Creating a Culture of Connection
In Macon, community and civic leaders are investing in the civic commons to connect neighborhoods–and people — to each other
Macon, Georgia is located along the Ocmulgee River in Central Georgia, about an hour and half’s drive from Atlanta. It is the traditional homeland of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, boasts a population of about 157,000 residents and joined Reimagining the Civic Commons as part of the initiative’s expansion in 2020.
Recently, it has seemed like Macon has also been on just about every “must visit list,” from Frommer’s 2023 “Best Places to Visit” to the New York Times “52 Places to Go in 2023.” This attention is driven partly by the ongoing efforts of the Macon Civic Commons team and partly by the momentum building for Macon to be on the map as the site of the nation’s next national park. If and when approved by Congress, the historic Ocmulgee Mounds National Park will be the first national park co-managed by a removed Native American tribe, the Muscogee Nation.
While Macon is being celebrated, it’s also a place that, like so many American communities, is struggling with poverty, inequity and deep economic and racial divisions. For instance, the historic Black community in Pleasant Hill was cut off from the rest of the city by a freeway project decades ago; the poverty rate is over 25%; and the median household income is only about $44,000 a year. Alex Morrison, the Director of Planning and Public Spaces for Macon-Bibb County and convener of the Macon Civic Commons team outlined some of the big challenges of the community’s work: “We’re a deeply Southern city, divided even before the highway system divided us further…we have economic and transportation segregation, as well as deep racial segregation.”
On the ground learning from each other and from Macon
Macon was the host of the seventh Civic Commons Studio in April. These Studios, which move to different cities participating in Reimagining the Civic Commons, draw practitioners from among the 12 cities in the network. The purpose is to foster ongoing learning among and between practitioners and residents, connect a community of practice that cuts across organizational silos and to hear from innovative thought leaders. As part of each Studio, attendees get a chance to tour the host city, hearing from local members of that city’s Civic Commons team and other community members about work on the ground.
Macon’s Civic Commons team — convened by the Macon-Bibb Urban Development Authority and Macon-Bibb County, with members spanning 14 different public, private and nonprofit sector organizations, has demonstrated outsize ambition and remarkable community spirit for a city of its size. During our visit, we saw how the Civic Commons team and the wider community has transformed downtown — a place largely abandoned three decades ago — into a vibrant, walkable city center with just 18% storefront vacancy. The investment in downtown is also providing the team with opportunities to create seamless and inviting connections to the Pleasant Hill neighborhood and the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park through the extension of the Ocmulgee Heritage Trail.
Our tours of Macon brought forth the team’s vision for connecting people and places to each other and how working across silos can transform organizations, public space and communities. From the Studio, a few key themes emerged:
A shared vision and implementation from the “bottom up” can drive progress
The Macon Action Plan (MAP) provides insights about how planning and democratized implementation can inform a community’s transformation. First approved in 2015, updated in 2020 and now embarking on its third iteration, this community-driven plan provides both a focused set of goals and the specific steps to accomplish those ambitions. Through MAP, Macon has stimulated mixed-use developments in downtown, rehabilitated vacant housing in urban core neighborhoods including Pleasant Hill, activated many of the city’s public spaces and improved the pedestrian and bicycle experience.
From the beginning, MAP didn’t just sit on a shelf, as so many plans do. A diverse group of community organizations and individuals were encouraged to make the plan a reality through the “Downtown Challenge Grant” program, which invited anyone — residents and local organizations — to receive funding for projects that implement MAP. Since 2016, dozens of grants have gone to individuals and organizations from The Community Foundation of Central Georgia with support from the Peyton Anderson Foundation and Knight Foundation supported a variety of creative, resident-driven ideas.
A discussion at our Studio among the three local funders of the Macon Action Plan (MAP) illustrated how these three locally-focused philanthropies collaborated to fund and build out MAP, providing an example for investment in other communities to create urban vibrancy. Part of the secret of this success, according to Knight Foundation’s Lynn Murphey, was adopting a shared strategy among the three philanthropies, which decided to fund both the MAP planning process and its implementation through small dollar community grants to individuals and nonprofits. “It wasn’t just philanthropy, it was a process of invigorating and accelerating public and private investment,” said Murphey. “We created a new culture of working together.”
The result of this cooperation, said Karen Lambert from the Peyton Anderson Foundation, was the creation of places where people want to be. “Macon is a place people want to live and stay,” said Lambert. “This process is making Macon a more inclusive, fun, happy, and productive place.”
Kathryn Dennis from the Community Foundation of Central Georgia noted the power this work has to create new leadership, including among young people and African-Americans. “What I love about Macon is that you don’t have to be someone to become someone — we are inviting people diverse in race, age and background into this work, all of whom are making this community more inclusive and more vibrant.”
MAP and the community challenge grants have been a piece of engaging a diversity of people in the community, increasing grants to people of color residents and diversely-led organizations from 23% to 50%, and engaging more donors of color.
