In communities around the country, public schools have emerged as one of the front lines in the culture wars. Skirmishes have erupted around book bans, school board meeting standoffs, restrictions on how history is taught, and limits on rights for LGBTQ+ students.
As conservative attacks on public schools continue, a number of funders have stepped up to support local grassroots groups that are pushing back. A new collaborative, the Education Future Fund, for example, has the backing of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Lozier Foundation, Pivotal Ventures, Raikes Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Spencer Foundation.
More broadly, a wide range of funders are backing efforts to promote “bridge-building” and “pluralism” as ways to cool the culture wars and tamp down toxic polarization — although those efforts, themselves, have been subject to debate.
Richard Harwood believes it’s possible to ward off culture war conflicts before they flare and spread. Harwood worked on political campaigns and at several nonprofits before founding the Harwood Institute (initially called the Harwood Group) in 1988 when he was just 27 years old; he is now the organization’s president. Harwood’s goal is to help communities sidestep culture war battles by creating what he calls “a civic path forward.”
The Harwood institute works to unite and fortify communities by helping them identify and work toward common goals. Over the years, the institute has received funding from major national philanthropies, including the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. It also receives funding from local and regional funders in the areas where it works.
“We’re arguing that we don’t need more politics, more politics is just going to divide us.” Harwood said in a recent interview. “What we need is a civic path forward, where people come together in their local communities, figure out what they can agree on, and get working together. I think the change we need is going to have to start in our local communities. That doesn’t mean that’s where it needs to end, but it surely needs to begin there.”
What happened in Reading
According to Harwood, local communities typically turn to the institute when they don’t see a clear way forward. “They’re stuck,” he said. “What they all hold in common, even though the conditions are different, is that there is a sense that they need to move forward but they don’t know how. The things they have tried have fizzled out, and often created a kind of false hope. I think the reason people come to us is because they’re looking for hope. They want something authentic and real and practical.”
Reading, Pennsylvania, was such a community. In 2011, the New York Times identified Reading as the city with the highest number of people living in poverty in the country. It had a flourishing industrial past, but, as in many areas of the country, that disappeared over time and hasn’t been replaced. Reading is now more diverse than any time in its history, with a population that is over 60% Latino, according to a Harwood Institute report published last year. When the Harwood team came to the city in 2021, there was widespread dissatisfaction — different sectors of society viewed each other with mistrust and there was an overall sense of stagnation.
The Harwood Institute began its work in Reading with funding from the Walton Family Foundation. It worked in partnership with Centro Hispano, a community organization with deep roots in the local community. The first step was a series of interviews with local leaders, educators and students, as well as 16 community meetings with Reading residents, including five that were held in Spanish. The United Way of Berks County, the Berks Alliance, an organization that promotes community development, and the Wyomissing Foundation, a Berks county-based philanthropy that was started by a group of local businessmen in 1927, later joined the project as funding partners.
Education and the future of Reading’s young people were themes that came up over and over in community meetings. Just as education is frequently the focus of local conflicts, it can also be the way communities find their way out, and that was the case in Reading.
“It’s been a process of finding those points of commonality and interests and how we align,” said Tammy White, president of the United Way of Berks County. “One thing we all have in common is that we all want our kids to succeed. We’ve learned that it’s much easier to get past any areas of disagreement when you focus on what’s best for kids.”
It turned out that Reading residents weren’t actually worried about the books in the school library or the signs on school bathroom doors. Instead, the issues that residents wanted to focus on were more basic, and all had an education focus: English as a second language, early childhood education, and after- and out-of-school activities for young people.
Two other communities Harwood is active in, Lexington, Kentucky, and Clarksville, Tennessee, cited additional priorities, many of them also education-focused or -adjacent, including mental health, education and career pathways, teacher diversity, and equitable resource access.
A common agenda
In Reading today, three teams of community members are working on the priority areas that residents identified. The teams meet regularly in small and larger groups, and with Harwood Institute staff.
The United Way of Berks County is leading the early childhood education team, collaborating with other organizations in Reading to raise awareness about early care and education, and to increase access to early care. The team has initiated outreach at local parks and community events to distribute books and information about the importance of early learning experiences.
The English as a second language team has boosted the number of ESL teachers and classes in the city. The local faith community also organized “Practice Potlucks” that bring English and non-English speakers together to share dishes and conversation. “Not only are people learning English, but they’re creating new social networks, they’re creating a greater sense of safety, they’re creating a greater sense of belonging to the larger community,” Harwood said.
The after- and out-of-school activities team has been coordinating local organizations providing services; it also started regular movie nights and is working to access federal dollars for after-school programs.
Harwood believes that fear both causes and feeds community polarization. “We are separating and segregating from one another really rapidly, which is rooted in our anxiety and fear of one another,” he said. “Many politicians and news media are intentionally manufacturing and stoking division for their own gain. And we’re having a natural response to this, which is a fight-or-flight response. When you add this to rapid demographic change, rapid economic change and political turmoil, it creates a very unstable environment for people. So they hunker down — or they come out swinging.”
For Harwood, the answer is not just about talking to those you disagree with. “There are more and more groups in our country who believe all we need to do to get through this period is get people to sit down and better understand one another,” he said. “I don’t think that’s going to help us move forward. In fact, I think that can often be a recipe for further gridlock, because people simply dig into their positions. I think what enables us to move forward is to figure out what we can agree on, and then to get to work on building something together.”
Planting bamboo
One of the reasons that the education culture wars have spread so rapidly is that they are fueled by outside groups like Moms for Liberty and supported by conservative funders. As my colleague Mike Scutari has written, that battlefield now also extends to college campuses. Harwood believes the best way to counter these efforts is to build stronger, more resilient communities.
“The question is, are we going to allow a small number of groups to hold our entire community hostage for their own agendas? Or are we going to come together as a community and articulate where we want to move forward? Of course, there are real differences in our society; the work the nstitute does is not about holding hands and singing Kumbaya. This is very difficult work. But I’ve learned that there is enough that we can agree on to get moving.”
The institute is currently working in communities around the country, and Harwood is hoping to see more funders get involved in this community-building work. He points out that the work is not always compatible with the one- or two- or three-year grant cycles that are typical in philanthropy. Instead, it requires longer-term investments; it also requires investments in the many elements that go into the creation of a strong civic culture.
He plans to explore these and other topics at two virtual convenings for the Harwood CIRCLE of Catalytic Funders this month. The CIRCLE “is an intimately connected group of funders committed to collectively discovering and developing new ways to accelerate and deepen impact in communities and people’s lives,” according to the website. Current CIRCLE members include the Patterson Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, several United Way chapters, and community foundations and corporate funders. Harwood would like to expand that circle. The convenings will be held on June 13 and 14; find out more here.
Harwood compares the process of community-building to planting bamboo. The root system of a bamboo plant grows underground, providing nutrients and support to the plant before any shoots appear above ground. “When the shoots start to emerge, you only see a small number of them, but they start to multiply and grow faster and faster over time,” he said. “Communities grow very much the same way. And in communities, we need a particular kind of emergent change that creates new norms, new relationships and networks for learning and innovation. We need to grow our sense of shared purpose. It’s a change that has an outward orientation that’s rooted in what matters to people.”
Tammy White, of United Way of Berks County, has seen that kind of change happening in Reading. “What’s been so positive is the community engagement, and welcoming people of all backgrounds and all skill sets to come to the table to work together. And it’s around that common agenda: education.”