Community Foundations and Civic Renewal

National philanthropy cannot pull democracy out of the ditch. Community foundations—with local knowledge, networks, accountability and continuity—are better positioned to help lead a civic renewal.

Last week I had the privilege of giving a keynote talk at the Pennsylvania Community Foundation Association’s annual conference in Hershey. After spending two days with these enterprising leaders, I left with a sense of encouragement. They represent philanthropy at its best. Here is the sketch of my remarks.

Let me start with a bold premise. If philanthropy is going to help democracy in America recover from its current backsliding, I’m betting it will not be large private foundations that lead the way. The critical leadership roles will instead fall to institutions like yours—community foundations and other place-based and more democratic forms of philanthropy. My goal tonight is to persuade you of the merits of this assertion.

Your Jobs Are Hard—and Getting Tougher

I know you have big jobs already. Community foundation leaders face extraordinary complexity. You must balance the interests, needs, and aspirations of your grantees, donors, boards, and staff—not to mention the myriad challenges facing the communities you serve. That alone is demanding. However, your jobs are getting even more difficult, for two reasons.

First, polarization has reached levels unseen since the Civil War. Political divisions—some real, some manufactured—are spiraling into violence. We’ve now seen assassinations and attempted assassinations across the country, including here in Pennsylvania with the attempt on President Trump’s life and the firebombing of Governor Shapiro’s residence.

Whether you like or dislike President Trump, there is no denying that he thrives on conflict. His confrontational leadership style intentionally deepens our divisions. This national conflict is seeping down into your communities. It doesn’t help that Pennsylvania is a perpetual electoral battleground. Every other year, “conflict entrepreneurs” inflame the Commonwealth to realize their political objectives.

Second, federal policy disruptions in the Second Trump Administration—from zealous enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws to steep cuts in social services and health care—are now cascading through your communities. With nearly 40% of Pennsylvania’s budget dependent on federal dollars, local governments and nonprofits are squeezed even further. You are left holding space for communities under greater strain.

Why then am I suggesting you can and should take the lead in civic renewal? Because in my experience you are better positioned than national funders to do so.

My Own Journey

From 2013 to 2022, I helped develop and then led a grant making program to strengthen U.S. democracy at the Hewlett Foundation. We were pursuing several innovative experiments (if I do say so myself!), and we had plenty of budget—$180 million over nine years—to spend on them. We worked alongside a dozen or so other national funders making grants at a similar scale; I watched their work unfold also.

Our main goal at Hewlett was to strengthen democracy by reducing polarization. Toward this end, we sought to bolster Congress and its capacity to absorb, represent, and reconcile our differences. We believed that our constitutional government could only be as resilient as its first branch.

You know how this turned out. Despite our best efforts, democracy faltered, polarization spiraled out of control, and Congress grew ever more feckless. What we were doing was clearly insufficient for the task at hand. But the response of many other funders to Trump’s election and re-election, to join and fund the resistance to him, struck me as even less effective and indeed counterproductive.

I thus saw first hand how national foundations face real barriers and challenges in their efforts to strengthen U.S. democracy. At best, they may be able to help slow its decline; at worst, they end up driving polarization – sometimes inadvertently, sometimes quite intentionally. I increasingly thought: there has to be a better way.

Ironically, a conversation with a community foundation leader pulled me toward this conclusion. After the 2020 election, he was anxious for his institution to find ways to help solve our national challenges. He called to ask for advice on what they might do.

For my part, I was impressed by what they were already doing in their community: supporting local journalism, fostering dialogue, and building civic infrastructure. I said if more parts of the country had a foundation doing what his was up to, 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.

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

Why Community Foundations?

Your institutions hold two unique advantages that national funders cannot match:

• Local knowledge, networks, accountability, and continuity. You are embedded in the communities you serve, and you aren’t going anywhere. You know them, and you are responsible for and to them. Whereas national funders regard Pennsylvania as an intermittent chessboard they can use to pursue their strategies, you see your communities, from Williamsport to Lancaster, on their own terms, as worthy of support in and of themselves.

