Many Americans are disconnected from civic life, in part due to falling trust in institutions — which is at an all-time low — and the belief that everyday people have little influence in Congress. Meanwhile, extreme political polarization has spiked to its highest point in generations and only 33% of voters believe the country can overcome division to solve its political problems.
Against that grim backdrop, one philanthropic initiative working to revitalize civic participation is the Trust for Civic Life, a pooled fund that invests in locally led civic programming that brings people together to solve problems in their communities and advance democracy. The trust recently announced $8 million in flexible funding to 26 organizations working to support civic participation and collaboration in underfunded rural regions. Grantees include Working Together Mississippi, Eagle Market Streets Development Corporation, SW Folklife Alliance, Anchorum Health Foundation and Keweenaw Community Foundation.
Launched in 2024, the trust has raised $40.5 million to date. In the 20 months since its inception, it has awarded a total of $17 million to support 150 efforts serving rural communities across the U.S.
“If we want to think about how we address polarization, we have to be in the communities that are polarizing…We know there are communities philanthropy has not been supporting. We have to support them to understand what’s happening and how they can be successful,” said the Trust for Civic Life’s executive director, Charlie Brown.
The trust initially launched with the support of three funders — Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Omidyar Network on the left-of-center side and Charles Koch’s Stand Together across the aisle. It is now backed by 23, including the Ballmer Group, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Acton Family Giving, Emerson Collective, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation.
“Part of the reason we are facing a democracy crisis in this country is because we have not paid enough attention to creating the means and mechanisms for the nurturing of this political culture — and it’s especially difficult in small towns and rural America, where there just isn’t the support for civic activity that there is in larger communities,” said Stephen B. Heintz, president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
How the Trust for Civic Life’s approach seeks to build bridges
This recent round of grants is part of the trust’s Civic Hub program, which awards $8 million a year to civic hubs — groups that act as community connectors and bridge builders. These groups seek to create new ways to get people involved in their communities — especially people who haven’t been active civic participants — and work together to solve shared problems.
Local communities, Brown said, are among the few places where people have a real sense of agency. But while bringing people together to talk and find common ground is important, as a community survey report published by the Trust for Civic Life earlier this year found, people prefer action over dialogue. Taking action alongside other community members was strongly tied to feelings of social trust, agency and belonging.
“Polarization reflects the erosion of our political culture and the fact that people are… retreating into their own bubbles of information and opinion, and spending less time with people who are different from them and who have different views than they have,” Heintz said.
Research, he added, has shown that if people with differing views work alongside each other on projects they have devised to improve life in their communities, they are then able to bridge those differences.
“Differences are important and they are part of the democratic life, but we have to be able to accept differences and work together for the common good, and that’s what the trust is supporting,” Heintz said.
The work of civic hubs covers lots of ground: supporting meetings in church basements, childcare initiatives, hiking trails, welder training, a podcast to uplift youth voices and the revitalization of mine lands in West Virginia.
One grantee, the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, was awarded $250,000 to grow civic engagement in central and southern Missouri. Part of the funding will go to affiliate foundations to support civic engagement work in their own communities. The funding will also go toward a civic engagement playbook, the community foundation’s rural Youth Empowerment chapters, and regional gatherings to build connections among rural communities in the area.
Another recipient, Thrive Regional Partnership, works in northeast Alabama, northwest Georgia and southeast Tennessee to advance economic opportunity. Its Resilient Communities program seeks to engage local residents to build nature-based solutions to environmental challenges and enhance quality of life in underserved areas.
The trust’s work is one pathway for philanthropy to support rural development and build civic life. “I think it absolutely has to be part of the package that we’re looking at when we’re thinking big-picture about polarization… The fact that we’re now bringing national resources to the local if we continue down this path, I think it opens up new opportunities in the future to address some of those longer-term issues,” said frequent IP contributor Jerry Kenney, who is co-chair on the council of directors for the Trust for Civic Life and vice president of impact and community investing at Dogwood Health Trust.
Why has the trust’s focus on local solutions in rural America attracted funders?
