PACE 2021: Our Year in Review

Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE)

Published in

Office of Citizen

10 min readFeb 1, 2022

Dear Colleagues,

Reflecting on a year like 2021 necessitates a moment of pause. In many ways, 2021 felt like an extension of 2020, as the world continued to make its way through the multiple “parallel crises” that defined the year before–COVID-19, economic instability, a racial injustice, and a backsliding democracy. While the PACE community has always put a significant amount of energy, attention, and resources into protecting and advancing a strong democracy in America, the confluence and interdependence of these multiple, parallel crises has made the work of strengthening democracy more complex, for certain.

In 2020, PACE shared its intention to evolve into what we termed a “philanthropic laboratory” — a space for funders seeking to maximize their individual and collective impact on democracy and civic life. The circumstances of the world in 2021 gave renewed purpose and urgency to the work of our philanthropic laboratory, and over the past year, we took intentional steps to increase our commitment to learn, experiment, collaborate, and model vibrant civic space as a community.

One of our guiding principles for how we work is to “learn out loud” — to actively, consistently, and iteratively talk about what we are learning in a public fashion with a goal of seeding conversations, learning, and action among anyone who has an interest in civic engagement and democracy in the United States. We offer this annual reflection in the same spirit as we “reflect out loud” about our journey over the past year.

PACE Learned…

This year, we started to internalize a mantra, shared with us by one of our Members: “It’s not just what you know, but also who you know it with.” Our learning over the last year was structured around content, for sure, but it was also structured around community. We found a lot of value in stepping into spaces where we learned not only with each other, but also from each other. That type of learning felt transformative to our work, as both our relationships and our knowledge grew.

Early in 2021, we identified that the potential for learning about democracy and civic life in America could be limitless, and we needed to focus our energy on particular topics. We coalesced around three learning and experimentation streams, which rose to the top based on the opportunities we saw in the field, the feedback we received from members, and an assessment of the areas where PACE is uniquely positioned to make a contribution. They are: (1) bridging and polarization, (2) civic education and learning, and (3) the language of democracy. The fullness of PACE’s learning over the last year in these areas was significant. Some highlights include:

Bridging and Polarization: We co-led a series and panel with the Center for Effective Philanthropy to wrestle with the question of whether America is better off divided. Our members met for two full days as a community to learn about toxic polarization and the levers we have to turn down its temperature; Amanda Ripley helped us understand high conflict, good conflict, and conflict entrepreneurs. We learned from the lived experience of polarization from Megan Phelps-Roper, a previous leader of Westboro Baptist Church. We convened a group to imagine what it would take for the U.S. to be a country that comes together after divisive elections.
Civic Education and Learning: We dug into Educating for American Democracy when it was released and shared major takeaways for philanthropy. We hosted a briefing with the Philanthropy Roundtable, Grantmakers for Education, and iCivics to hear the latest in civic education policy. We deepened our understanding of the ways private foundations are supporting civic education through case studies and research. We learned about what is motivating Gen Z to civic learning, action, and commitment through Civic Season. We continued to learn from the latest civic education research and resources as we facilitated the Civic Learning Funder Affinity Group.
Language of Democracy: This area of learning took a different approach, as we decided to launch a refresh and expansion of our 2019 Language Perceptions Project. We partnered with a research firm to understand people’s perceptions of the language associated with “civic engagement and democracy” work, and we are excited to share the fruits of that learning with the civic philanthropy field in early 2022.

Additionally, we seized opportunities to learn as they arose in other areas of democracy and civic life. For example, we prioritize learning about political violence in the aftermath of the January 6th Capitol insurrection (here and here), we co-hosted a briefing to understand how ranked choice voting in New York City’s primary impacted the culture surrounding the election, and we hosted a discussion with Dr. Yuval Levin to understand the role, strength, and trust of institutions in our democracy. Most notably (and highlighted further in the experimentation section below), we learned extensively about the role of faith communities in democracy and civic life through our Faith In/And Democracy (FIAD) initiative. We continued to convene the FIAD Learning Community of faith-inspired leaders, practitioners, and funders, which led to learnings on such questions and topics as what makes faith leaders and institutions unique, what calls leaders to confront discomfort and reach beyond the choir, and how the “hidden infrastructure” of faith and religious institutions contributes to the health and overall well-being of communities and democracy.

Perhaps the area of greatest learning for PACE over the last year was around what it means to be a philanthropic laboratory. This will be an on-going journey for us as an organization and a community, and we took intentional steps to explore and articulate this for ourselves and our network. We released a four-part series sharing what we learned:

PACE Experimented…

We hold experimentation as a foundational principle for the way we work, and we aim to be a platform that showcases, seeds, and supports collective experiments as we learn from the insights they reveal. In this spirit, we continued to facilitate and support the Faith In/And Democracy (FIAD) initiative as we ushered it into its third year. FIAD started as a one-year, experimental pooled fund by PACE Members who had a hypothesis that there was a field of practitioners working at the intersection of faith and democracy, and that it was under-exposed and under-resourced. Two years and an explosion of learnings later, we announced an expansion of the initiative in 2021 as it reached $1 million in grants to faith-inspired initiatives committed to democracy and civic life. We also took experimentation a step further for the initiative this year and established the FIAD Fund, which is a dedicated portion of the pooled fund to supports projects that build the evidence case around faith’s role in democracy. The Fund also utilizes participatory grantmaking practices in an effort to further democratize decision-making. Many of the projects that are being funded through this work are testing their own hypotheses about how to advance, strengthen, and innovate on faith’s role in democracy.

