Walking alongside this moment

Apr 12, 2025

The next /current wave of protests began this past weekend as over 1200 cities/locales hosted protests against the Musk/Trump version of American democracy. We at Rē are among many who are paying close attention to how our partners, friends, and colleagues are engaging - with many different forms of creating different trajectories than the wild ride we seem to currently be hurtling down.

One of the protest signs read: “the protests will get bigger until democracy is followed and respected”—an acknowledgement, perhaps, that this year’s protests against Trump are now just getting started. We appreciated that many protestors held not illusion that this one-day of action would necessarily yield an immediate policy change. As one participant from NYC said: “Today we’re here for us." One Republican business consultant who brought his two teen-age sons with him to the Plaza said: “We’re here to show the rest of Americans and overseas that opposition exists and it is widespread. …Our democracy isn’t working very well but we should be able to find better ways to fix it.”

Creating participatory forms for people to engage together - around land and water and food and feasting and composting and community - that's core to what democracy is.

And it is core to what regeneration is.

And it is part of why we keep lifting up the importance of participatory action research (PAR).

Democracy is not like a spectator sport or reality TV show, despite what certain leaders seem to think.

You have to get engaged, and that engagement impacts you and your neighbors. It's participatory.

The power of participation is true on so many levels. It often leads to many different results.

Towards that end, we want to lift up a few different initiatives. These are happening largely outside of our immediate network at Re (we try to lift up voices both from within and from outside of our network). These are from an old colleague of mine, Marcia Stepanak. The following is from her recent #newrules substack.

Here are a few ways that democracy models to boost civic engagement are being started, tested and expanded locally and nationally:

New_Public. Could social media support healthier online conversations? New_Public, a new nonprofit, is working on it. “We talk to a lot of towns where there is no newspaper anymore; there’s no community center anymore; the town square is shut down,” says Deepti Doshi, co-director. “And we go in and find collaboration with them to rebuild civic engagement.” Doshi and co-founder Eli Pariser, backed by millions of philanthropic dollars, are reimagining the digital public spaces for communities to better connect people and serve the public good. “At present, our physical communities have public spaces that are actually built for, and governed by, and serve the public but our digital spaces are mostly created, algorithmically for advertisers, to sell people things,” says Doshi, speaking on a panel about the organization’s work at SXSW last month. “ …When we can create social media made algorithmically to bring people together in a virtual civic space, we diagnose the challenge of de-polarizing things in our own neighborhoods, ones that we’re a part of—and find pathways out of the situations we’re in now to creating a more vibrant democracy.”
Front Porch Forum. It’s called, by many, “the friendliest social network you’ve never heard of.” It’s a social network, a better version of Next Door, and it counts nearly half of Vermont’s adults as active members. “It’s where Vermonters go to interact with their neighbors online and its the nation’s best example of a kinder, gentler online community. It is an example of how social networks can be designed algorithmically to encourage civic engagement, Doshi says. “Front Porch Forum is one of the few online spaces in America that leaves its users feeling more informed, more civically engaged and more connected to their neighbors, rather than less so,” she says. It is also moderated heavily and void of any real-time feed, like buttons, and doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm and no way to reach audiences beyond the local community. “It exists to stimulate real-world interactions among neighbors and doesn’t exist to be an online metaverse,” says founder and CEO Michael Wood-Lewis. Adds Pariser: “This demonstrates that local conversations don’t have to be toxic. Careful moderation and prioritizing civility over engagement can lead to a vastly different experience of social media.” It’s rewiring and innovating civic engagement, and doing so in a way that truly democratizes civic space again, but online.”
Citizens’ Asssemblies. Josh Burgess leads Democracy Next, a citizens’ assembly project to re-build democracy on the local level via boosting civic engagement. “CA is a group of people selected by lottery to represent a broad community, which then spends significant time together learning about and collaborating for solutions to local problems,” Burgess says. “They do research together and then seek common ground and form recommendations to give to local decision-makers, on both the local and national levels.” CA, he said, are being used in Japan and in Canada, and experimentation with them is beginning in the United States. A CA program he is leading now is working in central Oregon. “Governance is improved because these groups spend significant time together, learning to trust each other. Second, this helps rekindle empathy and understanding across differences, sharing personal stories to mend the social fabric. And third, it rekindles the civic spirit and the idea we can rebuild trust between people and their government officials.”

Avoiding Harm

According to Kurt Gray, a psychology professor and author of Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics, “people are motivated not by wanting to destroy things, but rather to find protection from harm. This distinction matters because it shows how we might change the way we interpret the actions of the other side of our social and political divides.”

“If everything we see now in society is seen as a threat,” Burgess says, then “people need to take the time to learn why and have a short conversation, or take the time to ask someone simple questions about how they see the world and think the way they do. If we try this in our own everyday lives with people we just met or even have known for a while, it can open new horizons for ourselves and, yes, for our communities. Changing the way we communicate—with polite and authentic curiosity— is the first step in reinventing our democracy, by helping people to feel heard and helping ourselves to understand more about the world around us.”