Embedded Files
When hands shoot up around the room after a presentation, you’d usually expect questions to follow. But not with this group. These are hands of help and support.
At the Civic Collaboratory, when one person presents a project, the rest of the group offers firm commitments of help — and it rotates so everyone gets their chance to be at the front of the room. It’s a practice of mutual aid that results in a groundswell of investment in one project.
The leaders, catalysts, innovators of the National Civic Collaboratory have been supporting and resourcing one another's projects for over a decade. This has fundamentally shaped and propelled the civic landscape and opportunities through the years.
This impact has happened because of the thousands of commitments over the years from members like you.
PROJECT FEATURE: YOUTH 250
PROJECT FEATURE: YOUTH 250
Imagining and Incubating:
Designing America’s 250th celebrations with Gen Z at the helm
Imagining and Incubating:
Designing America’s 250th celebrations with Gen Z at the helm
With our nation’s 250th anniversary on the horizon, Caroline Klibanoff is planning ahead. In June of 2023, she shared with the Civic Collaboratory her budding plans for a project called Youth250.
Her vision is for collaborative, intergenerational workshops and incubations to shape the ways we celebrate America’s semiquincentennial. And that vision is now a reality — thanks to a resounding round of commitments from fellow members. From workshop design to crafting engagement scorecards, this has been a team effort from the start.
Read the full story...
Caroline has noticed — and is closing — a gap. On one hand is the rising generation — young people bursting with passion, perspectives, and commitment to having their voice heard. On the other, the very institutions who need (and want!) to connect with, be informed by, and build on that exact energy from Gen Z.
While both the supply and demand are there, there are few opportunities and structures to match them up. But fortunately, she’s the perfect person for the job. Caroline leads Made By Us, a nationwide collaboration of hundreds of history museums and civic organizations aiming to ignite and inform young adults as they step into active citizenship and seek out context and community.
In June 2023, Caroline brought her gameplan called Youth250 to the National Civic Collaboratory. In her Rotating Credit Club presentation, she shared her vision to hold local, intergenerational gatherings to incubate activations for the nation’s 250th anniversary. Her key differentiator? They’ll bring together institutional leaders — who have a real say in what gets planned and executed — and Gen Z, who are our nation's future inheritors. “For the young people who have the most at stake in our country's future,” she said, “how do they want to mark this moment? They have the most at stake from a commemoration that flops — or soars.” Her asks in support of this project were for connections with facilitators to help design and lead these workshops, as well as with youth networks and funders who might support this approach.
The commitments that rolled in from the Collaboratory network helped this project take off. Sarah Jencks is helping produce a toolkit for institutions to help them design their programming around young people, including a Gen Z engagement scorecard. Kaz Brecher has helped design workshops taking place around the country, starting off with one hosted by Lisa Kay Solomon and Cheryl Hughes at the Stanford d.school, with participation from other Civic Collaboratory members like Debilyn Molineaux. Kerry Sautner is also hosting a workshop with her museum, the Eastern State Penitentiary. Caroline found guidance and resources by connecting with a wide range of Civic Collab members, including Eunice Lin, Daniel Stid, Janet Tran, Paz Marat, Aleesha Bhatti, and Louise Dube's team. Local members of the Atlanta Civic Collaboratory heard a pitch for an Atlanta-hosted Youth250 workshop at the Atlanta History Center, and stepped up to spread the word and share the story.
The Youth250 Workshop in Indianapolis in August of 2024 brought together “decision-makers with taste-makers” on equal footing to imagine the future and incubate ideas. Vicki Rubio from the Citizen University team attended the gathering and shared these reflections:
As I walked into the gathering hosted by Prairie House at Conner Prairie, it was clear this session was going to be engaging and generative. Our nametags had our “civic superpower” on them, the tables were covered with brown butcher paper with markers and post-its ready for use. Our facilitator for the day shared that a goal for our time together was to shift our perspective, and he reminded us that that might feel messy but it would also be fun and surprising.
