Better Together America: Another Example of Massively Parallel Democracy Building at Work
Newsletter 352 - May 10, 2025
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On May 1 and 2, we attended Better Together America's (BTA) Civic Hub Builders Initial Accelerator Workshop and came away energized and excited to learn about all of the "civic hub" building efforts that are already underway, and seeing the potential growth of this movement into something much bigger. This newsletter is the first report we plan to make on that event. As we explain at the end, there will hopefully be more.
What Are Civic Hubs?
The workshop started out with an explanation of what a "hub" is, which seems like a good point to start this post too. BTA defines civic hubs as "diverse collections of local, nonpartisan organizations, community leaders, and solutions journalists who partner with their community to identify and solve its democracy and civic health-related needs, goals, and priorities together." Drawing from a slide presented at the workshop entitled "What is a Civic Hub?", Civic Hubs are
Broad-based (meaning focused on more than a single issue, though they may start by focusing on one issue and grow from there). Their overarching goal is to build community and civic capacity to address a whole range of problems, rather than being focused on a particular policy change.
Non-partisan: based on shared democratic values ("small d" democracy, as in democratic governance, not the Democratic Party). Hubs should not be progressive or conservative, and should not pursue solutions for partisan gain. Rather, they should seek to transcend partisan interests, and demonstrate how transpartisan or nonpartisan work can be more effective at solving problems than a partisan approach. Ideally, over time, the hub will offer a new identity to participants as "hub members," "community members," or "transpartisans," which will grow to supersede earlier, sometimes stronger, partisan identifications.
Collaborative: co-created and consensus-driven. Hence, while they can be started by one person or one organization, that person or organization does not "own" or "run" the hub — all the participants do. Hub builders, Caleb Christian said, are "weaving a network, not building a kingdom. ... If you don't want an authoritarian government, you shouldn't run your hub that way either." (Caleb is one of the co-founders of Better Together America and is the Director of Hub Learning and Support.) Another benefit of distributed leadership is that the hubs are sustainable — if the originator leaves, the hub will still keep going.
Hubs include a range of democracy and civic health fields. So they do not just focus on one activity, but they include people and organizations who are working on a variety of civic-health-related endeavors. Examples of organizations that might participate in a hub include ones working on deliberative and participatory democracy, bridging (between left and right, rural/urban, rich/poor, etc.) service organizations, election reform organizations, other structural reformers, community foundations, community mediation centers, civic educators and trainers, community foundations, solutions journalists.
Civic hubs are solutions-oriented and practical. They go beyond talk and bridge building (although that can be part of their work) to collaborative action on real problems. They work early on to establish strong relationships between the participants, but they then move beyond that to tackle pressing community problems. Hubs described at the workshop took on such problems as lack of childcare, alienated and disconnected youth, housing (and lack thereof), fraying civic connections, clean water availability and more. Caleb suggested that hubs start with "easy wins" to build momentum, and then move onto harder issues over time.
Local: So far, hubs have been organized at the local (community), regional (parts of a large city or a state) and even at the state-level, although organizers reported that working at the level of a whole state was more challenging, as it requires more resources, time, and effort to hold the group together, and it is harder for all would-be hub members to meet together if the state is large. (A statewide effort was tried in Washington state, and although all the people initially recruited were enthusiastic, the hub organizers weren't able to maintain the momentum over the obstacle of geographic size.)
Driven by, reflecting, and accountable to the whole community, not one particular person, or organization, or campaign. Hub members approach problems by asking "how can we work together to support the community and each other?" And they do so in addition to pursuing their own organizations' individual interests, work and goals. So hub members are not expected to abandon their missions, but rather, they should be able to accelerate their missions through hub participation, as they receive assistance and support from other hub members.
They seek system change over time, realizing that meaningful change often comes slowly. There is no "silver bullet" to solve any of our long-term, complex socio-economic, environmental, and/or political problems. This is a project that makes a laudable commitment to a long-term effort and does not seek some sort of unrealistic "quick fix."
Why Are Civic Hubs Needed?
The Civic Hub notion grew out of data that showed that
Across the country, trust in local leaders is relatively high, while trust in national leaders is low. We have been told by multiple people, both BTA participants and others, that working to strengthen democracy at the national level is much more challenging (some would say impossible) than it is at the local level. So, a consensus among many active in the nonpartisan, pro-democracy movement is that work should start at the local level, where success can be more easily achieved and the viability of collaborative governance can be more easily demonstrated. Successes at this level can then be scaled up to higher levels, both by the hubs themselves collaborating, and by creating similar structures at higher levels of organization— structures that would, ideally, be based on the success of earlier local efforts.
Similarly, people are more confident that they can have a voice in local governance, while most people feel completely cut off from national governance. They may vote every two years, but few think their vote will make a significant difference. (Given the way in which gerrymandering and natural demographics tilt elections in predictable partisan directions, this is often the case.) Added to this is the fact that big money has much more influence in national decision-making, than it does locally. So, most people feel as if their interests and needs aren't being noticed or met at the national level. They do, however, think they have a reasonable chance of having meaningful input at the local level.
