Richard Harwood Talks With Heidi Burgess About His "New Civic Path"
Newsletter 363 - June 23, 2025
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On Tuesday, May 6, I talked with Richard Harwood, who is the President and Founder of the Harwood Institute. He has worked his entire life to transform our public and political lives by helping individuals, organizations, and communities in their "quest to create change." On June 1, 2025 his newest book, The New Civic Path, was published. It answers the exact same question we are trying to answer: how can we all work together to find a path forward and create an American democracy that works for all, not just for some. In Newsletter 362, we shared an excerpt from the book; today we are posting newsletter and the full conversation we had with Rich about the book and his broader work.
Where This All Started
I (Heidi) started out by noting that I absolutely loved the book, and urge people to get it and read it. (It is shockingly inexpensive!!) I then asked Rich to tell us a bit about his background which led him to do what he does — and has been doing for so long.
Rich gave four reasons for doing this work. First was his disillusionment that came from working on numerous political campaigns as a young man. "They struck me as seeking to win at any cost and trying to divide people. They didn't reflect the values that I held dear and how I was raised and they didn't reflect what I thought we needed to do as a country."
After that he worked for a couple of non-profits, which, he noted, he still admires. But, he said, "too many non-profits live off of soft money. We're afraid to get dirt under our fingernails and do the messy work that needs to get done." And that, he found deeply frustrating.
Third, he said, He is a "person of faith." Faith informs me every day, every hour, every step of the way I turn to it. It's part and parcel of who I am and how I seek to live my life on a daily basis. And it instructs me to show up in a particular kind of way in life.
Lastly, he explained that he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when he was born in 1960, which at the time was seen to be a death sentence. He was only expected to live three to five years. Though very young, he understood how his diagnosis overwhelmed his family. And
I have vivid memories, to this day, of having doctors and nurses and specialists surrounding my hospital to bed all talking about me, but never talking to me. I have vivid memories of being repeatedly violated and manhandled and the shame and humiliation that created in me that still lives within me. I have a deep sense of what it feels like to not be seen and heard and to be invisible and to have one's dignity stripped from me. And these things live with me every day still.
So these four things conspired in a way to lead me to want to start this, to feel compelled to do this work
One of the notions that came out of that is that no one can tackle big problems alone; we are meant to go together. "Community is a common enterprise. We need each other."
The Current Campaign
I asked Rich to explain how his recent work resulted in his current book. He explained that coming out of COVID, he saw the cohesiveness of our country and of our communities being destroyed. Politics was becoming increasingly heated, and many community leaders and active citizens were retreating from public life, and from each other. "And those who weren't retreating were moving to the edges of public life because they believed it was safer there to do their work. They could raise more money. They could hit their metrics more easily." At the same time, disparities and inequities were increasing, as was hatred. The need to address these problems was high. But people were exhausted after COVID. They didn't want to do "unnecessary work."
So Rich and his team at the Harwood Institute decided to start a campaign that they called "Enough. Time to Build," which they took on the road during the last presidential election. The goal was to show that there was a way to do politics differently.
We expressly wanted to articulate a civic message and say, "We don't need more divisive politics. We need a new way forward civically in our communities." And we wanted to send signals to people that you don't need to retreat. Amid your fatigue, amid your exhaustion, just take one step forward and find others to come with you. And as you do, your sense of possibility will grow. Your sense of civic confidence will grow. You'll see that we can achieve things together. Not necessarily big things, but small things we can believe in that give us hope and possibility. And that was the origin of the campaign.
When we began, we knew it would be an uphill climb. But I think we were the only national campaign that was invited to such disparate places as Matt Gaetz's congressional district in Pensacola, Florida; Lauren Boebert's congressional district in Colorado; Jim Jordan's congressional district,(Jordan was the co-founder of the Freedom Caucus). We were doing deep work in two separate counties in Ohio; Flint, Michigan; Jackson, Mississippi; Fresno, California. So deeply red places, deeply blue places, deeply purple places.
And here's the thing. We got the same response everywhere we went. "Thank God someone is saying this." "Thank God there's a way out of this mess." "Thank God I don't have to take on the world." "You're just saying to me, just take a step and let's get moving.' "
And so we got invited to more places than we could go to. Our social media numbers were off the charts. We had virtual convenings. We ran ads on YouTube, like political ads, but they had a different flavor. We had hundreds of thousands of views. And we realized coming out of it that there was this enormous, deep yearning for something different. And that's where we are today.
Building Civic Culture
Rich talked a lot about building "civic culture," which he defined as having nine factors. Communities that are not working tend to be missing many of these factors, or they are present, but in an opposite, negative way.
They have negative norms. They have leaders who are dividing people. They have spaces that erupt into polarized discussions, which I know you're interested in. They don't have a sense of shared purpose. They have division and acrimony in its place, and siloed and fragmented organizations. And what we find is, when we work with them, and they learn our approach, and they put the approach into place, they can actually grow these nine factors. They're instrumental. They're not what would be called terminal. You can create them.
