The Lexington Experiment, Part II

Richard Young of CivicLex on why local democracy efforts are hard to scale because "scaling" is the wrong goal

Richard Young (center, in gray) at the Lexington civic assembly (photo: CivicLex)

See Part I here.

It’s hard to explain neatly what CivicLex does. “Community organization” or “local democracy nonprofit” doesn’t quite cut it. Besides the civic assembly it just held, it does civic education for kids in schools and for adults in workshops. It holds events for voters to meet candidates for office. It has a paid consulting arm that runs public-input processes for local governments and companies. It publishes explainers on things like the city budget and how to go to council meetings. It gives micro-grants for events like block parties and club meet-ups. It has a couple of journalists who report on city hall.

In our interview, Richard Young, its director, kept on bringing up the words “durable civic infrastructure.” It seems to be his core concept for what the organization is trying to build.

In this installment, he unpacks that idea, and talks about why similar organizations in the US are so few. He explains why, instead of trying to “scale up” these efforts, the goal should be to “scale down” — to build deeper structures tailored to each community rather than trying to replicate similar structures across many of them. He discusses what philanthropies that fund local democracy work sometimes get wrong, and why the over-dependence on philanthropy is unhealthy. And lastly, he talks about what it takes to do this kind of work.

As before, these are excerpts from our discussion, edited for concision and clarity.

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The limits of civic assemblies

You said earlier you came out of this process “less skeptical” of assemblies than you were going in. Why were you skeptical?

Yeah. They’re really expensive, really time-intensive. And they engage a pretty small number of people. We got 36 people and did our assembly for $275,000. Some other assemblies are raising $2 million or more, and engaging, what — 40, 50 people? I fear that assemblies become another thing where you put a bunch of money in, get a win, the assembly is over, and then it’s back to the same old.

What we actually need to renew civic life at the local level is durable infrastructure — things people can engage with over and over again, for years, to start rebuilding the muscle of participation. An assembly can be a piece of the puzzle, but it can’t be the whole thing. I worry it’s the silver bullet du jour, and when it fails — or when funders move on to something else — we’re back where we started.

That said, I have been converted on certain aspects of assemblies, and I understand why people see them as a powerful tool. I think they are. I just still can’t shake the fear that they become the only tool.

“Durable civic infrastructure”

You mentioned “durable infrastructure” — what are the most durable kinds of infrastructure you think CivicLex has managed to build?

Our youth civic education program — that’s the biggest one. Every year, in every civics class in Fayette County public schools, we start the year by teaching students about local government and how it works. We then bring 60 to 70 government agencies, departments, divisions, and community organizations into every school to meet with students through a civic expo — like a career fair, but for civics. Over the course of the year, students design a project to respond to a community need, and at the end of the year they present those projects back to the people who came into their schools.

We’re in year three or four of the program. A local donor gave us a million-dollar gift to start an endowment for it. We’re raising a match. Once we get that, the program will be fully funded in perpetuity. That’s durable civic infrastructure. Two million dollars is what some organizations are raising to do a single civic assembly. What’s going to have more impact — doing one civic assembly for $2 million or educating every student who comes through the public school system about how their local government works — forever? Seems pretty clear to me.

And 10 years from now, when these students are in their 20s and 30s, what kind of civic leaders are they, when they’re not trying to learn on the fly, not being scolded for not knowing how things work? What does it look like when we have a wildly locally-informed set of voters? That’s a potential sea change in how a community functions. That’s durable civic infrastructure.

There are other parts of our work too — work to improve public spaces that will be around for 20 or 30 years. We helped with Phoenix Park in downtown Lexington, gathering public input on what people wanted for it. CivicLex may not be around forever, but Phoenix Park probably will be. That’s durable civic infrastructure.

In 2022 you led On The Table, a citywide set of gatherings on one day to come up with ideas for the city’s five-yearly Comprehensive Plan. Talk a bit about that.

The concept was that anyone, anywhere, could host or participate in a conversation about the future of Lexington. Each conversation would start with a survey, then another survey at the end. Through those two surveys, we gathered people’s opinions and perspectives, and that became the public input process for the Comprehensive Plan. We had 509 conversations across one week, with somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 people taking part.

It was also an arduous process — not as arduous as the civic assembly, but a lot. The conversations varied from a few people to hundreds. There was a guide for the host, giving them the process, the survey, how to be a good facilitator, a script to walk through with people — as flexible a format as possible while letting us relate the data across conversations. And then we sat down with city planners and hand-coded all 15,000 of those public comments.

What funders miss

I don’t know if there are any other organizations in the US like CivicLex doing all of these things: the journalism, civic education, the public input processes…

Not really.

How come?

We’ve evolved to this slowly, to respond to our community’s needs. It just so happens that these are the structures that made the most sense for us. Some news organizations — like Outlier Media, City Bureau, Austin Common — are reimagining the role they play in their communities: as conveners, or as entities empowering people to observe and document public meetings. That’s probably the closest parallel to what we do.

But they don’t do all three things that are core to CivicLex, which are: helping people understand and get involved in local issues; helping them build relationships with their neighbors and the broader community; and making public engagement with the city government more meaningful and rewarding. Those three things are integral to each other — they all feed off each other. A lot of organizations do one or two, but it’s rare to find one that does all three.

I think the reason is that it’s not incentivized or rewarded. Funders just don’t get us. We were up for a pretty significant investment from a funder, and when it got to the board level, they said it didn’t seem like a news organization. They were like, “they just have one or two reporters!”

