How to strengthen the civic health of cities

By Richard Young

On the Table in Lexington, Ky. served as the primary public input channel for updating the city’s Comprehensive Plan. Image courtesy of CivicLex.

American democracy is in crisis. A 2022 poll from USA Today and Suffolk University found that over 80% of Americans are “very” or “somewhat” worried about the future of democracy. Perhaps even more alarmingly, 46% of Americans are open to forms of government other than representative democracy, including rule by a strong leader or by groups of experts.

There are a number of reasons for this crisis, including declining trust in media and institutions, polarization, racial and geographic disparities, disinvestment in civic education, corruption and the spread of toxic online ideological communities. It’s gotten so bad that many people fear widespread violent civil unrest, and online posts and comments about civil war are soaring.

People don’t trust our government or our democracy like they used to.

Reimagining the Civic Commons is well-positioned to help address these challenges to our democracy. The initiative supports significant investments in civic spaces that foster connection and cohesion. Civic engagement and public participation are explicit parts of Reimagining the Civic Commons’ four outcomes.

In 2017, Alexa Bush and Kate Catherall identified several key principles to spark civic engagement through the lens of public space, including meeting people where they are, empowering local leaders to help grow engagement and making processes personal. These principles are fundamental to the Reimagining the Civic Commons approach and to projects supported by the initiative.

Civic Artist Tony Gilmore created a Environmental Quality and Public Works themed board game. Image courtesy of CivicLex.

Increasing civic engagement is essential to rebuilding trust in our democracy — both in the built environment and beyond. That’s why Lexington, Kentucky, is applying the principles of Reimagining the Civic Commons to better address challenges in local civic life. By focusing on policy and systems change within our communities, we are encouraging widespread civic engagement and public participation — and helping local residents restitch their community’s civic fabric.

Activating our city’s civic spirit

My organization, CivicLex, is focused on strengthening civic health in Lexington. We joined Lexington’s Reimagining the Civic Commons collaborative at the beginning of 2022. In many ways, we are an outlier among the organizations engaged in this work. Rather than overseeing or developing public spaces in our city, our work embodies the initiative’s civic engagement strategies.

We joined because we believed CivicLex could have a powerful impact on how Reimagining the Civic Commons plays out in our community. Over the past five years, we have brought together tens of thousands of Lexington residents to help them understand and engage with local civic life. Our approach to reshaping civic life is centered in human-to-human connection and encompasses strategies that align with the Reimagining the Civic Commons approach.

An On the Table data walk hosted by CivicLex. Images courtesy of CivicLex.

We provide civic education and news, helping residents understand local government, know what is happening in city hall and get involved with making public policy. We send out weekly newsletters and social posts that cover city hall meetings and we publish explainers around issues like our city’s Urban Service Boundary, the city budget and local redistricting. We also build tools that help residents learn how to take part in local civic life.

But while public education is a big part of what we do, our primary focus for helping residents understand local government is in-person workshops and events that bring together government officials and everyday residents. In this way, our work meets residents where they are and empowers them to activate the civic spirit of their friends, family and neighbors.

Transforming civic engagement, collaboratively

CivicLex builds collaborative civic transformation projects that change how institutions engage the public. This spring, we led our city’s fifth On the Table, a week of in-person conversations about community issues that we inherited from the Blue Grass Community Foundation just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Built with residents, researchers and the Division of Planning, this year’s On the Table served as the primary public input channel for updating our city’s Comprehensive Plan. Across one week in April, we hosted 509 conversations with thousands of residents about the future of Lexington. These conversations resulted in robust data sets captured through a mid-conversation open response survey. Afterward, we worked closely with staff in the Division of Planning to code every answer and to publish a detailed methodology. It took more than 25 people two weeks to code the data. In the end, we gathered a statistically significant 12,500 individual public comments on land use planning in Lexington. It is the single largest publicly available dataset of community sentiment in our city’s history.

On the Table is a week of in-person conversations about community issues that take place in all different locations with many different volunteer hosts. Images courtesy of CivicLex.

We saw two exciting outcomes from this dataset interact with our Civic Commons work. First, we now know that public space, green space and walkability/bikeability are three of our community’s top priorities. Of the 12,500 comments, over 3,500 were about these topics. Second, we now have a granular, neighborhood-level understanding of community priorities that we can call on when issues related to Lexington’s Reimagining the Civic Commons projects come up. In the few months our dataset has been out, we’ve seen it inform countless projects, including the upcoming redevelopment of Phoenix Park downtown and the reimagining of Lexington’s beltway, New Circle Road.

As we’ve become more enmeshed in our city’s priorities for Reimagining the Civic Commons, we’ve found exciting ways to bring the initiative’s thoughtful approach to engagement into public space policy. In partnership with the city’s divisions of Parks and Recreation and Planning, community gardening organization Seedleaf, and the Trust for Public Land, we recently launched the Lexington Park Equity Accelerator. This project will reshape how decisions are made around green space, park development and public land-use planning. It will also identify strategies to ensure community views and priorities are included in critical aspects of city park systems. This is an opportunity to place Civic Commons principles directly in the center of county-wide policy creation and decision-making.

Imagine New Circle, one outcome from CivicLex’s recent On the Table series. Image courtesy of CivicLex.

Restitching our relationship with democracy

We see local issues, policy and government as some of the best places to restitch people’s relationship with democracy. When people have a clear stake, their engagement can have meaningful impacts, and because of this, they can connect with people they may typically disagree with. Because of our role in Reimagining the Civic Commons, CivicLex is in the position to make Lexington a standard bearer for policy and systems change by supporting and nurturing local civic life. We are hopeful that, with this approach, we can pull people back from their doomscrolling and help reinforce the foundations of American democracy.

In his 1939 essay Creative Democracy, American philosopher John Dewey wrote, “I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in the free gathering of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another.”

Local issues, policy and government are some of the best places to restitch people’s relationship with democracy. Image courtesy of CivicLex.

Let’s use these ideals to stabilize local civic life, whether we’re encouraging residents to show up at city hall, serve as a poll worker or write a letter to the editor. By taking inspiration from Reimagining the Civic Commons, we can spur meaningful participation in public governance and public life and support residents to restitch their communities’ civic fabric. Right now, all of our places have an opportunity to reinforce our communities’ commitments to American democracy — and Reimagining the Civic Commons is uniquely positioned to steward this work.

Richard Young is the executive director of CivicLex, a non-profit civic education organization building civic health through education, media, and relationship building in Lexington, Ky.

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.