Leadership for a New Civic Future
Ash Hanson and Liz Joyner on rebuilding civic life from the ground up. (675 words / 2.5-minute read)
Hi friends,
Before jumping in today, I wanted to let you know that I will be on leave during June and July. During that time, you will continue to receive podcast episodes recorded in advance, along with guest newsletters from colleagues whose work I am especially pleased to share with you.
Thank you, as always, for reading and listening. I look forward to reconnecting with you in August.
In the meantime, I am delighted to share a podcast episode I recorded earlier this month with Ash Hanson, founder and Creative Executive Officer of Department of Public Transformation, and Liz Joyner, founder and President of The Village Square. Ash and Liz are exemplars of the kind of T-shaped leadership we will need for bottom-up civic renewal.
T-shaped civic leadership
The vertical bar of the “T” in this mode of leadership represents locally rooted leadership that enlivens a particular community. The horizontal cross-bar of the “T” represents the ability and curiosity to connect with peers rooted in other places and cross-pollinate promising approaches with them.
For Liz and The Village Square, the home base and seedbed for their work is Tallahassee, Florida. Under Liz’s leadership, the organization has also served in the vanguard of a broader national movement to, in their words,
“Breathe a little life into the neighborly civic connections that used to exist without much effort on our part. It’s past time to bring back the spirit of the quintessentially American town hall, where foes become partners in futures that are inextricably linked. As much as we want to blame Washington, ultimately this work can only be done in hometowns like ours and between neighbors like us.”
Ash likes to joke that she is more polyamorous, loving and being connected to several places at the same time. Yet she and Department of Public Transformation have deep roots in rural Minnesota, and Ash has carried that same spirit west to her new home base of Moab, Utah. Underlying all their work is a commitment to:
“Celebrating rural culture and cultural workers by uplifting small-town stories and connecting people to each other and their places. In doing so, we are working to shift damaging dominant narratives of what it means to live and work in rural America, build stronger civic ties and public participation, and expand creative capacity that benefits the whole country.”
An invitation to a new civic future
I reconnected with Liz and got to know Ash through a micro-group of civic leaders that spent the past year developing “An Invitation to a New Civic Future” that I shared with you back in February. The invitation begins with a hopeful premise: “America is at the start of a generational opportunity to renew our civic life.”
In this episode, Ash, Liz and I explore what it will take to realize this opportunity. In particular, we discuss the five foundational principles of a better civic life, one that is (in the invitation’s original phrasing):
Participatory, approaching residents as active members expected to shape their community’s future, not passive clients to be served;
Alive, embracing the joy, culture, and full humanity that make civic life worth living, not the logic of the machine;
Proximate, rooting renewal in the people who live in the places they serve, not distant groups and leaders;
Relational, treating relationships and interpersonal trust as ends in and of themselves, not means toward other ends; and
Generational, committing to the work, relationships, and structures that outlast us, not the quick fixes or silver bullets.
Each of these principles might strike you as a heavy lift relative to the status quo. But as you hear Ash and Liz flesh them out and bring them to life, you’ll appreciate, as I did anew, the extent to which these foundational principles are already exemplified in the civic lives of community members all across the country.
That reality is a source of hope.
Please give the episode a listen and share it with others. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, Amazon or Pocket Casts.
More soon,
Daniel