Supporting and showcasing FIAD as an experiment is not the only way we experimented this year; we also seeded an experiment related to philanthropy’s role in building social cohesion. We detected–especially after the series we released with CEP in Spring 2021 to complicate the narrative on bridging and polarization–that philanthropy’s concern about the rise in toxic polarization was bubbling to the surface. We had a hypothesis that funders were eager for a tool to help them reflect on and assess the ways they might be inadvertently contributing to polarization dynamics. We are in the midst of developing that tool, and we look forward to releasing more details about this experiment in the first quarter of 2022.

PACE Collaborated…

Collaboration is only possible with people and players at the table, so we were very excited that PACE grew to 59 members and welcomed seven new members in 2021: Arabella Advisors, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Klarman Family Foundation, Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Peter E. Haas Jr. Family Fund, and Piper Fund. In addition, PACE collaborated extensively with other organizations in the civic philanthropy field. We worked closely with our friends at Democracy Funders Network, New Pluralists, Center for Effective Philanthropy, Grantmakers for Education, Philanthropy Roundtable, and many others as we learned and experimented. Three collaborations stand out to us in particular:

As an immediate response to the January 6th Capitol insurrection, PACE collaborated with Democracy Funders Network to help funders take action. We helped catalyze a philanthropic statement (with over 260 signatures), aggregated statements individual foundations were releasing, developed action items for funders, and coordinated social media. It was a powerful affirmation of our collective commitment to democratic values, norms, and leadership.
We collaborated with CSR Communications and the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland to revisit Crisis As Catalyst, a resource to help funders guide a conversation about how a crisis can be a catalyst for civic reimagination. Together, we released a visual series that presented lessons from past crises throughout history and posed questions from the guide that urged funders to consider how to turn this current moment of crisis into an opportunity for imagination.
We collaborated with the Whitman Institute and Civity to host a conversation for funders about complex adaptive systems, how relationships drive these systems, and philanthropy’s role in engaging relationships. This collaboration sparked a tremendous dialogue about how to resource relationships, and we discovered just how eager funders were for a place to discuss this topic with others.

PACE Modeled…

In all of its work, PACE aims to model vibrant civic space, and in 2021, “space” was a term open for interpretation as we toggled between digital and in-person environments over the year. In all the spaces PACE convened, we worked hard to center two values we think are core to civic space: relationships and racial equity.

Relationships are foundational to PACE’s work, and building the infrastructure to support relationships is part of our charge. We experimented a lot in this category over the last year: we hosted virtual spaces dedicated solely to building fellowship among members, we started to test approaches to hybrid convening (and learned a lot of lessons along the way), we developed “peer consults” as a way for PACE Members to turn to one another for feedback, advice, and thought partnership, and we created informal space for PACE Members to explore racial equity and its impact on democracy through “Racial Equity Jam Sessions.” We were particularly proud to hear that 100% of pilot participants of our jam sessions felt the sessions were highly effective in developing trust among participants and fostering a space to iterate on others’ points.

Perhaps the area we put our most effort this year was in centering racial equity and applying a racial equity lens in our laboratory, which we believe is an essential ingredient to modeling vibrant civic space. Over the last year, we worked with a dedicated consultant (Danielle Marshall of Culture Principles) to guide our community, which resulted in the development of PACE’s racial equity commitment and an accompanying internal framework. The way we see it: the commitment outlines our intent and the framework holds us accountable to doing the work. We continue to push ourselves to make our work and the spaces we convene equitable, and we shared our learnings thus far in hopes that we might provoke, inspire, and serve as a resource for other philanthropic institutions on similar journeys.

In many ways, the areas in which we aimed to model this year were an important manifestation of a principle we hold core in our philanthropic laboratory: responsible philanthropy. We acknowledge that philanthropy can easily get wrapped up in its own power and reinforce the systemic inequities it is trying to address, and in the way we do our work, PACE strives to actively recognize and address the power imbalances that exist in philanthropy. For example, for any programming where we were asking for someone’s time and/or expertise, we compensated with stipends, honorariums, or small participation grants. This was true for speakers we invited to webinars and events, practitioners who participated in our imagination sprints, and non-funder members of the Faith In/And Democracy Learning Community. Through this, we came to understand that while PACE at times distributes funds, we are not a funding organization, nor were we ever meant to be; rather, we are a learning organization, and funds are necessary to compensate people for their time and contributions so that the learning is not extractive. To us, this is a core element of responsible philanthropy.

What’s Next?

We enter 2022 with even more resolve to confront the challenges ahead for America. We have a lot of programming underway, and our team is growing and evolving to support it: Amy McIsaac has been promoted to be a Managing Director, reflecting the leadership role she has played and will continue to play at PACE; we will hire an Operations Manager in the coming months; our Board has added three new members and two new officers, including Jonathan Gruber from Einhorn Collaborative who now serves as our Board Chair.

We certainly have an exciting year ahead as we continue to learn, experiment, collaborate, and model vibrant civic space. We know we will face great challenges along the way, but they are best met with colleagues and partners like you. Thank you for all you do in service to our democracy!

Yours in service,

Kristen Cambell, CEO

Amy McIsaac, Managing Director of Learning and Experimentation