Newfangled Ways to Spark Old-Style Civic Life: 4 Groups Show the Way

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One organization won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of missing-person cases. Another helps neighbors borrow leaf blowers. A like-minded group brought together polar opposites — a conservative Catholic priest and a lesbian theater director — to find common ground. And a fourth holds 100 events a year, some with kids’ bouncy houses.

As different as these groups might seem, each represents a 21st century version of the civic organizations that thinkers from Albert Einstein to Robert Putnam have deemed essential to democracy.

These groups, however, are nothing like the public forums that Einstein championed for making informed decisions. Or the social and civic groups that Putnam made famous in his Bowling Alone analysis. Each shares the idea that the internet is an essential ingredient to sparking in-person relationships and a belief that when done right, online interactions can build community, not pit us against each other. They also share a commitment to building new means by which people can engage with each other and in their community’s civic life.

“Democracy, when done correctly, is a ground-level operation,” says Liz Joyner, founder and president of the Village Square in Tallahassee, Fla.

Building Connections One Click at a Time

When Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis moved from Washington, D.C., to Vermont, they expected to get to know their neighbors in their small-town, walkable neighborhood. The couple delivered cookies to their neighbors on china as an excuse to strike up conversations when the plates were returned, but to their surprise, the dishes were never brought back.

So in 2000, the Wood-Lewises launched Front Porch Forum, a website with a simple mission: connect neighbors to help them swap garden tools, plan block parties, advertise giveaway items, and discuss local issues in ways that no longer seemed to happen in person. The goal: counter the growing social isolation and polarization evident in even their small community.

“In many ways, Front Porch Forum is a tiny effort, but it’s aimed directly at countering those trends,” says co-founder Michael Wood-Lewis. “Can we invite people to be in conversation daily with neighbors around them about mostly trivial things?”

FPF incorporated in 2006 and built similar neighborhood sites across Vermont, its audience spurred largely by word of mouth. Wood-Lewis believes that the hyperlocal focus has improved communities. He points to a group of mothers in rural Vermont who organized their community’s first food shelf after they learned their children were sharing lunches with classmates who were going without, as well as his own ability to connect with a neighbor with dramatically different political views over a giveaway for a table saw.

FPF often draws comparisons with Nextdoor, which it predates by nearly a decade. But it has steered clear of the divisiveness and suspicion that have made Nextdoor an internet punchline. Wood-Lewis attributes this to a commitment to civil discourse that lies behind “literally hundreds of small decisions,” including requiring real names and addresses in posts and guidelines for criticism of elected officials.

Most importantly, he says, FPF isn’t reaching for pageviews, but aims to build resilient communities and help people “organically connect in real life.”

“When you design an online space, goals and intentions are crucial,” says Wood-Lewis. “You typically get what you design for. We wanted to live in a community where people are thoughtful with each other and good neighbors. Our model isn’t to solve this directly digitally. It’s to solve it indirectly by creating more real-life connection among neighbors.”

Reimagining Journalism

Launched in Chicago in 2015, City Bureau aimed to “reimagine local media.” In the process, it has driven community engagement and participation by changing the definition of journalism — and who can do it.

“For a lot of organizations, journalism is a tradition that has its own language and history,” says co-founder Harry Backlund, now City Bureau’s operations and development lead. “For us, it was about breaking that down and thinking about journalism as a civic act.”

City Bureau has had impressive impact, including its Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of how Chicago police mishandled missing-person cases. It also has seen more than 165 of its civic reporting fellows move into jobs with media outlets. But perhaps most notable is its growing network of “documenters” — more than 1,000 community members in Chicago and 4,800 in nearly 30 localities ranging from Los Angeles to the Nebraska panhandle. Attending little-noticed government meetings and covering stories in their communities, these documenters are redefining what it means to be engaged in the community.

“We think about citizen journalism, but it’s just as important to think about journalistic citizenship,” says Backlund. “Creating the conditions for more acts of journalism locally can strengthen the information ecosystem and the relationships people have with each other.”

Community impact comes, Backlund argues, from tapping into “networks of trust.” Although the public has grown skeptical about journalism, “people trust their own communities and networks … someone they know that has their interests at heart.

