It would be an understatement to say that this is a divisive time in America. In fact, a survey from Pew Research Center found that when respondents were asked to describe their feelings about politics in a single word or phrase, the word that came up most often was “divisive.”
But beyond any one event, or even any one election, this era of significant partisan polarization has put democracy in danger. In an article published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, authors Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press examined data from episodes of “pernicious polarization” that have taken place around the world since 1950 and found that “severe polarization correlates with serious democratic decline: Of the 52 instances where democracies reached pernicious levels of polarization, 26 — fully half of the cases — experienced a downgrading of their democratic rating.”
We’ve seen a plethora of attacks on democracy in recent years — the January 6 attack on the Capitol, voter suppression laws, disinformation, and politicians refusing to accept election results, to name a few. The upcoming election has been billed by some as a last-ditch defense of the nation’s democratic system.
The urgency of the moment hasn’t been lost on philanthropic funders, who have been scrambling to find ways to bridge divides, reduce rampant polarization and address threats to democracy.
Launched earlier this year, a new philanthropic collaborative, the Trust for Civic Life, is also working to change a divided status quo. It seeks to address underinvestment in local civic infrastructure by supporting the people, places and civic programs that bring people together in a community to solve the problems that matter to them, rebuild social trust, and ultimately build a stronger democracy.
Fittingly, the Trust for Civic Life’s backers are a wide-ranging group, both ideologically and in terms of what and how they fund. The initial funders behind the trust are the Omidyar Network, Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Charles Koch’s Stand Together. Other funders include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Walmart Foundation.
“Our diverse group of funders, I think, is really a representation of the shared understanding and shared diagnosis of the problem that we all have and we’re all experiencing,” said the Trust for Civic Life’s executive director, Charlie Brown.
“There’s no silver bullet out of this”
The Trust for Civic Life has hit the ground running with an initial round of grants, known as “civic hub” grants, in which it awarded $8 million to 20 local organizations. The initial focus will be on rural areas, which have long been underfunded by philanthropy. About 60% of the grants went to four priority areas: Central Appalachia, the Black Belt, the southern border and tribal communities. The remaining grants went to communities in transition in rural parts of the nation.
Grantees include Chinle Planting Hope, Abara, Front Porch Forum, Humboldt Area Foundation and Wild Rivers Community Foundation, Black Belt Community Foundation, The Industrial Commons, Invest Appalachia, Communities Unlimited, and Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky.
The trust’s second round of grants, which will be awarded later this year, will be for civic entrepreneurs — individuals or organizations leading experimental new programs to get members of their communities to participate in shaping a community vision and working together to solve local problems.
The Trust for Civic Life is one of philanthropy’s latest moves to directly address division and polarization by building out civic infrastructure that can help citizens bridge divides. There’s certainly a strong case for that work right now. But commentary both here at IP and from prominent sector voices has also raised questions about how well those approaches can work.
Brown acknowledged the challenges at play. “There’s no silver bullet out of this. We are a polarized country. We have a high level of division. Those are really symptoms for what we believe is a sense of lack of agency and opportunity. We’ve got to take multiple approaches and multiple strategies to solve this.”
Launching the trust
The idea for the trust emerged from a 2020 report published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The report, titled “Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century,” found that there has been a decades-long underinvestment in civic programming.
“The lack of investment is really what has been a key contributor to [the] division, polarization [and] isolation that we’re all new well-aware of and experiencing,” Brown said.
One of the report’s recommendations was to dramatically expand civic bridging capacity by having private funders and philanthropy to establish a national trust for civic infrastructure to scale up and support “social, civic and democratic infrastructure” and to invest in leaders “who drive civic renewal in communities.”
Those initial three funders — Omidyar Network, Rockfeller Brothers Fund and Stand Together — came together to launch the Trust for Civic Life, which builds on the recommendations from the report.
“I think we’re at a moment in American history where many Americans feel… that the problems facing our country and themselves and their families are huge,” Brown said, citing inflation, global wars and climate change as examples. These are problems that are too big for any one person to solve, and this can depress participation in civic life.
On the other hand, it can seem like local issues often go ignored. These could include concerns over water and sanitation, lack of access to parks, fears over a town’s maternity ward closing, or a lack of resources for local schools. “There’s so many issues that are happening to us locally. And when we feel that we’re not being heard as communities, when we feel that the local issues that we have are not being addressed… we lose trust in institutions and we also start to lose trust in each other,” Brown said.
At the intersection of democracy and belonging
One of the trust’s initial funders is the Omidyar Network, which has pledged $3.5 million over three years. It is the largest single investment the Omidyar Network has made to date through its Building Cultures of Belonging funding vertical.
