Our joint civity journey – close to 20 years now – started with a one-on-one conversation … with each other. We talked about our concerns about important “tough issues” such as the environment, health care, education, racism, and poverty. We talked about our combined experience in local communities where we saw the effects of these problems, and where we also saw efforts to address them. And we started talking about the barriers we saw that got in the way of those efforts at problem-solving – and also the conditions that made for their success.
After that, many, many more conversations ensued – with each other, with local leaders, with researchers and academics. We learned that a community’s ability to solve tough issues was tied to how people saw others – particularly others that they treated as different and apart from them. When people saw that “we’re all in it together” and social trust was high, problem-solving went a lot better. But when the community was mired in “us vs. them,” things didn’t go so well.
Ten years ago we started Civity the organization to build and reinforce social trust. Literally, our purpose was and is to support communities moving from “us vs. them” to “we all belong.”
We chose the word “civity” (from the Latin word for “the people of a city”) to name a culture of intentionally creating cross-cutting relationships: relationships of respect and empathy across the differences that too often divide our communities. A civity culture highlights the relational aspect of civic engagement and nurtures the growth of civic capacity. Civity interactions elicit social trust. Civity builds community resilience, social muscle, and civic health.
Many of the collective challenges we as communities and we as a nation face are deep-seated and long-term. For these, we need to fortify ourselves – keep up and even build our social muscle – at the same time that we are working through the issues. Even more fundamentally, we need to build civity as we tackle these issues, because many of them arise from and are intensified by us-versus-them dynamics.
We started Civity to get to the root of these collective challenges. A healthy community culture in which people connect and communicate with people across lines of difference is a real boost to that community’s ability to address problems. And because a healthy community culture is the foundation for everything in that community, it helps in tackling ALL problems.
Since we founded Civity, many, many leaders across the country have come to us. They are deeply concerned about how people “see” other people – across divides of race, of religion, of socio-economic status, and, more and more, of politics.
But lately, we’re seeing something new. People are coming to us because they are concerned about specific problems. They see how the lack of civity is getting in the way, and they understand that building civity is essential for making real progress.
For over a year now, Civity has been working with leaders concerned about California’s housing crisis. As part of Meta’s California Housing Initiative, we see that the core of local resistance to building new housing stems from people in established neighborhoods fearing change to the “character of their community.” Whether this is a concern about different types of housing or different types of people, the need is to move toward a “we all belong” vision.
Civity has also, with the support of the Hewlett Foundation, been supporting groups and communities facing the effects of climate change. Even more than the housing shortage, climate change has been a long time in the making, and responding to it is anything but a quick fix. “Us versus them” distracts from the shared challenges at hand, which call for a “we’re all in this together” response.
Our purpose with Civity has always been to build the social muscle and community resilience we need to move forward together. Propelled by the “tough issues” into this work in the first place, we now feel we have come full circle. We are, as always, inspired by you, the people we meet in this work, and we are grateful to be in relationship with you.
Civity and the Tough Issues Photo by Fred Murphy (CC BY-ND-NC 1.0)