During one activity, a meme was put on the screen. We were asked to rate how well we got the meme on a scale from 0-5. As I tentatively put two fingers up, I looked around the room and could see many people were 4s and 5s and a few others were on the lower end of the scale like me. I felt a little embarrassed not understanding something many in the room seemed to know. A brave volunteer who had rated herself as a ‘one’ shared what she thought was going on in the meme. Then a Gen Z participant took a turn explaining, excitedly sharing the references and meaning. They also reflected that being able to decode the meme creates a feeling of belonging because you become part of a group that knows the jokes and gets the references. I had never thought about memes as a vehicle for belonging before. Another participant from a different generation reminded us that each generation has this in some way, the cultural touchstones specific to our experiences. It made me think about how we communicate to specific generations and across generations, and also, how we can use moments like these as opportunities to learn from each other. At the end of the activity, I no longer felt embarrassed for not knowing. I felt appreciative that someone helped me understand something that clearly gave them a lot of joy.
After learning from the other participants and engaging in the different activities, I came away thinking the 250th could be a moment to paint a vision for the future. Our commemorations could engage people from many different backgrounds in both actively contributing to designing the vision and giving space for them to choose the areas they want to plug into in order to make that vision a reality.
As we plan for our gatherings, people want experiences that are surprising, that get you out of your everyday life, that provide an opportunity to learn something new, and that let you be part of making the experience. A key takeaway that was repeated, particularly by the people of color in the room, was the importance of not leaving any group out of the story of the 250th.
As we gathered in a circle as our time came to a close, a few people shared out reflections. A Gen Z participant said this session made her feel that the different generations aren’t as far apart as they seem. We can find agreement on many things and we can be powerful if we work together.
The dreaming and scheming from these workshops is helping Caroline and her team build out strategy and tools to fundamentally shape our nation’s semiquincentennial. A Youth Advisory Bureau is in the works, for example, which will provide a platform, voice, and power (and a stipend!) to young thinkers and dreamers. These efforts will not only shape our upcoming civic celebration, but are laying the groundwork for more cogenerational design in the years ahead. Learn more about Youth250 →
INNOVATIVE IMPACT
INNOVATIVE IMPACT
Over the years, projects and partnerships catalyzed by the National Civic Collaboratory range from narrative efforts for social good such as Our Towns Civic Foundation which supports American renewal from the ground up through storytelling and Student Voice geared to advance educational equity in schools and communities. We have featured intergenerational projects such as the Co-Generate event and the Civic Spring project.
There have also been a number of projects born out of collaborations of members which led to culture changing conversation movements such as #WeavingCommunity and the Listen First Project. Projects spurred by the Collaboratory network include Made By Us, a collaboration with multiple museums around the nation, and Vote by Design workshop helping the next generation of voters think about why they vote. Other projects featured at meetings include The Bulwark and The People’s Supper.
“The Civic Collaboratory is a critical incubator for our democracy. It is the place where committed citizens provide the kindle needed to start fires that burn well past the time we are together.”
Sayu Bhojwani, New American Leaders Project
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
Rotating Credit Club presenters share some of the impact that results from the commitments and collaborations in support of their projects.
Leslie Garvin, North Carolina Campus Engagement
The inaugural cohort of NC Civic Impact Fellows graduated in May! Fellows from five campuses collaborated with campus and community leaders to design projects that strengthened civic life on their campus. Projects they developed and implemented included:
Revamping a latent campus voting coalition to promote nonpartisan student voting
Creating training materials and resources for students to learn how to facilitate dialogues on their campus. These materials, including a website, ready-made dialogues, and training videos, are intended to make dialogue facilitation a more accessible skill for all student leaders
Designed and integrated civic education workshops into first-year courses to educate freshmen about how to be involved in civic engagement during their college experience
We have selected the 2025-26 cohort of 7 Fellows which will start in the fall.
