Civics
How people build the relationships, practices, institutions, and collective agency needed to participate in shaping a shared future.
Part of Love & Work's continuing inquiry into what human beings are capable of becoming.
social intelligence
Hope is a group project.
"The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole." — Peter Block
Alexander W. Galbraith, Barn Raising in Lansing (circa 1900)
We are just weeks away from a consequential midterm election, and like you I find myself increasingly frightened by what is happening to American democracy. The Trump administration continues to test the limits of presidential power and the institutions designed to constrain it. Enormous wealth increasingly buys access and influence. The rush to build massive data centers, while communities contend with their demands for power, water, and land, is only the latest obvious manifestation. Rules and norms that once seemed durable suddenly seem much less so. And all around me I hear thoughtful people wondering whether anything they do can possibly make a difference.
That last part may frighten me most. Lately I’ve been wondering what happens when enough people conclude that nothing they do matters.
Carlyn Beccia recently introduced me to a useful idea she calls the “asshole threshold.” Cooperation works when most people believe that other people will cooperate too. But when enough people cheat, exploit, lie, or simply look out for themselves, cooperation begins to seem foolish. Why follow the rules when the assholes don’t?
Eventually the cooperators begin to defect too. That sounds uncomfortably familiar. But there is another side to the story. Research on cooperation suggests that cooperators become more resilient when they find one another, interact repeatedly, and discover that cooperation can actually work.
I keep thinking about what this means for community. Maybe one reason so many of us feel powerless is that we experience the enormous problems confronting us as individuals. Climate change. Concentrated wealth. Threats to democracy. Each is far beyond anything I can affect by myself.
But community changes the scale of the question. You show up. You meet people you didn’t know. Someone listens. Someone knows something you don’t. Someone has a skill, a relationship, a building, a truck, a garden, an idea. You begin to discover what exists among you. You imagine something that none of you could accomplish alone.
And then you do something. Something changes. That experience matters. The question shifts from What can I possibly do? to What might we be able to do together?
Maybe this is what start where you are really means. Whenever people have a chance to know one another, discover what they have among them, imagine what might be possible, and accomplish something together, they experience their own collective capacity.
These experiences are still far too rare. But each one provides evidence that cooperation works. Perhaps hope isn’t something we need to convince one another to feel. Perhaps it is something we create together.
civics, civic capacity
Community is built one gathering at a time.
I like Peter Block’s contention that a community’s capacity to create its future resides not primarily in its leaders, but in its citizens and their relationships. In Community, he proposes the small group as the unit of transformation: bring people together, ask questions that matter, discover what each can contribute, and create something together. The experience shifts people from waiting for solutions to discovering their own capacity to act together.
BOOK: Community: The Structure of Belonging
CIVICS, SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
The opposite of helplessness may be connection.
Carlyn Beccia warns that when corruption and self-dealing become common, cooperation starts to look foolish. But drawing on Robert Axelrod’s game theory and the civic organizing of the Gilded Age, she finds reason for hope: cooperation becomes more resilient when cooperators find one another and keep showing up. I like her suggestion that community may be where we find evidence that cooperation works—and where we rediscover our collective power.
ARTICLE: Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
CIVICS, ASSET-BASED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
Look what we've got.
Asset-Based Community Development turns the usual approach to community building on its head. Rather than beginning with problems and deficiencies, John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann begin by discovering the people, relationships, skills, knowledge, spaces, and resources already present. In the process, people discover one another and begin connecting capacities that had been scattered and unseen. The question shifts from What do we lack? to What might we do with what we already have?
ARTICLE: Asset Based Community Development (ABCD)
CIVICS, SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY
Your backyard is wilder than you are.
Over the past fifty years, practitioners have developed radically different ways for groups to think and act together. World Café, Open Space, Circle, Appreciative Inquiry, Liberating Structures, and other “social technologies” replace arguing competing points of view with practices that help people listen to and learn from one another. Their premise is radical: change the way people come together, and you can change what they become capable of doing together.
FOLLOW THE THREAD
One liners
ARTICLE: Twenty-nine ordinary residents of Snohomish County spent three weekends learning about artificial intelligence and emerged with 35 recommendations for how their government should use it.
ARTICLE: A Phoenix woman started inviting neighbors into her yard to talk, and those conversations eventually turned a vacant city lot into a community garden.
ARTICLE: A dozen California neighbors skipped the usual fight with a developer, pooled $50,000, bought the land themselves, and turned it into a permanent nature preserve.