But you don't need to work directly on those factors, Rich explained. You create them while you are working on specific challenges, like education or the environment, or safety, or senior care, or mental health.
You can address what matters to people and strengthen their civic culture at the same time, so long as you work with intentionality, and you're clear about what it really takes to create these factors. And that's being done all across the country right now. I think that's part of the good news in the country.
I asked Rich how they did that with people who are disconnected, disheartened, fearful, distrusting, and individualistic? Rich responded by saying
You have just described every community that we're working with in America. And you're describing, as far as the best I can tell, pretty much every community in America. You're describing American society writ large. And so the challenge, I think, what's really important to say upfront, is that those things are happening.
After we acknowledge those problems, Rich explained, they work with small groups in communities, usually about 50 people who believe that we can do better.
They don't often know how. They feel very much the way you just described, but they want to step forward and do something. So we have kind of a coalition of the willing.
And they grow from there, by doing four things, which Rich calls "mantras." His first mantra is to get people to turn outward, instead of inward. Get them to identify their aspirations and find the ones that they agree upon. Help them find issues that they can work on together. That gets people to turn outward, toward each other.
The second mantra is to "get in motion." More talk isn't good enough, he said. People need to "get in motion and start to build things together." This gives people confidence that they actually can make a difference — it rebuilds people's sense of belief that solutions can be found and implemented.
Rich's third mantra is "start small to go big." "I want big change," he said. "I got into this because I believe there's a lot of things in our society that do not work and a lot of systemic things that are broken. And I believe we've got to do something about them." But when people start big, they usually can't meet people's expectations, so they create false hope, and then they fail. When you start small, you can
catalyze and unleash a chain reaction of actions and ripple effects that take root and grow and spread over time. We teach people how to do this in our practice. And in doing that, not only does the chain reaction grow, but it typically jumps to another area in the community and spreads. And it ultimately spreads like a positive contagion. So, yes, I want big change. But I believe we need to start small to go big.
And the fourth mantra is that "we have to create a new trajectory of hope. ... If people ask me, "What really are you in the business of doing?" I say "engendering authentic hope." That's the bottom line.
When I engage folks across the country, regardless of their walk of life, how much money they have, their education level, no one that I've encountered believes we're going to solve our problems overnight. No one. And they're sick and tired of hearing it, of promises made. What they want to know is that we're moving in a better direction, that we're taking on the tough issues, that we're not afraid of the tough issues, that we're gaining confidence over time. As they were describing this, I was like, "Oh, you're describing a trajectory." It's a trajectory of hope. So we teach people how you create a new trajectory of hope.
But this trajectory of hope requires that you have a "different notion of time."
Time's our ally here, not our enemy. You have to have a sense of urgency, but also patience. You have to realize that you're going to try things that are not going to work. You have to get back up, dust yourself off, and try again. So you need perseverance and grit. All these things are part of the things we teach people and help them rediscover in themselves.
Scaling Up
When I asked Rich to talk about how this work can be scaled up, he talked about their work in Reading, Pennsylvania, where they started a group to work on education. The original group branched into three different groups, one working on early childhood education, another on English as a second language, and a third on after-school programs. Once community members saw the successes of these three efforts, they began to try the same approach on other problems. They mayor formed a task force on youth violence. Another group started an economic development effort. While some of the participants were "ordinary" citizens, others were heads of different organizations. "They took the work [meaning the Harwood process" and embedded it in their organizations. So if you had 20 different organizations represented on a single team, you now have a multiplier effect through all those organizations beyond the team. So it just keeps spreading and spreading."
But you have to have patience to work through difficulties, Rich stressed. He told a story about Alamance County, North Carolina, which he described as "one of the most divided communities I've worked in 40 years."
There were divides everywhere you look—it has more divides than I've ever seen. And the team couldn't get off the dime. They couldn't get in motion because they were so divided. ... It took them a year to be able to work through enough of their conflicts to be able to say, "Okay, we're ready to get to work in the community." But to their credit, they stuck at it instead of throwing up their hands and leaving.
Being patient, however, Rich explained is frustrating to funders, who want to see quick results and projects going according to plan.
And Much More!
We talked about how he convinces funders to be patient, and how he deals with folks who we call "bad faith actors" who are trying to block such efforts, or sabotage their agreements. We also talked about Rich's assertion that "polarization" is a "misdiagnosis" of our current problem in the U.S., but then he seems (according to Heidi) to explain why it is the problem after all. (If you want to see how we explored this and decided (well, at least Heidi decided) that we were actually on the same page, even though it appeared we were on opposite sides, please check out our full conversation. (It's a wonderful example of how people can appear to fundamentally disagree, but when they talk about their underlying beliefs, they find out they actually are in agreement!) Rich also had lots more compelling stories, and details about everything I excerpted above. So I hope you'll listen or read our full conversation, and then get the book The New Civic Path.
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