Studies have shown that grassroots citizens taking action together with other community members to achieve a specific outcome is strongly tied to those citizens' feelings of interpersonal trust, agency, and belonging. This is true for relatively simple, everyday problems, as well as more challenging, community-wide issues. However, just talking with others (in bridge-building dialogues) was not as strongly correlated with those same traits.
So, in a time when individuals' alienation, sense of hopelessness, and pessimism about the future are rampant, all of these ills can be positively affected by participating in civic hub activities.
What particularly excites Guy and Heidi about BTA's effort is that it is an excellent model for scaling up small group, "table-oriented" conflict resolution processes to a much larger level. While many BTA hubs use table-based discussions with small groups as a significant part of their work, they go beyond "just talk" to planning and implementing actions to bring about desired changes. And Better Together America is providing training and resource materials (and potentially, funding) to anyone wanting to start a hub. They also are creating "learning cohorts" of people who are building hubs in different places but at the same time. So they are establishing a mechanism which will allow hub builders in Denver to confer with hub builders in Chicago and Oakland and Seattle to find out what worked, what didn't, and how they surmounted various obstacles. This is a powerful peer-to-peer learning model that holds a great deal of potential, we think, to accelerate the creation and success of civic hubs.
How Are Civic Hubs Developed?
The "typical sequence" of hub formation is a four-phase process. What BTA calls "Phase 0" is hub formation; Phase 1 is community building; Phase 2 is Collaborative Solutions Generation, and Phase 3 is Organization for Collective Action.
In Phase 0, someone (BTA calls them the "local champion"), starts building a small network of people who are concerned about the civic health of their community. With a few like-minded colleagues (3-5 people), they form a "hub coordination team" (though they don't necessarily call themselves that), which works outward to build relationships with other people and organizations in the area who are engaged in civic work and who share similar civic concerns and values, even though they may differ on how best to handle specific policy issues. (The number one reason for participation, initially, BTA leaders say, is that people know and like or respect other participants.)
Victoria Hattersley, from Mount Vernon, Washington (in Washington State, not Washington D.C.) reported on the work she and Cindy Black did to set up a Washington State Hub. They reached out to the contacts they already had, sought out others through referrals from those existing contacts and did research to determine what organizations in Washington State were doing work that was related to civic health and engagement. Initially, Victoria reported, there was "almost universal enthusiasm" for the concept. They got about 35 members to join the hub, and initiated monthly forums, mostly on zoom since participants were scattered all over Washington, which is a fairly large state. Virginia reports that they had engaging conversations and made stronger connections, "just as hoped." Unfortunately, interest and attendance waned over time, and they learned that their model was not sustainable, as they, as volunteers, were not able to do the work that it took to nurture the growing membership and provide tangible benefits of participation. In hindsight, Victoria thinks they should have done more routine outreach to participants, considered in-person gatherings, provided benefits such as trainings, and helped the participants move up the hub activity ladder to action. She and Cindy are now planning to try again, in local areas, to do just that. One of the most important benefits of the BTA model is that many of the other people who BTA is recruiting to start local hubs were able to learn from Victoria's story, and hence will keep her difficulties in mind as they form their own hubs.
Another example that sits somewhere between Phase 0 and Phase 1 is the "Democracy Happy Hours" that BTA founders Vinay Orekondy and Caleb Christen have been holding in the D.C. metro area for several years. Once a week, they gather for a happy hour with anybody in the D.C. metropolitan area who is interested in civic health and democracy building. This has been a very successful event that has been ongoing for over two years, and has spawned several spin off activities — BTA being one of them. Using the peer-to-peer learning model, other hubs are copying what Caleb and Vinay did, starting "Democracy Happy Hours" in other cities as well.
Once a core set of people decide to get involved, hub builders often hold some kind of "kickoff event," designed to introduce the hub concept more broadly, get more people involved, and collaboratively identify common values, goals and a collaborative vision of what a healthy civic society would look like in their community. For instance, Prabha Sankaranarayan of the Trust Network and Mediators Beyond Borders said they began asking in Pittsburgh, "who do we want to be?" Similarly, the much smaller community of Montrose, Colorado did a community visioning process, through which they collected data from citizens about what they thought of the quality of life in Montrose — the good and the bad, and then they "grappled with the data to understand how their community was doing, and learned from community members and stakeholders what was most important to them — their needs, concerns, and opportunities." In Oakland, California, a much larger city, hub developer Duncan Autrey (of the Omni-Win Project) used Polis, an AI program, which gathers, analyzes, and reports on what large groups of people say in their own words, in this case on the issues facing Oakland and what they would like to see done about those issues.
Braver Angels, a nationwide network of people and organizations originally focused on dialogues to bridge the red-blue divide, was another example BTA provided of organizations at Phase 1. In addition to doing dialogues around the nation, Braver Angels is trying to do community building in ways that "strengthen civic muscle and increase belonging." They recommend that their local outlets host "social cohesion" events in spaces where the community comes together (e.g., parks, arts, main street, town square, festivals, etc.) During those events (or separately), they host civic engagement and training activities, acts of service and volunteerism. Examples of events that they listed in their presentation included events to build relationships (skills workshops such as "Depolarizing Within" and "Skills for Disagreeing Well," Red-Blue Workshops (for which they are best known), and a program called "Walk a Mile in My News." Programs to help communities find common ground include community town halls, debates, common ground workshops and interfaith dialogues.
