🤝🫶🏽 What Lexington, KY, can teach us about community engagement

Make it fun, focus on the whole person, and other lessons from CivicLex's Richard Young

We’re seeking a number of roles: Head of People and Culture, Staff Researcher for Local Lab, Senior Product Manager for Public Spaces Incubator, and Head of External Engagement

As we get more interested in bringing neighbors together in local communities, it’s helpful to look at specific examples, both online and off. So this week, we turn to CivicLex, an inspiring and innovative nonprofit dedicated to strengthening civic health in Lexington, Kentucky.

Here’s how Founder & Executive Director Richard Young summarizes CivicLex’s work:

We essentially do five things: We help people understand our civic institutions. We help them understand what's going on in local government. We help them build relationships in physical space. We help build relationships across power, and we help change how our city government works to make it easier to participate.

I had a great time learning from Richard and talking with him about their work in Lexington. As you’ll see, everything CivicLex does is specific to Lexington, but I think their work is widely applicable. As Richard wrote recently, “My view is that American democracy is only as strong as the individual local democracies that it includes.” At New_ Public, we couldn’t agree more.

We also touched on an interesting question: How can the internet strengthen local communities? Are there limits to how much connection is possible without gathering together IRL? Once again, we’re testing new tools for public conversation, and we’d love for you to weigh in here.

–Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial

What you need to know about Lexington:

From a zoomed-out perspective, we're a midsize city, 330,000 people, the second largest city in Kentucky. Lexington has never seen population decline. Our economy has always been agrarian. It's always been based on agriculture.

Along with that comes some really troubling parts of our history as a city. We were one of the largest sites for the sale of enslaved people in the United States. That was a huge part of Lexington's legacy and still is something that we're reckoning with as a city.

It's a city in which relationships really matter, where you're not more than one or two degrees separated from anyone. You are still going to run into the mayor. There's this huge Appalachian undercurrent in Lexington. We have a lot of the relational sort of nicities that come with southern culture and midwestern culture.

Also, our city elected to become a nonpartisan government. That means the mayor and our council members are all elected without party affiliation. The dividing lines always aren't blue and red.

How and why Richard started CivicLex:

I started working on CivicLex in 2016. I had just left a really challenging job in neighborhood-level community development. I saw a lot of decisions and official meetings being made without many people weighing in. I also saw that a few moderately well-organized people could actually have a significant influence in local policy. That combination made me realize there's something here about bringing more people into these processes and decisions. We needed to have more folks at the decision-making table in local government.

The big gap was people understanding these issues on a point to point basis, but not really understanding the broad context. We started by aggregating and centralizing information, putting it into a format that was really easy to digest, and then pairing that digital platform with in-person events. These events wouldn’t just connect people with the issues, but connect them with the decision-makers behind those issues.

After a few years, I ran into somebody at a grocery store who said we were basically lying to people by telling them that getting involved matters and that we’re part of the problem. That really planted a seed in my brain.

If we're telling people to get involved, we need to take responsibility for what that engagement is like, and we need to try and make it better. We actually started reaching out to government. Since then we've run eight or nine discrete programs focused on trying to make the process of engaging with local government something that is both meaningful and rewarding for the public so they want to do it again. They don't come and yell at me in the grocery store now.

Richard’s theory of stewardship and facilitation:

We have a significant focus on “whole people” in conversations. In civic spaces, people are often so focused on civic issues and civic outcomes that we're ignoring the whole person. We're ignoring what movies they like, where they like to spend their time, how many kids they have, where they went to school, what their favorite food is. Because it's work for people.

People don't wake up thinking about this. They care about outcomes and what happens in their communities. They care about what it's like on the road getting to work, and adequate education opportunities for kids and access to housing, but they don't care about “civic engagement and democracy.”

We should be treating people as whole people, and inviting them to share more of themselves, because that's actually what's bringing people there: a sense of wanting connection with others, some sense of agency in caring about the place that they live. We try to take the approach in our facilitation and in the design of our events from Rural-Urban Exchange. Most of our facilitators for our events are staff.

We'll do events that are just like, “come out and paint pumpkins.” That's it. You don't need to come and share your perspective on the future of the city. Come out and paint some pumpkins and there will be some people from local government there. Or come to this outdoor festival. There'll be a bouncy castle and a giant slide and someone from the city's planning division will be DJing. It doesn't all have to be about efficiency of public engagement. It has to be about acknowledging people's whole selves and their desire to be part of a community.

