Posts in Civic Learning & Culture
What Election Day to Every Day Means to Us

Moving Beyond Election-Centric Democracy Philanthropy

The Democracy Fund recently launched a new sign-on letter aimed at encouraging funders to continue supporting their democracy grantees beyond Election Day. We at the Democracy Funders Network (DFN) echo this sentiment and applaud Democracy Fund’s leadership in the space. Rather than simply signing on to the letter, however, we wanted to issue a “concurring opinion” to elaborate on some of its key points and deepen the conversation about the challenges highlighted in the letter, along with some potential solutions.

Here are three key things we hope every democracy funder will take away from the letter:

1) Revitalizing liberal democracy in the U.S. is a years-long task, and we need funders to be in it for the long haul. No matter who wins the presidential election in a few weeks, American democracy will remain fragile. The worst thing funders can do in response to the election is to walk away—either out of a sense of hopelessness or overconfidence about democracy’s prospects. It will admittedly not be easy for some to muster the energy to keep going in either circumstance, but what will all the resources we’ve devoted to protecting and revitalizing our democracy be for if we abandon the effort midstream?

While it may be too late to ask most funders to develop their 2025 strategies before knowing the outcomes of the election and the dynamics of the post-election environment, it is essential that donors begin considering the possibility of creating a multi-year democracy strategy that stretches beyond the next presidential election cycle. We agree with the letter’s call for multi-year funding as the gold standard that helps to create stronger organizations and a more stable field, and we encourage all funders to use it with their existing grantees wherever possible. We also recognize that funders often face various structural and psychological barriers to providing extensive multi-year funding. For those who are hesitant, a multi-year strategy can still create more stability in your grantmaking that can in turn help bolster your grantees and the broader field.

What if every democracy donor went through the exercise of developing a five-year strategy? Such a strategy would not need to be a rigid plan that locks in all your funding and activities far in advance; the best strategies are guides that can be reviewed and revised along the way. If democracy funders writ large pursued this approach, we believe our collective resources would ultimately go a lot farther. Even more so if we do some of this strategy development together. (Expect to hear from DFN on this front soon).

2) Democracy is about more than elections, so those of us who care about it need to ensure we are not just scaling up our giving in election years. The “Election Day to Every Day” letter addresses an incredibly challenging dynamic in democracy giving: the boom-and-bust cycle through which donors ramp up their giving in election years and then retract it immediately after each election. This kind of giving is highly inefficient at best and ineffective at worst. We are not going to solve the problems facing our democracy investing election cycle by election cycle, nor will this approach allow us to move from a reactive posture to a proactive one. By funding in this manner, we miss the opportunity to strengthen local civic life and ongoing civic engagement, improve the capacity of the state to deliver for its citizens, rebuild independent journalism, and combat polarization, among dozens of important priorities. As Daniel Stid has argued in A Framework for Democracy Philanthropy, democracy funders will find “more room to maneuver” if we can focus greater resources on long-term efforts in communities and fewer on near-term national politics.

Additionally, the more we let underlying problems fester by overweighting our resources on elections and in election years, the more expensive our elections become. Estimates are that upwards of $16 billion will be spent in partisan political giving alone this year, which is about half of what the entire democracy space raised in 2022, the last year for which we have solid data, according to the new U.S. Democracy Hub.

While the boom-and-bust cycle is most pronounced for organizations that do election-related work such as voter registration, election administration, crisis preparation, and combatting disinformation, it is also true for just about every kind of organization in the field. Whatever you fund, your grantees—and the issues they work on—need steady support. We know how difficult this can be in practice, as the boom-and-bust cycle is at least in part due to a very human dynamic: we often feel compelled to “go big” when it comes to elections, but most of us cannot sustain that level of giving year after year. Moving beyond this cycle doesn’t mean you can’t give less next year, but it does mean not letting your grantees starve in 2025. More importantly, it means resisting the temptation to go meaningfully bigger in 2026 and 2028 and instead finding a steady state for your democracy giving. (Here again a five-year strategy can help). The only way to solve long-term problems—and to do so at anything approaching a reasonable cost—is with long-term strategies and long-term commitment.

3) The work of protecting American democracy is becoming increasingly fraught, and funders need to be cognizant of how they and their grantees can remain both safe and effective. Fighting for a more just and inclusive democracy has always been difficult, but the level of threat facing those working to defend our democracy—election administrators, disinformation researchers, grassroots organizers, journalists, funders, and many others throughout the system—has grown to extreme levels. Funders need to be investing in the safety and security of their grantees and the broader field, and they also need to be taking their own operational security seriously. (DFN can be a resource on both fronts). This is true across civil society, not only in the democracy space: as American politics becomes more polarized and autocratic actors seek opportunities to undermine U.S. democracy, funders and nonprofits—as independent sources of power in American life—are increasingly being targeted. This is only likely to grow in the coming years—again, no matter who is president.

