Two of the members of a group issuing “An Invitation to a New Civic Future” talk to Michael E. Hartmann about the relationship between active citizens and philanthropic funders—as well as the opportunities presented to, and responsibilities of, each.
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.
In the first part of our discussion, which is here, we discuss 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. The just more than 18-minute edited video below is the second part, during which we talk about the relationship between active citizens and philanthropic funders—as well as the opportunities presented to, and responsibilities of, each.
The primary audience of the letter, Young tells me, was
fellow practitioners, to be like, “Hey, we see you. We know the work that you’re doing in your community, and if you haven’t started doing that work yet, you should just do it. You don’t have to wait for permission, … for a grant. You don’t have to wait for a program officer to give you their blessing. You don’t have to wait for any of that. You can just do your work, and we are here to support you, and we want to learn from you, and we want you to learn from us, and we’re working towards the thing.”
Every day, Pressler says, “I get inbound from people who” say, “‘I want to do this thing in my community. Where should I begin?’ There’s a renewed energy around this, because it feels like” the local
places where people live are the places where you can have a sense of agency over a world that feels like there’s a lot of distant forces acting upon you. I think we’re trying to hopefully be like, ‘Hey, we’ve been doing this, we see you. … If you’re just getting started, join us. If you’ve been doing this, you’re a part of something. And let’s go forward together.
As for the opportunities to go forward together for funders and those who work with them in particular, Pressler good-naturedly urges they do so in a certain way. “You’re getting paid four hundred thousand dollars a year or whatever it is. You’re getting paid a lot of money,” he says. “Go to people. Be there. Be a part of it. Have actual conversations. You have a responsibility …. That’s harder and that’s messier.”
The language of the letter specifically addressed to those in philanthropy isn’t “to say, like, ‘Hey, national funders, you know, screw off,’” Pressler continues. Rather, it’s to say
“There’s a different way of you being in relation to local places, and if you believe in the vision were proposing, … this is what it would look like to be more relational, this is what it would look like to be more participatory, this is what it would look like to actually support folks who are embedded in place.”
He notes that “most people in this world really do want to do good,” and “there’s just frankly so much that we have to unlearn, myself included, to be doing this in a better way.”
Young exhorts philanthropy to have
commitment to a place. … You don’t have to pick all the places, you don’t have to have the same places forever, but I think understanding that dropping $100,000 general-operating support—which some people can do that pretty easily—onto an organization for a year or two years and then leaving is actually kind of harmful to communities.
National philanthropic efforts to “scale up” local projects entail great risk, Young and Pressler think. “Scale is not something that is achieved from the top down,” according to Pressler. “Scale is lots of local people who are rooted in particular places working to cultivate the civic life of those particular places.” When it comes to strengthening local civic life, it cannot be a “corporatized top-down model.”
Young adds, “Civic life works because it is a unique thing in a unique place that has very unique people that are doing a very specific unique thing that can’t be reproduced in another community because it’s all different people involved. It’s all a different context.”
In any local context, Pressler concludes, those involved in civil renewal have responsibility, as well. “I think we’ve been critical of philanthropy. Here’s where our responsibility comes in,” he says. “If we’re kind of thinking about the role of local groups and local practitioners and local leaders, we need to be less dependent on outside funding and outside governance.”
For instance, “there are models of revenue that have been forgotten. There are models of revenue that have not yet been tested,” he continues. “Because of this reliance on outside philanthropy, our boards are not representative,” and our governance “structures are not representative of the communities that we work in, because the boards” often exist “to get the money.
“This is going to require creativity and responsibility among the people who want to do the work,” according to Pressler, “because I also don’t think it’s fair to critique the actions of the funders on one hand, but then to go walk back over to them and say, you know, ‘Daddy, money please.’
If we believe in self-sustainability and self-sufficiency, we need to work towards that, and that’s not going to happen in one or three or five years,” he concludes, but it “could happen over the course of a generation, and that’s what we should be working towards relearning and rediscovering.”
