Creating Community by Maricopa County Community College District

Higher education institutions can and should take steps to improve democratic practice on their campuses and for their students. They can also help develop tools and programs that aid democratic life in their surrounding communities. That is what happened in the Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD), the home of ten colleges in the greater Phoenix area. With a total enrollment of around one hundred thousand students, MCCCD is one of the largest community college systems in the country.

Program Description:

In the spring of 2022, representatives from several civic groups in Arizona met to talk about the growing polarization in the country and in the state. The legislature had authorized a partisan and poorly executed recount of the 2020 election results, and public officials were being harassed and receiving death threats. At the meeting, a member of the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce expressed the concern that, in this volatile setting, conversations at the workplace could go badly and destroy the ability of work teams to function.

While many organizations focus on promoting civic engagement among K–12 and higher-education students, this group in Arizona determined that the problems facing society are rooted more in adult behavior than in student actions. The group felt that adults needed a refresher course on the value of democratic citizenship and on cultivating the skills associated with democratic life. The easiest place to find adults is in the workplace. This led to Creating Community, a workforce-development tool designed for civic groups and industry to inculcate the skills a person needs to succeed in business and society.

The Maricopa County Community College District convened and led a coalition of civic groups to develop three modules. The district provided subject-matter experts from multiple colleges and facilitated the editing and publication of the modules. Each module emphasizes the value of citizenship in a diverse society. The modules are designed to be delivered in person or online. They review the skills needed to function as an engaged citizen and develop the habits of using those skills in public settings, with an emphasis on how to develop consensus. The modules were written in nonacademic terms to enable non-subject-matter experts, such as human resources officers, to facilitate the conversations.

The modules were also informed by a Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement study on perceptions of civic language. Per the study, the module avoids terms that are divisive and promotes terms that reflect shared values. The first module includes a civic engagement “Rosetta Stone” to connect the academic terms for civil discourse to equivalent terms for soft skills in a business context. “Community-based learning” is essentially the same idea as “public/private partnerships,” for example. This reflects efforts to use language that appeals to the widest audience across partisan, demographic, and urban/rural divides.

Impact: 

This material can be used to educate voting age adults in the need for civility, the skills of civility, and the practice of civility as members of their community. By encouraging robust social and civic engagement, the modules hope to increase social/cultural cohesion so communities can work together to solve complex problems.

Population Served:

The Creating Community workforce-development tool has been delivered to a variety of groups in the state. These include parole officers in rural Mohave County and retirement groups in urban Mesa. The Maricopa colleges have also used the modules internally, such as with employees of Maricopa Corporate College who, in turn, are sharing the modules with their contacts in business and industry. The modules are available for download free of charge and in print through a grant from the Vitalyst Health Foundation, a public health philanthropy. Its support was the result of the realization that, if communities lose the ability to have difficult conversations, none of the health problems they work on can be solved.

Learn more here.

Page last updated in August 2026