We hosted the 2nd Citizen Redefined Camp the last week in May with students from five North Carolina campuses. You can read an overview about this powerful week. The 3rd cohort of the Student Dialogue Ambassadors program completed their term of service in May. We trained the students and their faculty/staff mentors in five dialogue models: Braver Discussions; Civil Dialogue; Living Room Conversations; National Issues Forum Deliberative Dialogue; and L.E.A.R.N Dialogues. The Ambassadors led campus-based dialogues on a wide range of pressing topics, including economics, mental health, democracy, immigration, equity, and much more. (June 2025)
Brian Baird, National Museum and Center for Service
Our October Service Symposium (250 and Beyond) was a great success with more than 150 people in attendance live and more than 350 online. We have great partners in Independent Sector and have produced three toolkits, one for secondary schools, one for colleges, one for communities. Exhibits have been created in the DC Public Library, college campuses, and in several high schools with more to come.
A number of connections and commitments have been especially helpful. Amy Labenski and Chloe Kougias of WETA have been fantastic, reaching out to collaborate on toolkits specifically designed to coincide with their America 250 programming. Leslie Garvin of North Carolina Campus Engagement connected me with their Partnership Alliance and invited me to present at their online meeting. Keith Hickman recommended a wonderful recent graduate as an intern, who has since joined our team as a valued volunteer. Annafi Wahed and I had a great conversation, and she will be sharing our community exhibit model with her library in Pittsburgh. Sarah Sayeed arranged a great conversation with the Civic Engagement Commission of NYC and invited me to speak to their group. Debilyn Molineaux invited me to speak on her podcast. (March 2025)
Sam Ball, Citizen Film
Produced by Citizen Film in collaboration with PBS, American Creed invites young adults to view and discuss short films exploring America’s foundational democratic ideals and how to work towards the realization of those ideals, in local communities and nationally. Through 2026, PBS LearningMedia will release new American Creed shorts about young community leaders and their perspectives on American ideals.
After our Rotating Credit Club presentation, we sought commitments from partners to expand audience and impact. We are pleased to report that the RCC session resulted in a partnership with Mikva Challenge to engage participants in their persuasive writing and public speaking program, Soapbox Nation. After viewing and discussing our short films, Soapbox Nation participants will write research-based persuasive arguments in response to curricular prompts targeting American Creed’s core themes of civic participation. One of our partners, the National Writing Project, is making a grant to its Chicago Area site in order for that site, which trains teachers in person, to partner with Mikva Challenge to deepen and broaden our collective impact in Chicago. We have also begun conversations with other RCC partners about collaboration in the PBS markets they serve. (March 2025)
Deepti Doshi, New_ Public
Our project is focused on the belief that every local community in America should have a thriving digital public space where people connect across lines of difference, trust one another, and feel a sense of belonging. This summer, we ran The Neighborhood Steward Fellowship pilot.
With the Neighborhood Steward Fellowship, we brought together 5 people who were actively stewarding a digital public space for everyone in their local area to learn from each other and test a range of social-trust building practices in their spaces. After the program concluded, we released a public guide (Creating a Flourishing Digital Public Space) for stewards based on what we learned. Support from members, David Hsu and Kristen Cambell, helped unlock funding opportunities to advance this work. (October 2024)
Becca Kearl, Living Room Conversations
The Trust in Elections initiative is still ongoing, and we’ve made several exciting inroads while also experiencing some bumps along the way. Collab members were instrumental in spreading the word by sharing in newsletters and making connections. We have had nearly 1000 downloads of the conversation guide and have administered three national pulse surveys that are bringing in really great insight into the state of trust in elections across the country. The unofficial top line note is that it's not as bad as you may think.
One of the biggest impacts [of presenting] was the enthusiasm we received by presenting. It really fueled our momentum and created a lot more visibility on the work we are trying to do and validated the project in a way that put a fire under us. (September 2024)
Elizabeth Clay Roy & Andrew Wilkes, Generation Citizen
RISE Vote 2024, Generation Citizen’s nonpartisan voter activation initiative, is in full swing. We have hosted Spring voter registration events across the country, formed partnerships with National Voter Registration Day and the Civics Center, and are preparing for a busy fall season. We're focusing on rolling out targeted teacher trainings for high school voter registration, with an emphasis on National Voter Registration Day on 9/17 and High School Voter Registration week, October 2nd - 6th. We're also finalizing the fall launch of My First Vote, a storytelling series of RISE Vote that celebrates the first ballot experience of a cross-generational cohort of voters.