ARTICLE: When a heat wave hit Watertown, Massachusetts, neighbors collected unwanted air conditioners from other neighbors, then delivered and installed them free for people who needed them.
ARTICLE: After their island’s only grocery store and gas station closed, Anderson Island residents decided the replacement should belong to the community itself.
ARTICLE: Columbus is giving residents $9 million and asking them—not city officials—to decide how it should be spent in their neighborhoods.
*About the photograph
Alexander W. Galbraith photographed this barn raising in Lansing, then a rural community and now part of North York in Toronto, around 1900.
I am moved by what the photograph contains. There is no obvious expert at the center directing everyone else. Instead, scores of people with different roles and abilities have gathered to accomplish something none could readily do alone.
They aren’t discussing community, they are producing it. And the barn is almost beside the point. The tangible product of the gathering is a building. But another product is the experience people take home: we can do things together.
That is a lovely expression of a truth I want to find and celebrate again and again: Community is one of the places where people learn and relearn that cooperation works.
"Progress is people flourishing."
-Ted Gioia
Libraries
Given libraries’ unique combination of broad accessibility, civic neutrality, and deep public trust, policymakers should embed them intentionally within health and social planning frameworks.
Our city, Greenfield, Massachusetts, is the proud owner of a brand-new library right in the center of town. Since opening in 2023, visits are up more than 200 percent. Program attendance, use of study and meeting rooms, and reference and notary support have all surged. Computer use is up more than 300 percent.
ARTICLE: How Public Libraries Help Build Healthy Communities
Socialism
"Socialism has been as impossible to separate from the narrative of the nation’s history as the capitalist economy itself."
Michael Kazin is an American historian of U.S. politics and social movements, known for his scholarly work on the American left, populism, and the Democratic Party. In this article he observes that socialism has been a steady and shaping force in U.S. political and cultural life, even though socialist parties have rarely held significant electoral power.
ESSAY: A Brief History of American Socialism
Social Imagination
"Just keep moving forward, even if the steps are small.”
In 2007, the town of Greensburg, Kansas was nearly wiped off the map by a catastrophic EF-5 tornado. Ten people lost their lives, and the storm caused more than a quarter-billion dollars in damage.
VIDEO: Kansas town goes green while rebuilding after devastating tornado.
Democracy
Books
A powerful guide for defending freedom, pluralism, and rational problem-solving
Karl Popper (1902–1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher whose insights are especially relevant today. Having fled Austria in 1937 as the Nazis rose to power, he became a sharp critic of the philosophical roots of totalitarianism.
BOOK: The Open Society and Its Enemies
Activism
Books
Nonviolent civil resistance is not just morally preferable—it is strategically superior for securing freedom and sustaining democracy.
Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan have reshaped how we understand the power of ordinary people to create change and defend democracy.
BOOK: Why Civil Resistance Works. The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
Organizing
National ideals can still be organized and renewed, one neighborhood at a time.
On October 18, communities across the United States and beyond turned a day of protest into a vivid demonstration of grassroots coordination—proof that national ideals can still be organized and renewed, one neighborhood at a time.
ARTICLE: No Kings Protests (June 2025)
Activism
"This crisis is not about election cycles. It’s about historical tides."
The cover theme of The Atlantic’s November 2025 issue is “The Unfinished Revolution.” The editors mark the 250th anniversary of America’s founding and explore how the ideals, struggles, and unfinished business of the Revolution continue to shape the nation’s present and future.
ARTICLE: America Needs a Mass Movement Now
Empathy
Books
“If you wanted to design a system to break empathy, you could scarcely do better than the society we’ve created.”
Jamil Zaki is the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory. Concerned by the decline of empathy and kindness he saw in society—marked by rising tribalism, isolation, and growing barriers to understanding—he brought these concerns into his lab.
BOOK: The War for Kindness
Gathering
"Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them."
Uri Bram has apparently spent a lot of time thinking about how people interact at gatherings. Building on personal experience, social observation, and thoughtful experimentation, he summarizes what he's learned about hosting great parties.
ARTICLE: 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties
Listening
“We can change the world if we start listening to one another again.”
When Margaret J. Wheatley wrote this book in 2002, she said: “I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again.”She still believes this.
BOOK: TURNING TO ONE ANOTHER. Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future
Listening
"Couldn’t we devise an education that, rather than teaching citizens not to talk to strangers, instead teaches them how to interact with them self-confidently?”
Danielle Allen suggests that for many in the South, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was, in effect, a reconsideration of the Civil War.
BOOK: Talking to Strangers. Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education
