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Belonging & Civic Muscle

People need fulfilling relationships and social supports to thrive. They need to feel part of a community, contributing to its vibrancy, and developing the power to co-create a common world. Social support from friends, family, and other networks helps us navigate challenges and reinforces healthy behaviors. People who feel connected tend to live healthier, happier lives.

At the community level, feeling like an important part of a larger community strengthens social ties, increasing trust and cooperation—making it easier to work together. This connection builds a virtuous cycle: When people feel valued and cared for within the community, they are more likely to contribute and participate in creating healthy, equitable places.

What You Need to Know

These key issues are essential to understanding how we can support thriving people and places.

Table Of Contents
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Belonging & Civic Muscle: Power to Shape a Common World

Communities with an inclusive sense of belonging and strong civic
muscle may be better able to:

  • Design their own pathways to resilience
  • Gather assets to respond effectively and equitably in a crisis
  • Persistently expand vital conditions, while alleviating urgent needs
  • Use their power to assure mutual accountability

Community-driven change, which strengthens people’s resilience and responsiveness, is more likely to make lasting progress, while also being more fair and democratic.

Community-driven change is characterized by:

  • Shared power between organizational decision makers and community residents Multiple perspectives on issues
  • Meaningful participation from diverse people and organizations
  • A commitment to equitable processes and outcomes
  • Decisions that are transparent and widely supported

Historical Context

AMERICA ITSELF IS A GRAND—AND STILL-EVOLVING—EXPERIMENT based on the idea that all people belong and have the power, or civic muscle, to govern our lives together. The great social movements of the past half-century profoundly changed America’s civic landscape in ways that carry deep implications for who feels they belong and how we work together to shape a common world.

The ideas of belonging and civic muscle bring together a long history of related concepts, such as such as, civic agency, civic capacity, deliberative democracy, public participation, public work, constructive nonviolence, and collaborative problem solving. All of these traditions strive to make democracy come alive, not only on election day but every day, as a way of life where we work across our differences in pursuit of the things we value.

“In every state, every city, there’s been some expression [for racial justice] and there’s already been change.”

john powell, Othering & Belonging Institute

“We can’t talk about transition from jail if we’ve never had a person who’s been in jail advising us on this work.”

Liz Baxter, North Sound Accountable Community of Health

Current Conditions

The novel coronavirus and other crises in 2020 revealed, once again, many staggering contradictions of interdependence and injustice across our country. It will take an even more decisive movement to fulfill America’s promise of dignity and justice. Rather than focusing on any single issue, this movement must further expand the boundaries of who belongs and strengthen our civic muscle to build the resilience we all need to survive and thrive together through whatever crises may come our way.

The daily drumbeat of the disproportionate deaths of Black people from the novel coronavirus and police killings serves as a stark reminder of the pernicious persistence of systemic racism. As a counter to Mississippi’s long history of racism, former Governor William Winter founded the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in 1999 on the belief that “honest, purposeful talk (about race) works.” Over the years, it has helped bring perpetrators of racial violence to trial, taught police officers how to avoid racial profiling, exposed the symbolic racism of Confederate monuments, altered the public narrative about race by creating school curricula that tell the truth about the state’s history, orchestrated rituals of atonement, and advocated for institutional reforms to replace systems of oppression with equitable ones.

Pivotal Moves

A Selection of Ideas for Changing Course

PIVOTAL MOVES are decisive actions that could begin now and change the course of community life relatively quickly.

ORGANIZE RECOVERY & RESILIENCE ACCOUNTABILITY COUNCILS

Recovery and Resilience Accountability Councils would assure local control and coordination over the direction, actions, and accountabilities of residents, as well as federal, state, philanthropy, and business partners. These Councils would incorporate insights from similar, successful efforts, like Accountable Communities for Health and Ryan White Planning Councils.

ESTABLISH A COMMUNITY COMMONWEALTH CORPS

A nationwide Community Commonwealth Corps would build on America’s long history of public work, repairing the lives, businesses, community organizations, places of worship, infrastructures, and other common goods decimated by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the decades of neglect, civic erosion, and racial injustice the pandemic has revealed so starkly.

EMBRACE TARGETED UNIVERSALISM FOR FAIRNESS & EFFECTIVENESS

Targeted universalism is a framework that allows communities to establish common goals and create strategies to support specific groups. When we understand how we are each situated in relation to the vital conditions we all need to thrive, we are better able to meet the unique needs of our friends and neighbors—and move toward shared outcomes.

UPHOLD CIVIL RIGHTS & HUMAN RIGHTS

We must uphold civil rights and human rights for all. US history shows substantial benefits when we enforce established civil rights with respect to health care, education, employment, housing, transportation, voting, environmental protection, and other vital conditions—all of which remain unrealized.

DEPOLARIZE PARTISAN POLITICS & WEAVE SOCIAL FABRIC

We must work together to discover what we have in common, building our social fabric around shared values and productive discourse. Organizations like Braver Angels, Weaving Community, Local Voices Network, and Living Room Conversations offer resources and strategies for facilitating conversations and dialogues across differences.

TRACK CHANGES IN BELONGING & CIVIC MUSCLE
◀ reliable transportation
vital conditions
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