Who Can Rescue Democracy? Local Funders Have the Edge

The following is adapted from an address that Daniel Stid, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, gave to the Pennsylvania Community Foundation Association and later shared on his Substack, the Art of Association.

After the 2020 election, I had an eye-opening conversation with a community foundation leader. At the time, I had already spent almost a decade working to reduce polarization as the inaugural director of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s U.S. democracy grant making. He wanted to get my advice about how his foundation could help solve our national challenges.

I was impressed by what his foundation was already doing: supporting local journalism, fostering dialogue, and investing in civic infrastructure like parks and libraries. I said if more parts of the country had a community foundation doing such things, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. I encouraged him and his colleagues to stick to the great knitting they were already doing.

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I didn’t seem to convince him, but I began to convince myself.

Compared to their richly endowed national counterparts, community foundations are often regarded as more modest and often more staid institutions, lacking the scale, big ideas, and visibility to take on the nation’s biggest problems. Yet precisely in their local embeddedness and quieter, steadier role lies an overlooked strength. Because they are accountable to the communities they serve and indeed inseparable from them, community foundations can develop and deploy intangible assets that national funders, for all their resources, cannot replicate.

In a time when large-scale efforts to repair democracy from the top down have faltered, these place-based institutions hold the promise of bottom-up civic renewal, helping to cultivate the habits of association, the culture of citizenship, and the social trust on which democracy in America depends.

Why Community Foundations?

Community foundations hold unique advantages that national funders cannot match:

• Local knowledge, networks, accountability, and continuity. Community foundations are embedded where they serve, and they aren’t going anywhere. They know the people who live there, and they are responsible for and to them. Whereas national funders regard Pennsylvania as an intermittent chessboard they can use to pursue their strategies, community foundations see the value of their hometowns and regions as worthy of support in and of themselves.
• Proximity and legitimacy. Three out of four of Americans tell the Pew Research Center that they have an unfavorable view of the federal government. That is the bad news. The good news is that things look different from the bottom up: Three in five Americans view their local government favorably. That approval and implicit legitimacy are huge assets. Community foundations are not trying to fix a broken and distrusted national democracy; rather, they can build on proximate institutions and civic cultures in which people already believe.

How can community foundations best go about civic renewal? Let me offer a few guideposts:

Keep it local.

The polarization and nationalization of our politics have proceeded together and reinforced each other. Nevertheless, our polity remains remarkably decentralized. Most aspects of government that bear on daily life — policing, criminal justice, education, housing, transportation, economic development, public health, even elections — are largely funded and governed at the local and state levels. Transfixed by the reality show of national politics, we can’t see the actual reality.

Resist the temptation to join the fray spilling out from the Thunderdome in Washington or on Elon Musk’s X. Ultimately, we cannot depolarize American politics and government without denationalizing them. Keeping civic renewal local reconnects people to the level of our democracy and the community that matters most to them — and in which they have more trust and agency.

Community foundations can keep it local in various ways, including by:

• Supporting local media. Reimagining journalism — whether via traditional formats or better yet, through new solutions-oriented and civic media models — can help restore citizens’ understanding of their communities and increase their civic engagement and efficacy within them. Great examples include CivicLex in Kentucky, Front Porch Forum in Vermont, and the Documenters Network.
• Funding deliberation. Citizens’ assemblies and other forms of constructive dialogue on local issues such as school district consolidation or downtown redevelopment can help residents grapple with and make better tradeoffs together. Local philanthropy is uniquely suited to support such innovations at costs that communities can sustain.

Form citizens.

Another overlooked aspect of philanthropy is what I call the formative tradition. Civic associations don’t just serve communities and solve problems; they form citizens so they are more capable of governing themselves.

Participation in neighborhood groups, nonprofits, and local philanthropy changes people. It gives them opportunities and incentives to learn how to lead and follow and give and take. They come to see themselves as members of a community, and even civic leaders, rather than passive bystanders or mere residents.

Community foundations can nurture this tradition by:

• Valuing and supporting nonprofits and civic associations as formative institutions, not just service providers. At their best, congregations, PTAs, little leagues, food pantries, and Rotary clubs shape participants as much as they serve the broader community.
• Investing in civic infrastructure. These are gathering spaces where people meet up, have fun, and identify problems to solve and opportunities to pursue together. They enable the habits of membership and agency that help communities to take root. The Trust for Civic Life (a donor collaborative which I have served as an adviser) provides a refreshing example of far-sighted national funders figuring out how to support civic hubs serving rural and small-town America, including many community foundations. More of their peer institutions should follow their lead.

Nurture civic culture.

Many national funders are inclined to equate democracy with (and reduce it to) voting in congressional and presidential elections. Voting is an important but relatively small part of citizenship.

Community foundations must cultivate a healthy, 365-days-a-year civic culture that helps citizens play their part. An excellent new report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences defines civic culture as “the set of norms, values, narratives, habits, and rituals that shape how we live together and govern ourselves in our diverse democracy.”

I like that this definition underscores the challenge of self-government in a pluralistic society. There is no getting around this. The report lays out ways to fortify civic culture, from hosting civic celebrations and boosting community service to developing narratives of common purpose and emphasizing the shared identities of members of the same community. These are all good things that community foundations can help catalyze.

To be sure, civic culture needs to be built community by community. What works in Pittsburgh will differ from Scranton. But each community needs stewards to cultivate a healthy civic culture in ways grounded in local contexts.

‘Rip off and duplicate.’

One of the greatest strengths of community foundations is their inherent ability and inclination to learn from each other. The 900 community foundations nationwide represent test kitchens that develop unique recipes for civic renewal.

A friend of mine, a stellar community foundation leader, calls this approach “R&D+” which she explained means “rip off and duplicate — only make it better!” Each foundation can see what works in another part of the country, then adapt and improve it.

This requires reflective practice. Community foundations are doing difficult work in polarizing places even as government funding rapidly shifts. There is no polished blueprint. The only way forward is to experiment, learn, course correct, share — and repeat.

By taking these steps, community foundations will not only strengthen their communities but also help lead the bottom-up civic renewal on which democracy in America depends. National philanthropy cannot pull democracy out of the ditch. Renewal must come from the ground up. And community foundations — rooted in place, more apt to be trusted by neighbors, capable of forming citizens and revitalizing civic culture — are uniquely positioned to lead this work.

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