Public space’s potential for connecting people across differences
On day two, a powerful presentation by artist Tonika Lewis Johnson explored her “Folded Map Project,” which connects people who live at “twin” addresses on the North and South sides of Chicago, but whose experiences are so different they could be living in different cities. The primarily upper-middle class, white North Side and the primarily working class Black South Side share similar addresses on the long streets that run through Chicago, so that a map of the city, when folded, creates “map twins.” Johnson’s work connects these “map twins” for discussions that highlight the personal and human impacts of persistent racial and economic segregation.
“We don’t have a space to talk about this kind of segregation across divides,” Johnson told attendees. “Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. I want to draw attention to the inequities of segregation, how it hurts us all and perhaps outline how we can take a step towards racial healing.”
In Macon, you could feel the persistent racial and economic segregation Johnson referenced through walking tours of downtown and Pleasant Hill. The I-75 freeway was constructed in the late 1960s and bisected Pleasant Hill, cutting the rest of the historically Black neighborhood from the rest of the city. Much of the work being done in Macon now by the community’s civic commons team is to reknit Pleasant Hill to the rest of the community.
Part of this work to combat the physical segregation of Pleasant Hill by the Macon Civic Commons team is creating a walkable and bikeable connection between both neighborhoods called the Pleasant Hill Connector, upgraded and improved Jefferson Long Park (the site of a community meal on the Studio’s first evening), and worked with the Community Enhancement Authority to repair, upgrade and sell affordable homes to residents. Since our visit in April, the momentum in Pleasant Hill has since attracted new investment in the form of a $1.375M grant for Linear Park, originally built as part of a mitigation deal with the Georgia Department of Transportation that also includes funding for Jefferson Long Park and support for the Community Enhancement Authority housing strategy.
In a tour of the Ocmulgee Mounds National Heritage Park, attendees learned both about this sacred and historically important site and the history of the Mounds. If approved by Congress, the national park will be co-managed by the National Park Service and the original inhabitants of Middle Georgia, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, removed from their ancestral homelands in Middle Georgia in the 19th century as part of the Trail of Tears. The Mounds are part of the Tribe’s sacred heritage and thousands of years old. As a community, Macon has worked to build an ongoing relationship with the Muscogee Nation, permanently flying the Nation’s Flag at City Hall and creating plans with the tribe to build a cultural center focused on Muscogee history.
Civic infrastructure is a path to shared prosperity
In presentations and a panel discussion about how public space can contribute to healthier, more equitable and more prosperous communities, researcher Amanda Weinstein, Rhett Morris from Common Good Labs and former New York City Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver discussed the economic benefits of investing in civic infrastructure. One core theme that arose was that data backs up the strategy of creating a great place as a path to inclusive prosperity, defined as economic growth that benefits everyone and does not cause displacement.
Traditional economic development strategies do a terrible job of creating actual jobs, argued Weinstein, saying that attracting people through quality of life strategies like recreation, green spaces and arts and culture works much better. “Throwing money at a company ends up crowding out the economic activity you really want, and the businesses that would have started up don’t start up,” she said. Morris’ Common Good Labs research with Brookings demonstrated that decreases in poverty and growing inclusive prosperity was possible in hundreds of neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, without displacement, if neighborhoods had positive indicators present. These included high rates of home ownership, lower residential vacancy, lower rates of homicide, high residential density and the presence of community organizations working there.
In the group discussion facilitated by Alexa Bush from The Kresge Foundation, former New York City Parks Commissioner and current McAdams Principal Mitchell Silver emphasized the importance of a focus on the value of great places to the people who live nearby. “We often focus on the cost, but not the value of public space. What makes a great place is the value to communities, but those who make the decisions too often consider cost alone. That’s a mistake,” he said.
Mitchell pushed back against the concept of ‘green gentrification,’ arguing that doing nothing in the public realm because of a fear of gentrification means neglecting communities that may have lacked a vibrant public realm for decades. “In my experience, I have not found a place that has suffered displacement because of a community development or a new neighborhood park. It is very rare that this happens,” he said. Bush agreed. “The cost of doing nothing is also a very significant cost,” she said.
Collaborative relationships and an inclusive approach builds connection
In Macon, leaders and community members have learned to successfully work toward shared goals across organizational silos, across geography and across diverse backgrounds. While the obvious fruit of these collaborative efforts is the vision and implementation of the Macon Action Plan, underneath all the civic commons work in Macon is a strong sense of both connection and civic pride that shines through in interactions with residents and leaders.
Macon demonstrates that fostering connections between people in the civic commons is a powerful antidote to the divisions faced by Americans today. In his recent advisory on combating the epidemic of loneliness in the United States, the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on the country to develop a comprehensive national strategy for creating more social connection. His recommendations include designing the built environment for social connection, scaling community connection programs and building a culture of connection — this is exactly what we see on the ground in Reimagining the Civic Commons cities, like Macon.
“Fostering greater connection requires widespread individual and institutional action. It demands our sustained investment, effort, and focus. But it will be worth it, because when we each take these critical steps, we are choosing better lives, and to create a better world for all,” says the Surgeon General’s advisory. We couldn’t agree more.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration of The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and local partners.