Finally, funders looking to remain both safe and effective, and who would like to see their grantees do the same, will need to re-examine some of their core assumptions and approaches as they develop new strategies. We should all be inspired daily by the groups fighting for our democracy, but we should also be cognizant that many of the forces we have been up against in recent years, including toxic polarization, rampant misinformation and disinformation, threats to core democratic institutions, and support for authoritarian politics, have grown worse. We in philanthropy owe it to American democracy to be thoroughly introspective about where our efforts are failing—and even where they may be making things worse. For instance, when funders and organizations feel under threat, we tend to become both more polarized and polarizing. But in an era of “high conflict,” donors may want to reconsider funding initiatives that further polarize, radicalize, or increase misunderstanding and dysfunction in our society.

Only by remaining fully engaged—financially, emotionally, and intellectually—can we carry on the work of ensuring the U.S. is a robust liberal democracy a century from now. Here’s hoping we are up to the task.

Becoming Futures Ready: How Philanthropy Can Leverage Strategic Foresight For Democracy

While pro-democracy actors work to defend our democratic and electoral institutions in the near term, securing and strengthening our democracy also necessitates cultivating a longer term, affirmative orientation. DFN’s Better Futures Project is excited to announce the publication of a new toolkit, Becoming Futures Ready: How Philanthropy Can Leverage Strategic Foresight For Democracy, to build the strategic foresight skills of funders and to expand the field’s capacity to envision a bold, lasting vision for our democracy. 

Read the full toolkit here.

A Funding Guide for Faith and Democracy: Nothing Does What Faith Does Like Faith Does It

Over the last few years, the relationship between faith and democracy has been of growing interest to funders. While there has long been a robust debate in America about the proper relationship between government and religions, there is also a sustained and evolving relationship between faith and democracy. Plenty of headlines have spotlighted the ways they are influencing each other–both positively and negatively.

How are grantmakers to make sense of it all?

This new guide aims to explore the role of faith communities in shaping and making American civic life, while providing a framework for funders to engage with faith communities as partners in advancing a stronger and more inclusive democracy.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is meant for funders who are:

• Focused on democracy and civic life and want to increase their impact by engaging faith communities.

• Already investing in faith-inspired organizations but who are seeking a deeper understanding of the unique role those organizations play in the health of democracy and civic life.

• Anyone else who cares about the intersection of faith, democracy, civic engagement, and public life.

Read A Funding Guide for Faith and Democracy >>

The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America

Over Zero and the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council are excited to announce the launch of “The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America.” 

The Belonging Barometer report calls attention to belonging as a critical dimension of life that should matter to all stakeholders who seek to improve America’s physical, social, civic, and democratic well-being.

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Mapping Civic Measurement

The Institute for Citizens & Scholars brings together diverse people, across traditional divides, to build a constitutional democracy that works for all. In 2019, Citizens & Scholars released the whitepaper From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem: A Landscape Analysis and Case for Collaboration, which noted a surprising consensus among practitioners in the civic education space that thecurrent approach to developing effective citizens needed to be updated for the 21st century. 

Building on that work, Citizens & Scholars has launched a multi-year initiative on Civic Measurement. The first major milestone is a new report, Mapping Civic Measurement: How are we assessing readiness and opportunities for an engaged citizenry?  

Mapping Civic Measurement is a comprehensive civic measurement landscape review and a first-of-its-kind framework for mapping civic readiness and opportunities.  

The report features a collection of measurement tools, rubrics, and more than 200 resources in use by practitioners across education, business, philanthropy, community institutions, media, government, and civil society. You’ll come away from the report with new ways to think about measuring civic learning impact, new research to inform your work, and new opportunities to connect with other practitioners. 

Now is the time to come together to cultivate people as informed, engaged, and hopeful citizens. Creating a common knowledge base and practices to measure civic readiness and opportunities will enable us to chart the course to a healthy and robust democracy that works for all. 

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Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy

Building a robust, high functioning pluralist democracy in the U.S. capable of ushering in better futures for Americans requires us to think boldly and move away from reaction, apathy, and surrender. The extraordinary times we live in, full of rapid change, uncertainty and possibility, call upon us to identify and lift up positive disruptors who dare to dream and imagine what could be.

DFN’s report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy is a call to action to imagine what our democracy could become. Informed by dozens of interviews with visionary thinkers and doers from a variety of fields and viewpoints, including futurists, activists, thought leaders, creatives, artists, religious leaders, and funders, the report shares their insights on why positive visioning matters, discusses how those visions of better futures relate to democracy and governance systems, and asks how we can inspire more Americans to dream bigger and develop a sense of agency to bring those ideas to fruition.