Philanthropy, particularly at the national level, has a long history of underfunding rural America. To address this funding gap, the Trust for Civic Life has focused its investments on regions that are often overlooked, including areas that have been historically underserved, are experiencing persistent poverty or are undergoing rapid economic or demographic transition. This includes the Black Belt, Central Appalachia, tribal lands and the Southwest border.
When asked about why the trust is focused on rural places, Brown told IP last year that while they are philanthropically underfunded, they have “really high levels of social trust, incredible levels of entrepreneurship, but often lower levels of institutional trust.”
According to Brown, part of the reason the trust’s work has attracted so many funders is because of a growing interest in rural America. But the larger reason is a growing interest in being closer to what’s happening on the ground. Local civic action, he said, can be part of the antidote to what we are experiencing at a national level.
“I think what we’ve really tapped into is this strong desire to say we want to know what works in bringing our communities and country back together, really bridging divides and understanding what philanthropy’s role is in fixing it,” Brown said. A collective effort to learn about what rebuilds trust, agency and democratic norms is “a really attractive opportunity” for many funders, Brown added.
For the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, this work complements its overall support for democratic practice in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Like many other funders, the majority of the fund’s democracy grantmaking focuses on institutional and process issues, such as defending and expanding voting rights, and supporting independent judicial action and the rule of law — all of which are urgent issues.
In the longer term, however, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund is interested in creating a more robust and vibrant civic culture that can sustain democracy well into the future, Heintz said. The challenges that America is facing need both individual and process reform alongside the rebuilding of civic culture and civic life.
“This was something that became very clear to me in a previous part of my career during the 1990s when I was working in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Heintz said. He previously worked at the East West Institute, an international organization that helped emerging democracies in Eastern Europe with their democratic reforms.
One of the things Heintz observed was that it was easier to create the institutions and mechanisms of democracy — free and fair elections, separation of powers, independent judiciaries — than it was to create a democratic political culture in which citizens understood their rights and their responsibilities to practice democracy in their everyday lives.
“That’s where the culture is formed, and without a really strong culture, what we have seen… is some significant backsliding in the quality of their democracies,” Heintz said, pointing to Hungary as a prominent example of this. He added, “I think we’re seeing this in the United States.”
Barriers and challenges for bridge-building work
While they’re understandably in high demand right now, there’s also a lot of skepticism around philanthropy-backed bridge-building and depolarization efforts, with some arguing that these are not, as an Aspen Institute report notes, “viable solutions in the context of systemic inequalities.” Critics have raised the question of how they can be expected to have a civil conversation with someone whose views undermine their right to exist.
Others are skeptical not of the work itself, but about how this work can be scaled to the point that it can offset larger structural factors pitting Americans against each other. Disinformation, tribal mentalities, politicians who have built their careers on fueling polarization and algorithms created to foster division have all contributed to this growing crisis. How, then, can bridge-building efforts change political incentives to make a difference in the near future?
“That’s exactly the question that we’re grappling with at the trust… and this is exactly the challenge that we face,” Heintz said. “We know that this work is effective. We know that it needs to be scaled up.”
Heintz added that the trust’s goal for its first five years is to work in 500 communities across its four priority regions and develop data and stories of success that will help it expand its funding base and allow for the work to be scaled to reach thousands of other communities.
“If we want to see our country head in the direction that we all desire, we have to have a much higher level of coordination and a much higher level of partnership to be able to do that,” Brown said. “At a national level, a regional level and a community-level philanthropy, it’s happening, but it’s happening in pockets. We’re building this as a core part of our strategy. We need to go faster.”
Depolarization work will also take time. “I don’t think of it as, we’re going to flip a switch to fix polarization. This is going to be long term… There is no shortcut to building civic trust and capacity,” Kenney said. “If we think of it as a short-term solution, we’re always going to be stuck in that box.”
Heintz said the trust ranks among one of the most important things he’s involved in. He added that his greatest ambition for the trust is that it becomes a major institution in American life, and that it continues to attract funding, not just from national funders but from community foundations, the private sector, and local and state governments.
“It’s not going to solve the problem in 2025 or 2026,” Heintz said. “It’s going to contribute to a longer-term, strong future for the quality of American democracy. But it is essential work, and we have to do both the urgent and the long term simultaneously.”