After the Phase 1 kick off, relationship-building, and visioning events, civic hubs often try to engage people further through action — this is what BTA refers to as "Phase 2." In Montrose, Colorado, Unify America did a citizens' assembly on childcare in 2023, which was one of the areas of concern that was highlighted as important in the community visioning process mentioned above. This meeting was very successful, and led to the subsequent formation of the spin-off, Unify Montrose, which was established in 2024 by and for Montrose community members as a non-profit dedicated to enhancing civic engagement in the town. Their mission is advocating for solutions to community issues "through open-minded collaboration and inclusive decision-making," using AI-assisted tools, structured dialogue that fosters deep understanding and collaborative problem-solving, and deep community listening to address critical local challenges effectively. Their "Catalyst and Connectors Club" has moved on from a focus on childcare to addressing a much wider array of issues including walkability, parking, childcare, youth programming, housing, and mental health. On their website, they report that "through thoughtful, facilitated discussions and AI-supported processes, ideas from our community become actionable, measurable solutions." They add that their locally successful model is scalable and replicable, serving as an inspiration for other rural communities. The BTA learning cohort program seems to make such replication much more likely to occur.
Braver Angels also engages in phase 2 activities. For instance, they organized a city council letter-writing campaign in Irvine, California; they undertook a program to establish more affordable housing with tiny homes in El Sobrante California; and another affordable housing project in Oxford, Connecticut.
They even took on the very controversial topic of immigration, which was the topic selected at their national convention as the one most important to address. To do so, they held dozens of common ground workshops on immigration around the country, they held local debates on the topic, they held conversations between congressional representatives and constituents, and roundtables with experts who differed in their views. They plan to put together the findings from all these activities into a report to the nation. Though it wasn't easy, they reported that they were able to find consensus on concerns that need to be addressed, values that need to be protected, and ideas for solutions or policies that they recommend be implemented. Examples of the consensus concerns were: lack of compassion for people involved, the immigration system is slow and broken, it stresses other systems such as health care, and politicians, and politicians. using immigration as a divisive issue. Examples of consensus on values included patriotism — seeing the value of the "American experiment," fairness, integrity, transparency, and treating everyone with dignity, regardless of status. And, consensus solutions or policies included, among others, ruling out "mass deportation now," clearer guidance on legal pathways to immigration, cleared pathways to legal residency for undocumented residents who have been living and working in this country for many years and who do not have a criminal background, passage of the DREAM ACT, and reducing incentives for people to leave their home countries.
Finally, in Phase 3, BTA focuses on "organizing for collective action." That, they explain, can take one of two different paths. One is advocacy, for instance, pushing ballot initiatives that will strengthen civic muscle, such as ballot initiatives to establish open primaries, ranked choice voting, or nonpartisan redistricting commissions, or advocating for policy changes such as those laid out by Better Angels for immigration reform. The other direction is shared stewardship of the community, region, or state, working to protect the commons upon which we all depend.
One example of shared stewardship is the Colorado System of Care Model for Children, Youth, and Families. This initiative focuses on providing comprehensive, coordinated, and community-based services to address behavioral health challenges and promote well-being. The system emphasizes collaboration across different agencies, including child welfare, juvenile justice, education, and public health, to ensure children and families receive the necessary support.
Sound Interesting? Promising?
If, like us, you think that this sounds like a promising effort to strengthen civic health, and if you are interested in exploring the possibility of joining this effort, we suggest that you contact the folks at Better Together America. They can hook you up with lots of resources and people who can help you get started. The entire purpose of BTA is to support people developing civic hubs to give them the resources they need (including, potentially, funding!) and forming a network of hub-builders who can exchange ideas, jointly think through problems, and learn through the experiences of others around the country who are doing the same sort of thing.
We have long been saying that there are a lot more good activities, organizations, and people doing important democracy-strengthening work across the country, than is generally recognized. The people and organizations who are trying to tear us apart, and pull our country down get almost all the press. The people trying to bring us back together, heal our wounds, and build a civic culture that serves everyone hardly get any press at all. It is time that changed! We are doing what we can to publicize the wonderful things that our democracy colleagues are doing, and the BTA meeting was full of great ideas to write about. This is just the start of our "BTA coverage." We hope to do interviews with a lot of the hub builders we met over the next few months, and share details of their stories with you. If you listen to many of them, I hope you will see, as we have, that there is an amazing amount of energy and creativity going into efforts to put us on a more constructive path. I hope some of our readers will be interested enough to learn more and perhaps join BTA as a future hub designer!
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BI sends out newsletter 2-3 times a week. Two of these are substantive articles. Once a week or so we compile a list of the most interesting reading we have found related to our topics of interest: intractable conflict, hyper-polarization, and democracy, and we share them in a "Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links” newsletter. These links include articles sent by readers, information about our colleagues’ activities, and news and opinion pieces that we have found to be of particular interest. Each Newsletter will be posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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