According to Michelle Barsa, who co-chairs the Trust for Civic Life and is a principal at Omidyar’s Building Cultures and Belonging program, the Omidyar Network had several reasons for backing the trust. For one, the trust’s work aligns with the network’s problem analysis: Participation in civic and civic-adjacent spaces has declined significantly over the years.
“Generally in the U.S., we’ve had this tendency to reduce our understanding of democracy to election cycles and the actions of elected officials,” Barsa said. “Beyond that, or maybe as a compliment to that, there’s this recognition that the health of a democracy also rests in the beliefs, norms and practices of its citizenry.”
A healthy democracy isn’t just the belief in democratic principles and protections, but the willingness to defend them for people who don’t look or think like you, Barsa said. These habits, norms and practices were once built and shaped in both formal and informal settings like civic clubs, unions, religious institutions, and even, as Robert D. Putnam famously put it, bowling leagues.
However, Putnam’s “bowling leagues and clubs really represent more of our past than our future,” Barsa said. “So the task at hand is really to reimagine civic infrastructure for the 21st century, which includes, for us, exploring digital civic infrastructure and reflecting back the ways in which people gather and find community today.”
In addition, Omidyar believes that the trust’s work fills a gap that the funder has observed in the donor ecosystem. Democracy and belonging, according to Omidyar, are two mutually reinforcing and intersecting issues, but work at their intersection lacks a “natural home” among democracy donors.
The Omidyar Network is also focusing on doing this work on a local, place-based level — which makes a lot of sense for rural support in particular.
“The trust plays this critical role [in] connecting national and regional philanthropies with rural efforts, and also really does try its best to center the voices of civic entrepreneurs in rural and small-town America. Those are actors that national philanthropies often don’t have access to, so it was compelling to us to engage with partners to figure out how to do that in a responsible way,” Barsa said.
While the trust is supported by several national funders, its grantees include several community foundations, who may better understand the communities they serve and are better equipped to redistribute funds where they’re most needed.
Supporting rural regions
So why start with rural areas? Brown noted that the U.S. is a big country and trying to determine where to begin can be overwhelming. The trust, therefore, took into consideration where philanthropy can be most catalytic and have the biggest impact, while also thinking about where there’s been a lack of investment.
Rural areas not only receive a very small amount of national philanthropic funding; they are also regions that have “really high levels of social trust, incredible levels of entrepreneurship, but often lower levels of institutional trust,” Brown said.
Supporting civic engagement in rural communities is also an important learning opportunity for funders to better understand which programs and initiatives can work elsewhere. Brown hopes the trust can identify the most effective models that can be replicated by other communities and organizations.
“Democracy is something that’s always meant to be an experiment and requires us to try new things, whether that’s democracy in the formal sense of how we think about politics and government, or what the reality [is] of how we spend most of our time in democracy, which is coming together in our communities to solve problems that matter to us, that everyday democracy. We need to find new ways that get people involved,” Brown said.
One of the trust’s grantees, for example, is Communities Unlimited, whose ConnectRURAL initiative is working to strengthen civic infrastructure across rural East Texas. The program is run by a locally embedded team and provides technical assistance, leverages matching funds and offers support through regional AmeriCorps programs. Launched thanks to a grant from the T.L.L. Temple Foundation, ConnectRURAL also helps rural communities access federal and state funding.
“Across work I have done for decades has been the same conversation about resources that exist, but people don’t always know about them,” said Martha Claire Bullen, director of community sustainability at Communities Unlimited. “When we started talking with the Temple Foundation, I realized they also understood that issue in East Texas. We really took that idea and built out ConnectRURAL to answer that question. How do you connect resources to people rather than the other way around?”
Other grantees include the Four Bands Community Fund, which is creating opportunities for native communities in South Dakota to overcome structural barriers and build a robust civic ecosystem, as well as Abara, which is based in El Paso, Texas, and is creating spaces for people to come together to explore communal decision-making around immigration, economic development and how polarization is affecting the borderlands region. There’s also the Black Belt Community Foundation, which has built “a civic marketplace” by supporting grassroots civic engagement, local leadership development, community and economic development and health and wellness.
Efforts like these may help strengthen civic life and bridge divides, and ultimately strengthen our democracy, Brown said, but there’s still a long way to go. While the work can seem overwhelming at times, it is still nevertheless a moment of hope.
“I just feel like this is such an exciting moment in American history,” Brown said. “Here, we are getting to reinvest and reimagine what democracy means, what the American experience means, and we’re getting to do it in a way that involves more people than it ever has.”
