting them to grow and change in the process. Planting trees you won't sit under.
Civic renewal will never happen over a season, a year, or even a decade; it always has been and will be a project that unfolds over generations.
JOIN US
Our civic life can only be renewed by us choosing to build something that lasts.
This isn't a call to join an organization or sign up for a program. We’re not trying to sell you some new solution. We're simply inviting you to join us in committing to a new civic future.
The best part is that you don’t need a title, or grant, or organization to do that. You just need to work towards the values expressed here.
For those already working on civic renewal in your own community, we hope you find something in this letter that speaks to you. Don’t lose faith. Keep building the things that make your place better: the gatherings, the projects, the relationships that only you can grow. Add your story to this one. Post your responses and comments. Contribute your lessons learned.
For the millions of Americans yearning to find some sense of agency in this world, we invite you to continue applying these principles in your own life. Try something new with your neighbors. Host a dinner. Join a club. Show up at a meeting. Volunteer. Start a conversation that otherwise wouldn’t happen. Meet a need in your community. Contribute to your place’s history. Find the problem you want to solve, and work on it.
For national organizations, we invite you to consider how your role can promote these values as a part of civic renewal. Help local practitioners in your field of work find one another and ask how you can complement them. Proactively engage with communities that you want to work in to understand if they actually want the solution you’re bringing them. If you can’t align with local work and commit to places for the long-haul, consider asking yourself “should I really be here?” Leave places better than you found them.
For philanthropy, we invite you to take a step back from managing communities, and take a step toward trusting them. Reconsider your approach to scale: go deep, not wide. Build real relationships with people who are stewarding their own places, and invest in them. Encourage them to experiment. Help them find durable and participatory operating, business, and governance models. Support networks and intermediaries led by people doing the work in their own places. And importantly, invest in all of this long enough to see what emerges.
Regardless of where you sit, if you see your work in this vision, we invite you to join us. Here’s how you can do that:
Sign on to this letter and post your response or comments.
Join us for one of the virtual conversations – Civic Power Hours – we’re hosting in February and March to explore these themes together. Register here.
Come join the party. We’ll be hosting a small two–day gathering in mid-April ats Warm Cookies of the Revolution’s annual Tax Day Carnival in Denver. If you want to come, let us know here. If you need assistance to make it work, you can indicate so on the RSVP form.
We see signing on to these values as an act of civic aspiration. A way of saying “the future can be like this.”
But, it can also be an act of civic commitment. A way of saying “I’ll work to make it so.”
We welcome your commitment to a new civic future.
Savannah Barrett, Art of the Rural+Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange
Pete Davis, Join or Die
Kate Hanisian, YMCA of Greater Cincinnati
Ashley Hanson, Department of Public Transformation
Darryl Holliday, News Futures & Commoner Co
Liz Joyner, The Village Square
Naudy Martinez, Falls Church Forward
Evan Vahouny, Falls Church Forward
Adrian H. Molina, Warm Cookies of the Revolution
Evan Weismann, Warm Cookies of the Revolution
Sam Pressler, Connective Tissue
Daniel Stid, American Enterprise Institute
Richard Young, CivicLex