Read the full report here>

Below are the report’s key findings and recommendations:

Findings:

  • Enthusiastic and emphatic agreement that positive visions of the future matter tremendously because they help us to imagine better alternatives, motivate us, and guide us to achieving positive societal outcomes. They also reinforce the idea that we have agency to shape our individual and collective futures and those of our descendants.

  • Several points of disconnection – 

    • Few interviewees saw governance as critical to achieving the better futures they articulated, or had thought about how to improve and reimagine democracy.  

    • The future-oriented community seldom connects with the democracy community.

    • America lags in experimenting with new forms of future-oriented governance models and thinking.

    • The people we interviewed are also disconnected from each other, although there are some hubs and communities of practice that provide connective tissue that some interviewees are a part of.

  • Many obstacles (e.g., complex problems from the local to the planetary, conflict-driven media and political environments, dystopian narratives, racism and othering) currently stand in the way of positive visions of the future emerging at scale.

  • Positive stories about the future and narratives of mutuality and abundance exist but are barely breaking through in mass culture.

Recommendations:

While we have a strong foundation on which to build – great ideas, visionary leaders, real-world experiments, powerful stories about better futures, and media campaigns – we need more infrastructure and connective tissue to gain traction and impact.  Accordingly, we recommend three types of strategies:

Strengthen the positive visioning ecosystem by investing in infrastructure and relationships 

There are numerous ways to build and support an emerging ecosystem and to create connections between those broadly engaged in positive visioning and those working specifically on democracy issues. We recommend more networking, collaboration, and mapping, more productive chances to convene donors and working groups around the future of democracy, and greater use of futures thinking tools to change mindsets.

Model what’s possible and fund experimentation

We want to explore how to adapt governance innovations from outside the U.S. that incorporate a futures orientation, a longer planning horizon, and an intergenerational fairness lens. We also see promise in funding innovative efforts to strengthen and invigorate democracy in the U.S., especially at the state and local level, by using technology, engaging youth, creatives, game designers, and speculative fiction writers, and tapping into collective imagination exercises.

Strengthen narrative systems & amplify positive, futures-oriented content 

We need strategies that elevate and sustain narratives of abundance, interdependence, and mutuality and that amplify current bright spots for greater impact. Content also matters. We need more of it that’s positive, inspiring, and hopeful about what we can build together. That means influencing which stories are told, by whom, and how.

Read the full report here>

Root Causes Perspectives: How Did We Get Here?

Everyday Americans and political insiders alike have become increasingly concerned with the dangerous levels of division, governmental dysfunction, and public distrust in our country. These trends had been intensifying for several years, and were on display in stark terms this past year in the midst of numerous domestic crises. Our country’s responses to COVID-19, widespread civil unrest, and the January 6 storming of the Capitol each highlighted the seriousness of the situation. READ MORE>

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

In Palaces for the People, Eric Klinenberg suggests that the future of democratic societies rests not simply on shared values but on shared spaces: the libraries, childcare centers, churches, and parks where crucial connections are formed. Interweaving his own research with examples from around the globe, Klinenberg shows how "social infrastructure" could help to bridge our seemingly unbridgeable divides. READ MORE>

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism--Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times.

But we've been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today. However as the twentieth century opened, America became--slowly, unevenly, but steadily--more egalitarian, more cooperative, more generous; a society on the upswing, more focused on our responsibilities to one another and less focused on our narrower self-interest. Sometime during the 1960s, however, these trends reversed, leaving us in today's disarray.

In a sweeping overview of more than a century of history, drawing on his inimitable combination of statistical analysis and storytelling, Robert Putnam analyzes a remarkable confluence of trends that brought us from an "I" society to a "We" society and then back again. He draws inspiring lessons for our time from an earlier era, when a dedicated group of reformers righted the ship, putting us on a path to becoming a society once again based on community. READ MORE>

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

Our Declaration reinterprets the promise of American democracy through our founding text. Combining a personal account of teaching the Declaration with a vivid evocation of the colonial world between 1774 and 1777, Allen, a political philosopher renowned for her work on justice and citizenship reveals our nation’s founding text to be an animating force that not only changed the world more than two-hundred years ago, but also still can. Challenging conventional wisdom, she boldly makes the case that the Declaration is a document as much about political equality as about individual liberty. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Our Declaration is an “uncommonly elegant, incisive, and often poetic primer on America’s cardinal text”. READ MORE>

American Fabric: Identity and Belonging

In this first report of the American Fabric series, More in Common delves deeper into the complexity of American identity. The report explores how associations, experiences, and norms of our shared identity differ across the political and demographic diversity of the United States. Conducted against the backdrop of a deeply contentious year, the study articulates where Americans continue to diverge and highlights places of meaningful commonality. READ MORE>