Also — maybe I shouldn’t talk about it, but fuck it — I don’t think funders see what’s happening in places like this as being valid. I think there’s a bias in most American institutions that if it’s not happening in Chicago, New York, LA, San Francisco, Austin, or another major urban center, it’s an anomaly, a curiosity, but it doesn’t have the same relevance.

Part of that is a genuine inability to see into these places. I don’t mean that in an offensive way. I just think that because we’re not in the rooms and spaces where funders are, it’s just hard to recognize, see, and value what we’re doing. I don’t think that’s anyone’s fault; it’s geography.

But the flip side of that is you’ve been able to build something pretty unique in a town that nobody pays attention to. Why has nobody replicated that model in places that people do pay attention to?

Not for lack of interest — we’ve had a couple hundred communities reach out about replicating our model. But I’m not particularly interested in direct replication. Our work is the product of our place and our people.

A number of things about Lexington make our work possible: the relational networks, a nonpartisan local government [Councillors don’t run under a party banner—GL], a fully merged urban-county government [The city and Fayette County merged more than 50 years ago—GL]. Our elected officials are relatively accessible. The city’s big enough that the relational penalties for doing new and novel things aren’t that harsh, but not so big that you can’t have relational access at all.

If I were to critique the democracy-renewal ecosystem broadly, it’s that it’s placeless. It’s tethered to ideas and values, not to places. But in a federalist democratic republic like ours, places are the political units that matter. The majority of policymaking happens in states and local communities. People organize in place-based precincts. We treat democracy as this abstract concept that needs to be impacted from afar, when in reality the cure is proximate, not distant.

Some people hope that the internet can bring everyone together into some kind of digital democracy. But we can see how that’s going, and it’s not going well. People are inherently relational, and we need to give them spaces for that. And the healthiest place to do that is at the local level.

The problem with “scale”

People often talk about why it’s so hard to “scale” local democracy efforts. Why do you think it is?

The approach to scaling in this field is too wedded to the idea of amassing as many eyeballs and people as possible, hitting the largest reach possible.

To me, the best form of scaling isn’t hierarchical and top-down — it’s trans-local. How do we scale lessons learned across communities so that someone starting a civic health organization in Dubuque can learn what we’ve learned without having to start from zero? It shouldn’t be a copy-paste, but there could be genuine learning. We’ll be announcing later this spring a pretty major investment from a funder to help build exactly that kind of peer-to-peer, trans-local learning.

What’s actually needed to renew civic life is to go deep — scale down, into our communities, and give people long, routine exposure to a relational, participatory, proximate civic life. If you’re copy-pasting a program across a bunch of communities, you’re reaching a lot of people, but are you reaching them deeply enough? I don’t think so. You’re touching them for a week, a month, a year, and then you’re gone.

I also think we need more intermediaries, like the Trust for Civic Life, that can take money from people [i.e., philanthropies] looking to invest in local civic life and fund new opportunities for experimentation — giving communities the tools and resources they need to build for themselves. Not to take a handed-down program and have it be over in a year. Communities know what they need. They self-organize. They’re just wildly under-resourced.

So yes, I get grumpy that funders can’t see into communities, but I also don’t begrudge them. How are they supposed to have relationships with every community in the United States? Sure, they can find bright spots like CivicLex, and that’s welcome. But it’s not sustainable long-term.

So part of the answer is more intermediaries that can direct the $32 billion a year that flows into the democracy ecosystem down to the community level.

The other thing, my biggest problem with the local democracy space, aside from its placelessness, is it’s too dependent on philanthropy. We need locally viable revenue models. We can’t all just be on the dime of philanthropy forever. That’s also not responsible — not from a business perspective and not for democracy itself.

So if I were in philanthropy, I’d be investing in revenue diversification. A funder could pay for us to have a chief financial officer or a business development person who could build out our consulting arm.

How to do the work

Someone comes to you and says, “How do I be the Richard Young of City X?” Presumably the first thing you say is, “Don’t try to be Richard Young.”

Yeah. Do your own thing, buddy!

But what questions should they be asking to figure out what their community needs?

Just start talking to people. Start building relationships. That’s how I got started on the CivicLex path. My neighbors said they didn’t know what was happening with local races, they didn’t know who to vote for. And I was like, I live in a high-transit-ridership community — maybe I could partner with the public transit system to increase access to civic information. So I started this little project called Lex Vote, putting yard signs out at bus stops. I got a $5,000 grant to do that. It took five years to get to a point of any real substance. But just start. Talk to your neighbors. Listen to what they need. Try to provide it.

I read an interview with you where you said, “You have to be okay with it taking forever to change, and with [the fact that] any change you succeed in making can be upended immediately.” You’ve been doing this for nine years now. How do you keep going?

What else are you going to do?

Open a coffee shop?

Also great — creating its own kind of civic infrastructure!

But the thing is, you can’t do this work thinking there’s an end. There is no end. It’s perpetual. I get discouraged all the time. I’m exhausted all the time. But the exhausting part is building the organization and funding it — not the work itself. The work is tiring in its own way; I left the assembly wiped. But also just incredibly inspired. It filled up my cup. But now I’ve got to go back to looking at budget projections and our revenue for next year. That’s the part that’s hard for me.

It’s all hard and challenging. But the only choice is to do it.

How will you know when it’s time to hand it off to someone else?

I don’t know what my timeline is, but it can’t be that far away. Part of CivicLex being durable civic infrastructure is that I have to leave and someone else has to take it on. As long as a founder remains, it’s their project to some extent. I have to leave at some point, and I want to do that while leaving the organization in a good position.