Building the bridges that befit our citizenship
In early 2017, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement announced a multi-year strategic exploration into three questions that would guide our work. One was: How can philanthropy create spaces for people to come together around complex and divisive issues? Inspired by his personal passion and experiences, as well as his professional background in the civic sector, we hired Decker Ngongang as a Fellow to lead the charge on this exploration.
At PACE, we have always believed in the power, potential, and responsibility of people to come together to discuss, address, and solve the problems they see around them. This is why part of our shared belief statement is that “the office of citizen should be treated as central to how democracy functions.” We believe that democracy will be stronger when all people are informed and engaged in the process of creating it; deliberative dialogue is one way to do that.
While this commitment and belief pre-dated the 2016 election, the tone, tenor, and divisions that were exacerbated during that process raised increasing concern for PACE on a number of levels, and started to make the proposition of deliberative dialogue and engagement increasingly difficult. Implicit in our question was the need to “bridge divides” and “come together across lines of difference” — the idea of coming together felt nearly impossible, much less working together toward something.
We knew from the start that this was a big, complex question — one that was increasingly important, could not be avoided, and was ripe for PACE to help explore. We knew it would not be easy, and we were not sure where it would go. That said, I think it is fair to say we did not fully anticipate just how much more difficult it would get as time went on and our social and political contexts continued to shift so dramatically. Over the last couple of years, partisan conflict in government and across our citizenry has deepened and made the possibility of achieving consensus on solutions to problems feel nearly impossible. Additionally, research has emerged to suggest that now, people not only believe that those who are politically different than them are wrong, but that they are “downright evil” and “lack traits to be fully human.”
When we launched the exploration into this question about building bridges across division, we wanted to be mindful of several dynamics. First, we knew there had been increasing attention — inside and outside philanthropy — towards this topic and it was important PACE’s contributions be additive rather than duplicative. Second, we did not want to be prescriptive about answers or outcomes — as we respected the topic’s complexity — and we wanted to be exploratory rather than authoritative. As a result, we gave Decker full freedom to go where the journey took him and examine multiple angles to see where PACE could make a unique contribution. He launched field research and interviews with our members, several of their grantees, and many other partners and leaders across the fields of philanthropy and civic engagement. Civility, and the need for more of it, was a common theme across his conversations.
Around the same time, some particularly heated and contentious debates were playing out in political spheres, and pushback to the idea of civility was starting to percolate across the public discourse. There were people issuing well-intentioned and reasonable calls for civility, and people pushing back on them — also for well-intentioned and principled reasons.
But if we can trust that in most circumstances, both the call and the response are reasonable and well-intentioned, where does that leave us? Civility (properly understood) is good, and we need more of it — that is true. Literally defined, civility means “befitting a citizen” and is a virtue that makes disagreement possible in a diverse and tolerant society. But it is also true that civility can privilege dominant cultures, and is often over-simplified to mean niceness, politeness, and decorum at the potential expense of justice and liberty.
Decker has penned this series of essays on civility and bridge building as a culmination of his exploration into the complex question we posed. Including an introduction from Decker, as the author, the series explores the themes that became salient and prompted further consideration. Below is a snapshot of these themes:
Theme 1: Context and History Matter: An essay exploring the importance of historical context and the complexities of individual stories before the hard work of civility, bridge building, and healthy discourse can be fully examined.
Theme 2: Civility is Insufficient: An essay exploring the limits of civility and the alternate ways conditions can be enabled for meaningful dialogue and deliberation across lines of difference.
Theme 3: Beyond Civility, The Opportunity for Philanthropy: An essay exploring the role philanthropy can play in holistically advancing civility and bridge building, particularly in cultivating norms that build trust and facilitating conversations.
Personal Reflection from the Author: A personal piece offering reflections about how this project shaped the author’s view of his own personal history, the current political context, and his hope for the future of civic institutions and American democracy.
Taken together, the essays give us a framework to consider civility and philanthropy’s role in cultivating it in a deep, complex, and nuanced way — one that strives to make civility an animating condition of our interactions, and make those interactions more constructive, productive, and sustainable in the process. Throughout the pieces, Decker anchors an “equity lens” to the concept — a way to consider civility from historically marginalized and non-dominant cultural perspectives. If we consider civility in the ways he invites us, can we do more to cultivate relationships that surface ideas and elevate outcomes to create a stronger democracy and a better society for all?
Perhaps embracing all of this might empower us (collectively) to leave behind trite interpretations of civility — as simply being nice or polite — and lead us more fully towards embodying its literal definition — “befitting a citizen” — by demonstrating leadership and behavior that reflects the integrity of our citizenship and honors the dignity of others’ citizenship as well.
