Two of the members of a group issuing “An Invitation to a New Civic Future” talk to Michael E. Hartmann about their backgrounds, their driving motivations to be part of the project, and the inherent localism and anti-professional and -managerial natures of successful civic renewal.
Last month, a group of people who are active in local civic life throughout America issued “An Invitation to a New Civic Future.” “In the face of our country’s many crises, new seeds of civic renewal are beginning to take root,” the open letter starts. “While our political parties and institutions crumble under partisanship and ineffectiveness, communities are solving problems for themselves,” its authors write.
“Moments like this are fragile,” according to the well-written letter. “They can be nurtured. Or, they can be captured. Solutions being sold to communities by distant experts, nonprofits, and funders who aren’t accountable to them may not intend harm. But they often shift attention, power, and resources away from communities, displacing local stewardship rather than strengthening it.”
With what seems a mixture of excitement and concern, its writers continue, “It’s this opportunity for community-led renewal—and the risk it gets captured—that’s brought a small group of us together over the past year.” The group includes Sam Pressler, who writes the Connective Tissue Substack newsletter, and Richard Young, founder and executive director of CivicLex in Lexington, Ky.
Noting that its signers all “come from different political traditions, geographies, and lines of work,” the letter says, “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 built from the ground up.” It inspiringly urges a “shared civic life” that “we are called to grow together”—“[o]ne 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.”
After explaining some foundational principles underlying the invitation, it concludes by asking others active in and around civic life to join the signers by accepting it and signing on to the letter themselves—including those in philanthropy. Specifically, to those in philanthropy, the signers write:
We invite you to take a step back from managing communities, and take a step toward trusting them. Invest in distributed networks that bring together people working in their own places. Build real relationships with people stewarding their particular places, and invest in them for long enough to see what emerges.
Pressler and Young were kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation later last month. In addition to writing Connective Tissue, Pressler is a practitioner fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and a research affiliate at the Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program. He founded and was executive director of the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP). After working in community development, Young founded CivicLex in 2017 to help get citizens connect with their neighbors and deepen their involvement in decisionmaking about local issues.
The just less than 21-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about their backgrounds, their driving motivations to be part of the “Invitation to a New Civic Future,” and the inherent localism and anti-professional and -managerial natures of successful civic renewal.
After describing his experience at ASAP in and subsequent study of civic life, Pressler tells me he kept coming back to the same overarching question: “How do we connect, or how do we reconnect, people to the communities, commitments, connections that make our lives worth living?” And after referencing his years in community development in Lexington, Young says he had questions too—“Why are people not involved? Why are people not engaged? And how can we work to alleviate that?”—so he started CivicLex. The new open-letter project of which they are a part is trying to work on good, thoughtful, workable answers to those questions.
Civic renewal is inherently local, Young says in answer to a question. “We live in a democratic system in our country that is an amalgamation of places, right?” Ours “is not a political system that exists on its own. It is a political system that exists from the places that we call home,” he underscores. “For civic renewal to succeed, it can only be in the communities in which we live, and then our national civic life will benefit from that. But our national civic life is downstream of the civic life in our communities.”
Asked whether civic renewal has to or should occur through formalized nonprofit entities that are collectively characterized as a sector defined by the tax code, Pressler says, “Nonprofits aren’t evil, but I think we also have to recognize that the specific form of 501(c)(3) nonprofit, that has become hyper-professionalized, hyper-managerial”—which “has actually played a pretty-significant role in crowding ordinary citizens out of the shaping of their shared lives together.
“Nonprofits are a part of it, but informal groups should be a part of it, neighborhoods should be a part of it, small businesses that are anchors to places should be a part of it,” he continues.
It’s an all-of-the-above. I think where we get into trouble is when we say that you need these qualifications in order to be someone who is renewing your community. I think that is the inherent problem. To the extent that nonprofits have bought into that kind of approach of specialization and professionalization, then, yes, they are part of the problem.
As to the role of philanthropic funders in furthering, if not fomenting, that approach, according to Pressler, “The kind of modus operandi of civic life over the last 30 years, if not the last 50 years, has been … trying to control civic life as if it could be a well-oiled machine,” but “civic life is comprised of human beings that are organic creatures” who “are not machines. …
“All of these tools—professionalization, measurement—are meant to enable distant control by distant people in distant places” and end up treating “particular people in particular places as abstract anyones and abstract anywheres,” Pressler says.
And philanthropy has been a driver of that.
As someone who had to fill out many logic models with inputs and outputs and outcomes, I can tell you very clearly that that is not how relationships work, that is not how the messiness of community works, that is not how the messiness of civic life works. I don’t think philanthropy in and of itself is a problem, I think philanthropy in terms of the ‘how’ that it’s operated is the problem.
Young later adds, “I certainly don’t begrudge people for that happening, right? I think it’s a natural product of centralization and efficiency.” His request, “as a local practitioner trying to build something in the world, would be that folks have a little bit of self-critique and self-evaluation about what blind spots they might have, whether their logic model really is going to work in all circumstances ….”
In his experience, “I encounter perceptions about the place that I’m from that come from a subconscious point in people’s perspectives that maybe don’t even know that they have, right? There’s a perspective about being from Kentucky and it comes across in comments, it comes across in small ways,” Young says.
“I think you the sort of professionalized managerial class in both philanthropy or in government, or in any of these institutions,” including business, “I would say that to some extent, yes, they try and build these sorts of frameworks and guidelines and logic models and theories of change that do keep people out.”
In the conversation’s second part, Pressler and Young talk more about the relationship between active citizens and philanthropic funders—as well as the opportunities presented to, and responsibilities of, each.