We had a rich conversation with Heather Cerny Van Benthuysen at the Engaged Collective Consultancy that helped to clarify our thinking in terms of narrating our value add proposition to teachers and schools needing support with organizing nonpartisan voter registration drives. Her clear, targeted feedback, as well as the incidental impact of her civics education expertise on other fronts — all of which were directly facilitated by CU’s mutual aid spirit — made a particularly powerful contribution to our RISE Vote 2024 work and our NE work of policy advocacy more generally with the Rhode Island state education department. (June 2024)
Daniel Stid, Lyceum Labs
In October of 2023, I had the opportunity to present the Leading to Govern project I am leading with Emily Cherniack in the Rotating Credit Club. The inbound commitments I received from people coming out of that meeting have been especially helpful and informative. At a 40-person convening we hosted in February 2024, we had several of these folks join us and they made great contributions. One commitment that was particularly impactful came from Sam Ball of Citizen Film. Sam has been a great resource and thought partner on how we can tell and share the stories of the exemplary leaders we are looking to highlight.
And the benefits from the commitments are still accruing — later next week I will talk with Aria Florent, just back from her sabbatical, to take her up on her commitment to help us learn from the narrative reframing approach that Liberation Ventures has used in their work. (March 2024)
Brittany Buford, Partners In Democracy
With the feedback from the Collaboratory in October 2023, we have been able to not only refine our process but include additional community input. We've created a pathway for the coalition members working with us on our State Scorecards to create 2-3 additional indicators which they believe should be a focus when discussing the health of democracy in a state. We have also become acutely aware of the need to educate people not only on democracy but on our strategies and methods - from this comes our speakers bureaus, a democracy renovation guide and a glossary; some of which are launching and some of which are works in progress.
PID was developed with partnership in mind and we have prided ourselves on our ability to build relationships and define them over time with understanding that they can shift. The resources and variation of relationships that emerged from our time at the Collaboratory have allowed us to learn how to shift not only our presentation of materials for various audiences but led us to prioritizing access to information for those who may not have continued or direct contact with us. (January 2024)
Jason Marsh, Greater Good Science Center
We are nearly done finalizing our initial batch of 15 practices designed to help youth bridge differences and broaden their circle of care. This content development benefitted substantially from Collaboratory members' input. We reached out to several members of the Collaboratory to review these 15 Bridging Differences practices that our team created for educators and parents, particularly to tell us whether they felt relevant to people from different backgrounds. We received a lot of helpful feedback and have been updating our practices based on what we learned. Our next step will be to distribute the practices more broadly, and we plan to reach back out to members of the Collaboratory to support this distribution. We have already connected with several Collaboratory members who confirmed their willingness (even enthusiasm) to help us distribute these practices more broadly once they're done and published on our website.
Emily Holthaus (Committee for Children) and Dana Coester (West Virginia University & 100 Days in Appalachia) both shared incredibly helpful feedback on several of our practices. Their feedback has led to revisions and updates that we believe will make our practices more culturally relevant for teachers, parents, and students. Youth Collaboratory member Chelsea Osei also addressed several questions we had about our practices, and we discussed following up with Chelsea once the practices are ready to pilot so that they can share them with their principal and possibly use them at their school. (May 2023)
Aria Florant, Liberation Ventures
We published our inaugural report, A Dream In Our Name, which outlines our vision for building a culture of repair in the US. I'm really in a space of gratitude right now for all the people who have helped LV get to this point. Presenting at the September Collaboratory in 2022 resulted in:
Almost $1M in funding from folks we met at the Collaboratory
2 people read and provided feedback on the report
I'm likely going to speak at Tom Tom Festival this year (put on by Paul Beyer) and he has also connected me to great people as well
(February 2023)
“This type of work, as everyone knows, is an uphill battle even when you have irrefutable proof that a process or intervention worked. Getting flooded with people wanting to support was so necessary for my spirit, and I didn't realize how much I needed it until it happened. "
Jennifer Brandel, Hearken
Page updated
Report abuse