Local Community

One way to create a shared context is through shared struggle. This is why many organizations implement ritualized hazing3 to initiate new members, but the important thing is not the hazing, it’s the sense that you are working together with your fellow humans to achieve a super-human goal. Whether that’s to develop vaccines, to drywall a shelter,... See more

Beginning the work of civic renewal in localities rather than at the national level is an easier lift in part because Americans have more trust in democracy the closer it is to them. Sixty-six percent of respondents in a 2022 Pew survey reported a favorable view of their local government, and 54 percent did of their state government, compared to... See more

So yes, Americans are materially wealthy and unfulfilled, and the primary problem is cultural—we’ve sacrificed community and meaning to emphasize an archetype built on acquiring as much stuff as possible, but then we have made that unnecessarily hard to do. When you give your citizens a cultural script, built on the material, that promises hard... See more

“Our towns are where civic culture is created, for better or worse. As this polarized moment in our national politics has shown, civic culture can be poisoned from the top down. But it can be healed and unpolluted from the bottom up and the inside out. How the residents of Tulsa choose to make a civic culture will of course be different from how... See more

Americans used to live within “place-based networks” of clubs, churches, schools, commerce, and recreation that overlapped, wrapping individuals in social support. Local networks protected individuals from isolation and loneliness.

Those networks have largely disappeared, replaced by networks based outside the local community. We shop and interact... See more

Dunning highlights a thorny and persistent problem with the system of nonprofit neighborhoods: it channelled and mediated the voices and interests of residents in ways that muffled direct challenges to the distribution of power within their communities.

Insofar as the neighborhood nonprofits that represent them have depended on government for their... See more

There are four systems in a community: one is the family system, one is the business and nonprofit system, one is the faith system, and the other is the school and government system. When those systems are working together well, you have a healthy, cohesive culture.

Over the last 50 years, people have shifted away from meeting and volunteering regularly in associations and informal gatherings such as support groups and Bible study groups, choosing instead to engage through “checkbook participation,” where we outsource and pay local and national organizations who hire professional staff to do the good works and... See more