#CITIZEN UNIVERSITY YOUTH COLLABORATORY CODE#

We've worked with Encore, Code for America. On Civic Saturdays, we work with public libraries, colleges and universities, faith organizations, the YMCA, the Family Independence Initiative. Every act, civil or uncivil, discourteous or courteous, uncaring or caring, sets off a contagion. Long before the Supreme Court ratified marriage equality, a norm took hold: love is love. It took a mass of people with a cultural message. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Acts became possible only when a critical mass of Americans shifted towards a norm of equality. Historically, norms change before policy does. You are a cultural entrepreneur - changing hearts and minds. We ask deeper questions: Who are you responsible for? Who have you failed in your life? How do you try to make a sense of family when you don't have family? You don't get to pick your neighbors all the time, but we're in it together. Tribalism dehumanizes, and we're trying to re-humanize civic life. How do you handle today’s tribalism and partisanship? So we created a Civic Seminary program to train catalytic leaders to lead Civic Saturdays in their own communities. We obliged for a while but having our team run around the country is super not-scaleable. Word spread quickly about Civic Saturdays, and people asked us to bring the gathering to their towns. It’s an invitation to reckon with reality. The practice of civic religion is not about blind faith, indoctrination, or the party line. And there’s a civic sermon at the heart of the gathering, to help folks make ethical sense of the challenges we face. We hear readings of texts from our shared past - civic scripture. We sing together, turn to the strangers next to us to talk about hard questions. Think of them as a civic analogue to a faith gathering.

Four years ago in Seattle we started a new ritual called Civic Saturdays. Voting is one such ritual, of course, but so are service, participation, and spontaneous action during a crisis like a pandemic. In our work, we focus on what we call America’s “civic religion” - the body of ideals, creeds, deeds, and rituals that Americans are supposed to live up to.

Citizen university youth collaboratory