City Bureau also has facilitated more than 150 “public newsrooms,” locally hosted workshops where anyone can discuss how to cover issues ranging from municipal budgets to sexual assault in community-focused ways. It has also developed orientations and training for its documenters, who have collectively been compensated more than $1 million for their work. But, Backlund says, civic journalism starts with relationships.

“People like having an excuse to talk to their neighbors,” he says. “It’s really critical for the health of not just democracy, but any community, that people have civic knowledge and skills.”

Decision-Making From Inside and Out

Launched in 2017, CivicLex aimed to help people get their arms around the big issues in Lexington, Ky., from the affordable housing crisis to clean water. Founder Richard Young first provided explanatory information and regular events that brought together decisionmakers and the public. Now, it has a newsroom that covers every public meeting in Lexington — often more than 15 a week.

These efforts focus on what Young calls “civic health,” or the way a community makes decisions and addresses challenges. “Every single outcome in our community is downstream from how we make decisions as a society,” Young says. “How we make those decisions depends on what information we have, how our government makes the decisions, and what kind of relationships shape that engagement.”

Despite the high stakes, Young acknowledges that “civic engagement appeals to people like eating steamed Brussels sprouts. You have to make it a rewarding experience.”

That’s where the bouncy house came in. When planning an event on the city’s urban growth plan, CivicLex wanted to attract more than “the same 10 people you always get,” Young says. It partnered with the YMCA to make it a community gathering, complete with face painting, music DJed by a city planning official — and a bouncy house.The event drew hundreds.

“Do something people want to do, and you can sneak engagement in on the side,” Young says. “A lot of time, civic engagement focuses more on the moral reasons around why you should be engaged and less on the importance to people’s daily lives.”

CivicLex now holds more than 100 events each year. “People are really busy, and it takes a lot of touch points to pull them into civic life,” Young says. “You have to be patient.”

CivicLex has also spurred local government to redesign its proceedings and work to increase engagement. When city meetings were moved online during the pandemic and public comments were curtailed, CivicLex surveyed thousands of residents and made 15 recommendations to improve public engagement, from restructuring agendas to posting a greeter at the City Hall entrance. City officials largely implemented the recommendations. “Our local government understands the value proposition of civic engagement — better results, better policy,” Young says.

CivicLex recently introduced a civic assembly that will bring together randomly selected residents and policy experts to tackle big issues. “Everyday decisions shape the musculature of how we navigate crisis,” Young says. “We have to be practicing every day how we make decisions as a society, and that depends on investing in information that’s accurate, the ability to have connections and disagreements in a predictable way, and institutions that engage people in decision-making.”

To Disagree Better

Joyner describes the mission of Village Square — rebuilding civic trust amid increasing polarization — as both “impossible and mandatory.”

Founded nearly two decades ago in response to controversy over a Tallahassee proposal to buy into a planned coal plant, the organization seeks to create spaces where people hear all sides of contentious real-world issues. “We realized that no place existed in civic life to talk about things that are complicated,” says Joyner. “So we set out to reinvent that.”

Borrowing its name from Einstein’s belief that complex issues require public discourse, the Village Square hosts dinner series and other in-person events on wide-ranging topics, including green energy, faith, and the Civil Rights movement. Topics are challenging and controversial by design; when the conservative Catholic priest and lesbian theater director came together, they initially only found common ground in their clothing — “a lot of black,” Joyner says. The goal: help citizens see each other as “people with good intentions and different opinions.”

Waiting for the organization’s first-ever program to begin, Joyner recalls expecting the worst — loud arguments and shouting. “It did not happen,” she says. Small wonder, then, that the Village Square’s unofficial motto is “When Pigs Fly.”

“When people come together face to face, we have an extraordinary capacity for reciprocal kindness and decency,” Joyner says. “It’s a human superpower.” Consistent in-person events can become “a tradition we’re doing together as a people [that] makes you feel like a part of the greater whole.”

The good feelings engendered can penetrate even polarized online spaces, Joyner says. The organization uses metrics developed by the Civic Health Project to measure the contributions of events to increased empathy and decreased polarization, among other outcomes.

“Powerful content offered online when there is an in-person community that underpins it can help create more scale in the local work,” she says. “We’re parched for these kinds of high ideals instead of what we’re stewing in now.”

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