Create a Trust for Civic Infrastructure

Physical infrastructure, like highways, trains, and tunnels, creates connections between places. Civic infrastructure consists of gathering places like parks, libraries, schools, churches, and museums, spaces that bring people together and help form community bonds. It takes inspired leaders, organizational capacity, and networks for community engagement to flourish. The places, spaces, leaders, organizations, and networks that facilitate and undergird civic life are what we refer to when we speak of civic infrastructure.

People who engage with one another through common interests or experiences are more likely to develop a shared sense of collective good. Civic infrastructure supports interactions through which different segments of our society can connect and develop a sense of common purpose.

Although it is challenging to measure the health of our civic infrastructure, there is no question that our civic infrastructure today is poorly supported and too often underappreciated.  

In communities of every size, Americans told the Commission that there are not enough places that bring people together. The available evidence supports this conclusion. Federal and state governments have weakened civic infrastructure by introducing cuts to libraries, public parks, and community recreation programs.

The United States needs a Trust for Civic Infrastructure, an organization whose focus would be strengthening civic infrastructure on both the national and local levels.

Funding for the Trust should come initially from private funders and philanthropic organizations, but the organization should eventually be funded by Congress through annual appropriations. Congress already provides funds to strengthen democracies abroad through the National Endowment for Democracy. Why not fund democracy at home, too? 

The Gathering House in Spokane, Washington, is a “job training coffee shop” that gives people coming out of poverty, addiction, or parole a chance to work and build a resume.

On Sunday, the coffee shop closes, and with the barista bar a pulpit and café tables pews, the Gathering House becomes a church. Led by Pastor Rob Bryceson, the Gathering House has become a fixture of Spokane’s civic life. Business and nonprofit groups use its space to hold meetings.

Akron Civic Commons is connecting isolated communities by collaboratively reimagining public spaces. The effort includes investments in local neighborhoods and the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail that connects them. “Temporary and permanent design features and regular programming are reestablishing the 100-acre Summit Lake as a place of civic pride and play, bridging diverse neighborhoods including Ohio & Erie Canal Park and fostering economic development and public life in Akron’s downtown.”

Civic Health Project, CivicLex, The Village Square, and the North Carolina Leadership Forum are committed to working to implement this recommendation in order to help reinvent American democracy for the 21st century.