Major funders bet big on rural America and ‘everyday democracy’

Someone may need to tell Carlton Turner that he’s working to save democracy.

Turner is co-director of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production in the town of Utica, population 600, where his family has lived for eight generations. The organization, better known as Sipp Culture, is helping breathe life into a region that’s seen schools, grocery stores, and factories shutter or leave. A project in the works: transformation of one of Utica’s oldest buildings into a cultural center and commercial kitchen.

While that may seem like traditional community development, a new philanthropic venture sees Turner as key to grand ambitions to shore up democracy. In June, the Trust for Civic Life named Sipp Culture one of 20 inaugural grantees in its bid to reinvigorate rural, often high-poverty towns, regions, and tribal areas. A collaborative of 15 grantmakers — most of them high-profile national funders — the trust sees small, local groups as instruments of change — modern versions of the organizations that scholars from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam have singled out as a distinguishing feature of American democracy.

The trust announced $8 million in funding, the first installment of what it says will be investments of $50 million over five years. Grantees exemplify what the trust calls “everyday democracy” as they bring people together to address often-fundamental concerns, whether that’s a fading industry, a dilapidated park, or access to quality health care.

“Pragmatic problem-solving is the most effective way to build trust and counter polarization,” said Charlie Brown, executive director of the trust. “Efforts don’t have to be labeled ‘democracy’ or ‘civic’ to contribute toward a stronger democracy. And sometimes the more we try to convince people to participate in our democracy and be democratic, the more we alienate them from the process.”

Grantees “don’t ever have to see themselves as democracy advocates,” said Sarah Cross, a vice president with Stand Together, a trust partner. “They care about the issues that are keeping them from being able to feed their families and educate their kids and have safe and strong communities.”

Bipartisan collaboration

The trust bills itself as cross-ideological collaboration. It includes many progressive-minded grantmakers and such liberal lions as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. But the Walmart Foundation and Stand Together, the philanthropy of conservative billionaire Charles Koch, are also among the partners.

“There are many, many things we disagree on,” Cross said. But the group, she added, is committed to a liberal democracy and wants to address the crisis of despair and isolation. “People are turning to extremist movements and drugs and addiction. These things that are tearing families apart and killing people.”

It’s a rare investment by national philanthropy in small groups in rural America. The organizations will receive between $300,000 and $425,000 in general-operating support over three years — grants that represent a hefty cash infusion. One grantee, Chinle Planting Hope, a four-year-old, volunteer-led organization in the Navajo Nation in Arizona, had revenues of less than $400,000 last year.

Over the past couple decades, major grantmakers have scaled back investments in rural areas. They have been swayed in part by the popular theories of economists like Richard Florida whose research pointed to metropolitan regions as economic and creative engines. In the mid-2000s, the Brookings Institution declared America a “metropolitan nation.”

“That did a lot of damage because it fed into the stereotypes that people at foundations had about rural communities,” said Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies.

Today, those communities are home to 20% of Americans yet receive just 7% of foundation funding, according to a federal analysis cited by the trust.

Davis, who advised the Trust for Civic Life funders, was initially skeptical about the effort. National grantmakers, he noted, tend to come and go. “But this is a pretty righteous start.”

The grantees look nothing like the groups that many other democracy-minded funders are backing. For the better part of a decade, a lot of philanthropic money has gone to address polarization, hyperpartisanship, and unresponsive governance institutions in Washington, statehouses, and the elections system.

Reforms of democracy’s institutions, while needed, aren’t enough, said Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which spearheaded creation of the trust. Political dysfunction and legislative neglect of everyday concerns have dulled America’s civic spirit and even the hope that things can get better.

“Americans feel like they have no influence, that democracy is overlooking them, not delivering for them,” Heintz said. The first grantees, he added, share the mission to renew the sense of agency among people in their communities. “These are remarkable examples of citizens just coming together and saying, ‘We’ve got to fix something.’”

Sipp Culture began working with Utica residents in 2017, putting them with architects and designers to devise solutions to the region’s challenges. Since then, Utica has created a community farm, a commercial greenhouse, and an artists’ residency.

“No one is coming to do this work for us,” Turner said. “No one’s coming to save us.”

Another grantee, the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque in Iowa, works in small towns in a seven-county region, helping each identify and then address community needs. “We really believe that the best people to build our community are the people that live there,” said CEO Nancy Van Milligen.

‘Democracy laboratories’

The trust sees poor parts of the country and areas in transition as democracy laboratories. It has targeted many of its grants for the Appalachians, the Black Belt of the South, the Southern border, and the Navajo Nation — places that simply need more philanthropic investment, executive director Brown said. Also, the opportunity for civic engagement in such areas is much lower than elsewhere, according to research by the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

But these communities are also innovation hotbeds, Brown says. Stripped of the old ways of coming together, they are creating new models.

“You’ve got a group of people who are very entrepreneurial,” Brown added. “They’ve been underfunded, yet they are still finding creative solutions. What does that tell us for the rest of the country?”

In the western North Carolina town of Morganton, one of the grantees is looking to bring civic practices to private industry. Molly Hemstreet and Sara Chester, both natives of the region, co-founded the Industrial Commons in 2015 to support workers as free trade and then the Great Recession ravaged the textile and furniture industry at the heart of the region’s economy. The organization is helping create community-owned businesses to increase local wealth and give workers influence in their companies.

Many businesses that closed or moved abroad for cheaper labor were owned by just a few people, Chester said. “Our hope is that as ownership is shared more broadly, those decisions will look different, whether that’s 10 years from now or 50 years.”

The work may stir opposition. Some community residents will push back against the change that grantees bring about, Brown said. Local governments or traditional civic groups may feel threatened. “Some of the pushback we’ll get is from people feeling like their power structures are changing. Which is exactly what should happen.”

One longtime local rural grant maker warned Brown that things will get messy. “And I think that’s absolutely right.”