• Building from a place of strength. Looking from the top down, three out of four of Americans now 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 is a huge asset. You are not trying to fix a broken and distrusted national democracy but rather to build on proximate institutions and civic cultures in which people already believe.

So how should you approach the work of civic renewal? Let me offer three guideposts:

1) Keep It Local

The polarization and the nationalization of our politics have proceeded together and reinforced each other. Several things have ratcheted these trends forward in the past six decades, including the greater activism of the federal government, the nationally sharpened differences between our parties, the demise of local media, and the simultaneous shift in the public’s attention to politics and government in Washington.

Nevertheless, ours continues to be a remarkably decentralized polity. Unless you are a senior citizen, 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, DC or on Elon Musk’s X. Ultimately, we will not be able to 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 actual agency.

Community foundations can keep it local in various ways, e.g.,

• 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 here 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, e.g., 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 in self-governance at costs that communities can sustain.

2) 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 and even civic leaders of their community rather than passive bystanders or mere residents of it.

Community foundations can nurture this tradition by:

• Valuing nonprofits and civic associations as formative institutions, not just service providers. At their best, congregations, PTAs, little leagues, food pantries, and Rotary clubs shape the people who participate in them as much as they serve the broader community. You can help them augment their capacity, sustain their work, and join forces with other associations you support.

• Investing in civic infrastructure—e.g., parks, libraries, town centers, fairgrounds etc. These spaces allow people to meet up, have fun, and identify problems to solve and opportunities to pursue together. They enable the habits of membership and agency that sustain communities to take root. The Trust for Civic Life (which, full disclosure, I have served as an advisor) 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.

3) Nurture Civic Culture

Many national funders are inclined to equate democracy with (and reduce it to) voting in our congressional and presidential elections. Voting is an important but relatively small part of citizenship in a democracy. We vote on election day, yet we hold and must honorably discharge the office of citizen every day of the year.

The work we need your institutions to do is cultivating a healthy civic culture that helps citizens in your communities play their part. What do I mean by civic culture? The American Academy of Arts and Sciences recently put out an excellent report on the topic that defines it 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 how this definition underscores that self-government in a pluralistic society is challenging. There is no getting around this. The report lays out a number of ways to fortify civic culture, from hosting civic celebrations and boosting community service to developing narratives of common purpose and rooting work in shared local affinities. These are all good things that community foundations can help catalyze.

To be sure, civic culture needs to be built – and will vary – community by community. What works in Philadelphia will differ from Pittsburgh, and the same goes for Erie and Scranton. Each community needs stewards like you to cultivate a healthy civic culture in ways that are grounded in your local contexts.

R&D+ Reflective Practice

One of the greatest strengths of your institutions is your inherent ability and inclination to learn from each other. With 35 community foundations in Pennsylvania and 900 nationwide, innovation is happening everywhere. You have hundreds of test kitchens to draw upon in developing your own unique recipes for civic renewal.

A friend of mine, a stellar community foundation leader in her own right, calls this approach “R&D+" which she explained means “rip-off and duplicate–only make it better!” See what works in another part of the Commonwealth—or for that matter another part of the country. Then adapt and improve it in the part that you serve.

This requires reflective practice. You are doing difficult work in polarizing communities with rapidly shifting funding flows. There is no polished blueprint. The only way forward is to experiment, learn, course correct, share—and repeat.

Key Takeaways

National philanthropy cannot pull democracy out of the ditch. Renewal must come from the ground up. 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.

Keep it local. Turn residents into members and leaders. Focus on civic culture, and democracy will take care of itself. Learn from one another. Be reflective practitioners.

By taking these steps, you will not only strengthen your communities but also help lead the bottom up civic renewal on which the fate of democracy in America ultimately depends.