We do a bunch of events, over a hundred in person events a year. We go to everything that we possibly can. We try and be very open and honest about what we care about and not be too serious. This has serious outcomes and implications but if you go into it being all about serious work, then no one's going to care.

A screenshot of CivicLex’s website

The challenges and limits about what can be done online vs offline:

I would say we generally have a pessimistic view about online civic engagement. The length of the fuse towards dehumanization online is much shorter than the length of it in-person. You go much quicker from “I disagree with this person” to “I hate this person.” It’s much harder to do that in real life. There’s no sense of mutual accountability and mutual co-existence. It’s a place where it’s really easy to dehumanize people.

I think it does have the capacity to be a healing place. When the pandemic started, we switched all of our programming to hosting these digital spaces on Zoom. It was a monster of a challenge to facilitate. We would have 400-500 people synced in on some of these calls. The moderation tools were not great at the time.

I don’t think I realized that it actually provided a really important thing for people: a sense of connection and capacity to process shared trauma. That was hard. Now, we don’t use digital spaces as much for that. Even in the past 4-5 years, people are getting even more feral when there’s a screen separating them from their neighbors.

We still use it for getting information out about what’s happening in local government. The thing we’re known for, first and foremost in Lexington, is our digital newsletter. But for us the digital is a mechanism to bring people into in-person work with us. That is our endgame, to get you in a room with us and help you connect with people around you who have similar interests.

Looking at some of the other things out there, like y’all’s work, there is the potential for digital spaces in which people can actually feel a sense of meaningful connection and belonging. The big question I always have is, how does that apply to local, place-based contexts?

Why CivicLex does this work:

There are larger stakes about democracy, self-government, and our capacity to make decisions about our lives. At the federal level, at the state level, that’s really concerning and something that I have no control over. I can influence it when I vote and if I start writing to people. But I do have the capacity to really influence people's concepts of self-government and democracy here in Lexington.

I think people's sense of meaning and mutual commitment and agency in a democracy can trickle up from the local level. We have such a collapse in national institutions that I think our last hope of saving national institutions is bolstering our local institutions and the sense of possibility that exists there.

To me the stakes are pretty high, because if we lose faith in our ability as a country, or as Kentuckians, or as Lexingtonians, to have some control over the place that we live in, I think we start to lose our imagination and our capacity to believe that we matter.

I really believe strongly that people's ability to have a sense of agency affects their sense of self worth and of being. I think if we start working on improving this sense of agency and meaning here locally, we can actually do something.

We can actually give people that warm and fuzzy feeling when they show up to a thing and the vote goes the way they care about, or when they just can sit down and have coffee with an elected official. That is the type of thinking that we really want to pull people to, a sense of shared humanity, commitment, and agency here at the local level. The stakes are whether people feel like they matter to their community, which is actually a pretty profound part of being a human being.

How to scale local civic engagement work:

I really believe strongly that what works in Lexington works in Lexington. A lot of the things that work in Lexington can also work in Cincinnati or Reno, but it's not going to be able to be the exact same thing. And what Reno needs is very different than what Lexington needs. There are things we can learn from each other, and strategies, measurement tools, maybe even platforms or technology frameworks that we can share, but ultimately, I am from Lexington.

I grew up here. Every day I am discovering new things about my place that radically change how I think about my work. I would never assume that I know what’s best in another place. We need to be thinking about how scale is enabling people to do what’s best for their own community.

When someone's like, "Hey, how do I do this?" I'm like, "have you talked to your neighbors about if they want something like that and talked to people who may already be doing something similar?" That's a great place to start. If people want to build an organization similar to CivicLex, they should see what's going on in their community first. Are there things they don't know about? How can they support that?

Just pick one of the five things we do and start there. See if there are any other folks that are doing those things already and get involved. Are there social studies teachers who are looking for resources? Are there libraries that are interested in getting more people involved in civic life? Are there boards and commissions for your local government that you can join? You don't have to start a non-profit organization to make a difference. At the same time, I think that we do need more local civic institutions that are working on these issues.

And so if you want to start a non-profit, it's hard, but we're here to help. We have a bunch of materials and documentation of how we build our board and our programs, how we do facilitation, how we manage our city hall coverage — all these things.

I think we're going to put out a larger version of our how-to guide later this year. But also, we're just happy to chat. Just spending 30 minutes on a call with somebody can change so much about how you do your work and can give you so much inspiration that can really get you through those hard times in building an institution.

Thanks Richard!

Trying to get out in the sunlight as much as possible,

–Josh