Alex Daniels on the critical role philanthropy and nonprofits played in voter education and mobilization in Georgia’s 2021 Senate run-off races. READ MORE>
Steven Waldman on the importance of philanthropic support for local news. READ MORE>
Glenn Gamboa on the critical role philanthropy played in the 2020 election. READ MORE>
Joe Goldman on how philanthropy can support the fight for a more open and just democracy. READ MORE>
Mike Scutari on how philanthropy can continue and deepen efforts to curb misinformation in the coming years. READ MORE>
Philip Rojc interviews democracy funders on what funders should have done better in the lead-up to January 6, and what they can do now. READ MORE>
Mike Scutari summarizes areas where philanthropy has both succeeded and come up short in the fight against misinformation, along with some of the obstacles they’ll be facing in the precarious year ahead. READ MORE>
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of organizations working to address our growing political divisions and hyper-partisanship. FixUS has developed this Landscape Review with the purpose of curating the many existing organizations devoted to improving the state of our democracy through political, economic, cultural, and other changes. READ MORE>
Arabella Advisors’ Loren McArthur explores how philanthropy can work to bolster government over the long haul and not merely seek to make up for its deficiencies. READ MORE>
Mohit Mookim, Rob Reich, Nadia Roumani, and Ayushi Vig outline how those with wealth and privilege are uniquely positioned to support the building and reimagining of our tattered and under-resourced democracy-preserving institutions. READ MORE>
In mid-2020, the Alliance for Securing Democracy convened a task force of 30 leading American national security and foreign policy experts to devise a national strategy for the United States to offset autocratic advances in non-military domains of competition. This report reflects the collective insights and recommendations of this bipartisan group. READ MORE>
Democracy Fund’s Josh Stearns explores how journalism can benefit civic engagement, build social cohesion, and provide other democratic benefits. READ MORE>
In this first report of the American Fabric series, More in Common delves deeper into the complexity of American identity. The report explores how associations, experiences, and norms of our shared identity differ across the political and demographic diversity of the United States. Conducted against the backdrop of a deeply contentious year, the study articulates where Americans continue to diverge and highlights places of meaningful commonality. READ MORE>
Read this article by the Knight Foundation’s Sam Gill on what the 2020 US presidential election can teach us about the need for new knowledge in the digital age. READ MORE>
This report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences includes key recommendations to increase citizens’ capacity to engage in their communities, call attention to promising local initiatives around the country, combat rising threats to democratic self-government, and rebuild trust in political institutions. READ MORE>
This essay series from the Knight Foundation and Kettering Foundation explores the challenges and opportunities for American democracy and what role philanthropy can play in addressing those challenges. It includes 18 pieces by leading thinkers on the future of our democracy including Francis Fukuyama, Antonia Hernández, Brian Hooks, and Yascha Mounk. READ MORE>
DFN’s Executive Director Mike Berkowitz outlines the damage President Trump does by claiming fraud refusing to concede in the 2020 election. READ MORE>
Inside Philanthropy speaks with funders about their reactions to the 2020 elections and plans for continued work in the democracy field. READ MORE>
Open letter from 120 philanthropic leaders affirming the principles of a free, fair, and safe election season and asking fellow leaders to do the same. READ MORE>
DFN’s Executive Director Mike Berkowitz shares some of the numerous options funders have for demonstrating civic leadership leading up to and immediately following the election, and in the process, ensuring public safety and protecting democratic values and norms. READ MORE>
On November 21, 2022, PACE and DFN hosted a webinar to present newly developed evidence from four organizations–three of which were grantees from PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Fund. During the webinar, each speaker presented evidence from their work and then participants engaged with the speakers in breakout room conversations.
Building a robust, high functioning pluralist democracy in the U.S. capable of ushering in better futures for Americans requires us to think boldly and move away from reaction, apathy, and surrender. The extraordinary times we live in, full of rapid change, uncertainty and possibility, call upon us to identify and lift up positive disruptors who dare to dream and imagine what could be.
DFN’s report Imagining Better Futures for American Democracy is a call to action to imagine what our democracy could become. Informed by dozens of interviews with visionary thinkers and doers from a variety of fields and viewpoints, including futurists, activists, thought leaders, creatives, artists, religious leaders, and funders, the report shares their insights on why positive visioning matters, discusses how those visions of better futures relate to democracy and governance systems, and asks how we can inspire more Americans to dream bigger and develop a sense of agency to bring those ideas to fruition.
Below are the report’s key findings and recommendations:
Findings:
Enthusiastic and emphatic agreement that positive visions of the future matter tremendously because they help us to imagine better alternatives, motivate us, and guide us to achieving positive societal outcomes. They also reinforce the idea that we have agency to shape our individual and collective futures and those of our descendants.
