While pro-democracy actors work to defend our democratic and electoral institutions in the near term, securing and strengthening our democracy also necessitates cultivating a longer term, affirmative orientation. DFN’s Better Futures Project is excited to announce the publication of a new toolkit, Becoming Futures Ready: How Philanthropy Can Leverage Strategic Foresight For Democracy, to build the strategic foresight skills of funders and to expand the field’s capacity to envision a bold, lasting vision for our democracy. 

Read the full toolkit here.

In this new report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld examines how over the past two decades, dozens of governments have used regulations, laws, and vilifying narratives to restrict the ability of civil society organizations to act and speak. Now, a similar set of tactics is being rolled out in the United States. What should philanthropists and organizations expect, and what can be done?

From the report:

CLOSING SPACE INTERNATIONALLY

“The absence of civic space was a hallmark of Cold War totalitarianism. There was the individual, and there was the government; any attempt to organize regular people to act or speak publicly in even innocuous ways—such as a birdwatching league, a home church, or a small arts magazine—had to be monitored and approved by the ruling party or crushed.

The blossoming of civil society across the former Soviet Union and many other once-closed societies was among the strongest signals that the 1990s wave of democracy was not only toppling authoritarian regimes but also growing roots. Organizations, interest groups, religious congregations, open media, and the free exchange of ideas helped people find their voices, locate their communities, and push their governments and societies to do things that they cared about.

Then, in the mid-2000s, democracy started to recede globally. And the walls started to close in on civil society.”

Read the full report here>>

Over Zero and the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at the American Immigration Council are excited to announce the launch of “The Belonging Barometer: The State of Belonging in America.” 

The Belonging Barometer report calls attention to belonging as a critical dimension of life that should matter to all stakeholders who seek to improve America’s physical, social, civic, and democratic well-being.

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The Institute for Citizens & Scholars brings together diverse people, across traditional divides, to build a constitutional democracy that works for all. In 2019, Citizens & Scholars released the whitepaper From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem: A Landscape Analysis and Case for Collaboration, which noted a surprising consensus among practitioners in the civic education space that thecurrent approach to developing effective citizens needed to be updated for the 21st century. 

Building on that work, Citizens & Scholars has launched a multi-year initiative on Civic Measurement. The first major milestone is a new report, Mapping Civic Measurement: How are we assessing readiness and opportunities for an engaged citizenry?  

Mapping Civic Measurement is a comprehensive civic measurement landscape review and a first-of-its-kind framework for mapping civic readiness and opportunities.  

The report features a collection of measurement tools, rubrics, and more than 200 resources in use by practitioners across education, business, philanthropy, community institutions, media, government, and civil society. You’ll come away from the report with new ways to think about measuring civic learning impact, new research to inform your work, and new opportunities to connect with other practitioners. 

Now is the time to come together to cultivate people as informed, engaged, and hopeful citizens. Creating a common knowledge base and practices to measure civic readiness and opportunities will enable us to chart the course to a healthy and robust democracy that works for all. 

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Political violence is on the rise in the United States, and as we approach the 2024 election season, there are urgent interventions that can mitigate risks and prevent violence from further increasing. As we saw throughout 2020, elections and the post-election period can be flashpoints with particularly elevated tensions and increased risk of political violence. The violent attack on the US Capitol is forever etched in our minds, and it serves as a constant reminder of where our work begins as we look toward the 2024 elections. The increasing threats can be overwhelming, but with early and sustained investment in key antiviolence work, we can mitigate the risks of further violence over the next year and beyond.

Political violence and democratic backsliding—including declining institutional health and public distrust of institutions—are mutually reinforcing phenomena. The threat of political violence can chill civic engagement and voter participation, particularly among communities targeted by such threats. A heightened risk of political violence also endangers election administrators and election administration. In this guide we aim to present effective strategies and leading organizations involved in preventing and addressing political violence in hopes of increasing donor understanding of these issues and to catalyze action.

Email Carly Straus at carly@thirdplateau.com for access.

While questions about the size and role of government are highly politicized, most Americans are united in a desire for our government to be effective and efficient. Despite this, our national governing institutions are weakened by years of neglect and underinvestment. The federal government is beset with outdated systems ill-equipped for the twenty-first century and a demoralized and shrinking expert workforce. Partisan gridlock and insufficient resources perpetuate a vicious cycle in which national governing institutions struggle to deliver the results they aspire to, eroding public trust and therefore making it harder to secure the political support and resources they require to succeed. The historical lack of diversity in the senior federal workforce has led to programs failing to meet the needs of populations who are not represented in decision making processes. This lack of perspective in the design and implementation of programs not only limits their effectiveness, but also leads large swaths of the public to believe the federal government is not serving them or their families.

Highly functioning national governing institutions are more likely to restore the public’s trust and faith in democracy’s ability to deliver for all Americans. The effectiveness of our governing institutions matters on a basic level for making good use of public resources, delivering essential services, and ensuring that citizens experience the value of civic institutions. On a more existential level, our governing institutions need to be equipped to respond to the increasingly complex challenges of our time, including battling a global pandemic, managing a rapidly changing climate, modernizing our nation’s infrastructure, and mitigating the impacts of phenomena like inflation. Michael Lewis, author of The Fifth Risk, has noted that the “United States government manages the biggest portfolio of [catastrophic] risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world.”

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The midterm election period proved mercifully free from violence and drama, following months of concern from democracy organizations and even the Department of Homeland Security.

While most experts did not expect Election Day violence (which is rare globally), why did more problems not arise from the army of volunteer poll watchers recruited by Steve Bannon? Why was there not more pre-election intimidation? And why did most election deniers accept their losses peacefully, particularly after an expected red wave failed to materialize?

In other words, how should organizations and philanthropists who have been working to support democracy and deter political violence understand what occurred during the 2022 elections, and what it means for future work supporting democracy and reducing violence?

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