The specter of fascism haunts the United States. In President Donald Trump, it has found not its first, but its most effective and destructive host.

The core value of civil society is to nourish and enrich communities to ensure that the needs and dreams of each community are heeded.

In this moment of deepening crisis, civil society must act. But civil society is vast, fragmented, and compromised. Most groups respond only to threats that directly and immediately impact them.

So, the question remains: Can civil society assume an effective collective place where it leverages its unique positions, missions, and capacities?

Civil Society: Rooted, Connective, Protective 

Civil society plays many roles—through religious institutions, neighborhood associations, food shelves, labor unions, and so on. The core value of civil society is to nourish and enrich communities to ensure that the needs and dreams of each community are heeded by both government (public sector) and business (private sector).

In a relatively functional polity, the public and private sectors are involved in a complex and dynamic web of power relations; they jostle against each other for influence or dominance over the broader society and its resources.

For civil society, this “jostling” action may take the form of holding the other two sectors accountable and ensuring that community members can exercise enough power so that their needs are not trampled or disregarded by powerful government and corporate actors.  

A Fragmented Sector

How is civil society divided? First, there is a scarcity mindset and often destructive competition for resources. Second, across the sector, there is tension among groups that employ a service model versus those that follow a legal/policy advocacy model, or a grassroots, power-building, systemic change model.

Service-focused community groups are often cautious about working with more “radical” or “political” groups. Meanwhile, many social justice groups are distrustful of service-focused organizations, seeing them as hopelessly depoliticized.

Finally, civil society is constrained by the weakening of social bonds and institutions that maintain healthy social bonds, a point famously made by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam many years ago. A hyperconnected, hyperinformed, socially isolated populace fueled by likes, shares, electronic petitions, and hot takes has now emerged.   This is now an additional obstacle for civil society to overcome.

The Value of Practitioner Knowledge

While each group has its particular focused work serving or tending to a community, it’s also the case that frontline practice can inform a critique of how the state and private sectors are impeding or undercutting that community work.

Consider the example of a practitioner at a housing counseling agency. That person might say, “We provide prepurchase housing counseling and connect first-time homebuyers with down payment assistance. I have a great track record of helping individual community members navigate the process and gain the skills needed to become successful homeowners. But I also see so many people fail in this journey, because government fails to provide sufficient consumer protections. This results in some community members getting trapped in predatory or abusive home loans. And institutional or private equity investors are able to mass purchase single-family starter homes to convert into rentals, boxing many qualified buyers out of the home purchase market.”

It is precisely at this point, where even a skilled practitioner sees their best efforts to fulfill their mission fall short, that the practitioner can utilize their wisdom and insight into “upstream” barriers to client success. The result is a very persuasive advocate, grounded in scores or hundreds of pertinent experiences with clients, who will likely have their own practical ideas for changes that could level the playing field or remove major obstacles that continue to prevent the agency from achieving its mission. Such a practitioner is also likely to have built and sustained genuine, trusting relationships with clients that would allow them to invite those clients into advocacy.

Labor unions, tenant unions, and worker-owned cooperatives each enact—or seek to enact—deep relationships in collective or communal settings.

The Value of Relationships

A second value of civil society is less about practitioner knowledge than it is about fostering authentic, human relationships with people at the grassroots. While government and the private sector have goals that require appealing to or engaging people as a means to an end (consumers contributing to profits, citizens contributing to national prosperity, workers contributing to company production) civil society lends itself most directly to practices that connect deeply with community members to meet their needs (physical, spiritual, social, or otherwise) because their dignity and humanity asks that of us.

It’s not a certainty, of course and we have many examples of failed relationship-building. Community groups can treat program participants as clients to be pathologized or as a passive flock in need of comfort and escape in a world of suffering. Plenty of nonprofits and community groups also neglect to address racial bias.

But this propensity to forge deep, human relationships is core to civil society acting at its best. Labor unions, tenant unions, and worker-owned cooperatives each enact—or seek to enact—deep relationships in collective or communal settings.

By allowing workers or tenants to exert some level of democratic control or influence over these critical spheres of their lives, unions and cooperatives create and maintain democratic spaces. Even when they fall short, it is much more likely in a unionized workplace, tenant union, or cooperative that people will gain some of the skills, experiences, and expectations of democracy. These are spaces in which genuine democracy—where people’s votes count, where democratic practices beyond voting are broadly taught and practiced—can flourish. It is through the widespread and effective use of democratic practices that people at the grassroots can exercise civic power, including the power to resist fascism and tyranny.

The Nature of Community Building

A focus on human relationships in social service organizations can yield powerful, transformative results. When practitioners build human relationships with clients—and dispel stigma and shame by naming and acknowledging systemic predatory actors and sinkholes in our financial system, they lay the groundwork for civic engagement in the context of people’s everyday financial and political lives. This equips “everyday people” to stand up critically to systems of exploitation and advocate for fairer systems and futures. Now they can tell a story of connection, of individual effort, community support, and of systemic barriers that must be addressed for communities to thrive.

How does this work? I’ll share a brief example of this kind of connective work from a campaign I worked on as the founder and coordinator of the Minnesota Asset Building Coalition. I was hired in 2012 and given two years to establish a statewide policy coalition, including a leadership team and a policy agenda that had to relate in some way to financial asset building. I seized on the opportunity to travel across the state, and after dozens of meetings with directors, senior and frontline practitioners, and Head Start staff and parents, I proposed to our newly assembled leadership team that we focus on vehicle donation and repair programs.

We convened a group of car program practitioners and held monthly conference calls. The “Cartalk Group” fostered peer learning across quite different programs, many of which had been isolated, and the practitioners gave substantive input into the crafting of our first bill, the “Getting to Work” bill that provided funding to car programs.

When practitioners build human relationships with clients …they lay the groundwork for civic engagement.

This same practitioner circle continued to meet after the passage of the bill and heard from speakers from the Consumer Federation of America and the Center for Responsible Lending on topics such as auto insurance discrimination and the issue of high fines and fees that lead to suspended driver’s licenses.

Subsequently, the coalition decided to pursue legislation related to these more systemic challenges to transportation, and again the practitioners provided policy input and served as compelling advocates, especially with rural Republican legislators whose constituents they served. We discovered real power, insight, and common ground between social service, advocacy and grassroots organizing groups that led to impressive gains in policy and coalition power over many years.

The Value of Deep Organizing

Taking steps such as these, and taking them seriously, can unlock a tremendous source of grassroots power for community groups to accompany into the public square.

By centering our work in practitioner knowledge, human relationships, and democratic spaces, community groups have succeeded in equipping thousands, even millions, of community members to be powerful, grounded, eloquent advocates for a fair and just society.

And by forging new connections with less familiar groups whose work lights up a similar path toward a deep, upstream, or systemic critique of our society, civil society can play even greater roles, including acting as a curb or sentry against concentrated power in the government or corporate sector.

There are some powerful lessons here. To collectively and powerfully contest for a truly just, multicultural democracy requires not only mobilization, but deep organizing rooted in practitioner knowledge, human relationships, and community. The lessons perhaps are old, but never more important than they are today.