Several points of disconnection –
Few interviewees saw governance as critical to achieving the better futures they articulated, or had thought about how to improve and reimagine democracy.
The future-oriented community seldom connects with the democracy community.
America lags in experimenting with new forms of future-oriented governance models and thinking.
The people we interviewed are also disconnected from each other, although there are some hubs and communities of practice that provide connective tissue that some interviewees are a part of.
Many obstacles (e.g., complex problems from the local to the planetary, conflict-driven media and political environments, dystopian narratives, racism and othering) currently stand in the way of positive visions of the future emerging at scale.
Positive stories about the future and narratives of mutuality and abundance exist but are barely breaking through in mass culture.
Recommendations:
While we have a strong foundation on which to build – great ideas, visionary leaders, real-world experiments, powerful stories about better futures, and media campaigns – we need more infrastructure and connective tissue to gain traction and impact. Accordingly, we recommend three types of strategies:
Strengthen the positive visioning ecosystem by investing in infrastructure and relationships
There are numerous ways to build and support an emerging ecosystem and to create connections between those broadly engaged in positive visioning and those working specifically on democracy issues. We recommend more networking, collaboration, and mapping, more productive chances to convene donors and working groups around the future of democracy, and greater use of futures thinking tools to change mindsets.
Model what’s possible and fund experimentation
We want to explore how to adapt governance innovations from outside the U.S. that incorporate a futures orientation, a longer planning horizon, and an intergenerational fairness lens. We also see promise in funding innovative efforts to strengthen and invigorate democracy in the U.S., especially at the state and local level, by using technology, engaging youth, creatives, game designers, and speculative fiction writers, and tapping into collective imagination exercises.
Strengthen narrative systems & amplify positive, futures-oriented content
We need strategies that elevate and sustain narratives of abundance, interdependence, and mutuality and that amplify current bright spots for greater impact. Content also matters. We need more of it that’s positive, inspiring, and hopeful about what we can build together. That means influencing which stories are told, by whom, and how.
The Constitution Drafting Project brings together three teams of leading constitutional scholars—team libertarian, team progressive, and team conservative—to draft and present their ideal constitutions. Team libertarian was led by Ilya Shapiro, then of the Cato Institute, and included Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute and Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law School. Team progressive was led by Caroline Fredrickson of Georgetown Law School and included Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School and Melissa Murray of New York University School of Law. Team conservative was led by Ilan Wurman of Arizona State University College of Law and included Robert P. George of Princeton University, Michael McConnell of Stanford Law School, and Colleen A. Sheehan of Arizona State University.
With U.S. democracy in crisis, guest contributors Mike Berkowitz and Rachel Kleinfeld argue that philanthropy cannot stick to its usual playbook. They outline five ways funders can improve how they approach this work.
In this moment of crisis, donors must use all the tools available to protect American democracy. Tax-deductible philanthropy alone is insufficient.
In case you missed DFN’s The Role of Faith Communities in Preserving Democracy program, PACE provided a summary of the webinar.
In this meeting, DFN explored key questions around the role faith communities can play in preserving American democracy: What can faith communities contribute to a pro-democracy movement? How can faith leaders and communities be mobilized to act in defense of democracy and resist embracing extremist and anti-democratic viewpoints? What are the potential benefits of faith engagement in the pro-democracy movement, and what do we risk by failing to engage religious communities?
READ MORE>
More in Common’s newest survey, Parties and Politics, focused on Americans’ attitudes towards the 2022 midterm elections and their feelings about how to best influence politics. It was developed in collaboration with the national NBC broadcast & streaming network, LX News, as well as our polling partner YouGov.
The top findings are :
Americans across party, race, and generations overwhelming see voting as the most effective way to influence politics. However, Gen Z Americans are much more likely than other generations to also see protesting as an effective way to influence politics.
Democrats and Republicans are much more likely to want more moderate candidates in the other party than in their own party. In contrast, Independents want more moderate candidates in both parties. Republicans and Democrats who want more moderate candidates in their own party were less ideologically extreme and more likely to say they belonged to their party because of their family or friends, as opposed to how their party aligned with their values.
Registered voters are ten times more likely to say they will vote in the 2022 general election compared to Americans who are not registered to vote.
As cases of political violence rise in America, PACE reviews five strategies for funders interested in preventing political violence to implement.
There is no shortage of headlines about the grim state of our democracy. Many forces are to blame: leaders who flout democratic norms and spout “us vs. them” rhetoric, a political system that fuels polarization, growing threats of political violence and election interference, and the divisive and distorting effects of social media. The list goes on. Another factor, frequently left out of the picture, is loneliness – often defined as the discrepancy between one’s desired and actual levels of social connection.
We see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.