Right in Our Backyard: Community-Based Organizations and the Potential to Build a New Democracy

We are in a moment of crisis and potential. The promise of democracy, never fully realized, appears to be slipping away as rights are eroded and as people are disconnected from the civic sphere while living in a constant stream of misinformation. At the same time, organizations and people are gathering to determine how we can defend the democracy we know, and fight for one that’s better. Masses of people mobilize for protests and small groups of neighbors fiercely protect one another, quickly developing new practices to keep each other safe in the face of government violence and repression.

These trends are inspiring. However, in creating new structures and affiliations, we may be missing an opportunity to engage thousands of people already connected to their communities.

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are right in our backyards. These organizations are rooted in neighborhoods, providing services and opportunities for residents to create change together, such as safe places for young people to have fun and connect with peers, a place to train residents to enter career pathways, help people to access the resources to build financial stability, and other supports.

They are also places that already build trust and connection among neighbors, often acting as cultural hubs, places where people can register to vote and advocate for change in their communities. This offers the potential to more readily build bridges with larger pro-democracy movements. With intentional strategy, we can leverage the many strengths of CBOs to advance toward the democracy we dream of.

Democracy’s Crucial Role

The work of CBOs assumes that these organizations are run within the context of a functional democracy.

In a functional representative democracy, the government will aim to meet the needs of its people. People can express their needs by participating in free and fair elections—choosing the candidates who promote policies and ideas that align with their needs and ideals—and through other informal and formal methods of public expression. CBOs are trusted partners of government agencies. They are contracted to implement programs communities have called for: affordable housing, adult education, youth services, education and counseling to counteract the legacy of systemic racism, and tools to build financial stability.

Our work to provide services generally assumes that the people we serve have the freedom to travel around the city without fear of abduction, detainment, or widespread violence from law enforcement. Likewise, our work to bring people together to advocate for positive changes in their communities relies on the freedom to criticize the government and those in power, and to speak freely about injustice in our country’s history and its systems.

The present moment is challenging all of these assumptions. Our democracy is threatened daily with assaults on basic rights, including people’s ability to move safely and freely through the world.

Building the World We Want, Neighborhood by Neighborhood

The immediate response of many CBOs to this political moment is understandably defensive and reactive. We work quickly to protect the people we serve, leading Know Your Rights workshops for immigrants and making services virtual to accommodate those who are afraid to leave their homes. We jump into scenario planning: considering risks to government funding that supports our work; talking with board members to determine whether to keep “racial justice” in our mission statements, or if it will make our organizations too vulnerable to government attacks; assessing and revising our public communications to guard against right-wing trolls; and shoring up our data and physical security protocols, to ensure that we don’t unwittingly provide the government with an open virtual or actual door to go after our communities.

These responses to the dangers we’re living through are legitimate and necessary, but they’re not sufficient. CBOs are also well-positioned to take the long view and must consider how our work can help us to create the democracy we need. Instead of a system that privileges White economic elites, we can build a democracy where all people have power, freedom, and access to financial stability and opportunities to pursue their dreams.

As CBOs need a functional democracy to thrive, a thriving democracy relies on CBOs—and the trust in social networks and communities they build—to uphold it. If we can trust our neighbors and local institutions to listen to us and help us, then we can collectively participate in democracy to build the society we want.

Democracy thrives with a diversity of institutions, cultures, and points of view shared in public spaces, so that we can learn from and challenge one another. It’s built on tenant associations, town hall meetings, information tables, block parties, and other ways that neighbors come together. Grassroots community organizations make these connection points happen, and in this way we contribute to broader conversations and the culture of our neighborhoods, cities, and country.

CBOs and the Journey to Earth Three

The hard truth is that we know that our organizations are working in a context where the promise of democracy has never been fully achieved.

My father was a high school American history teacher for many years. He used to tell me that the United States is not the worst country, but it is perhaps the most hypocritical. We have set values and ideals that we have never lived up to. Our history has shown us that US democracy was built on structural racism, which persists to this day. Scott Nakagawa, co-director of the 22nd Century Initiative, wrote, “We are not fighting to return to a democracy that never fully existed for most people. We are fighting to birth the democracy that has always been our deepest aspiration—one that finally lives up to its liberatory potential.”

CBOs represent an untapped and powerful resource in the journey toward Earth Three.

Speaking at a Hands Off training in New York City in December 2025, political scientist and organizer Maria Stephan posited a framing based on three distinct eras, or Earths, to understand where our country has been and how civil resistance can help us move toward a better future.

Before the 2024 (or perhaps 2016) election, we lived in Earth One, which Stephan illustrated with a photo of a smiling Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Newt Gingrich. Deep inequities and racism were baked into the system. At the same time, elements of the democratic system functioned reliably and predictably. We’re now in Earth Two, a moment when the government is using the “authoritarian playbook” to actively assault people’s rights and grab power. It’s a fragile time, when we might lose the democracy we relied on in Earth One. It’s also a moment of potential, where instead of simply defending the past, we can dream and build for a future Earth Three, where the promise of a true democracy is realized.

As activists and thought leaders scan the landscape and consider how to mobilize and organize for Earth Three, CBOs are often overlooked. And, indeed, there are structural elements of CBOs that make it seem that these organizations cannot engage in this work (even though nonprofits can legally mobilize participation in democracy and are powerfully positioned to do so). CBOs have government contracts and federal incorporation status that prevent them from engaging in certain types of political advocacy or activities. CBOs also have strengths to bring to larger collaborations. In their book Practical Radicals, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce make the compelling case for combining diverse strategies of social change to bring the strengths of different methods together for a more dynamic and responsive approach. Considering this framing, CBOs represent an untapped and powerful resource in the journey toward Earth Three.

Creating Community Agency

Bhargava and Luce describe collective care as one method or entry point to social change. They tell the powerful story of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), which was founded by gay men to provide care and services to each other in the early days of the AIDS crisis. Many CBOs founded in the 1970s and 80s, particularly community development corporations, were created by neighbors who sought to improve their communities in the wake of massive disinvestment. They built affordable housing, organized tenants, and began providing services—youth programs, workforce development, adult education, and others—to help meet the needs of their neighbors. As Bhargava and Luce wrote, “In a world where so many are afflicted by despair in the face of problems that seem too big to tackle, collective care’s emphasis on change at an intimate, human scale can instill the sense of agency and hope needed to power large scale social change.”

Effective CBOs support their participants to build their sense of agency. An ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) student or a tenant seeking to improve her housing conditions can receive support from a CBO staffer in the form of instruction or resources. She will also, by connecting with the organization and her peers, deepen her sense that she can set goals to improve her life and achieve them. This agency and connection to others is essential to people feeling that their voices matter, and that they can make a difference in their own lives and communities.

In addition to individual services, many CBOs also support civic engagement: organizing among neighbors to advocate for better housing, more resources for public schools, investments in neighborhood infrastructure, or other needs. Others register and educate voters, host candidate forums, and get out the vote. All these elements can create the conditions for an engaged and connected society, where people feel that they have a role and a voice in determining their future and advancing their vision for their communities.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

So, what’s missing? While many of the approaches described here are inherent to how CBOs operate, they are often led and run in a disparate way. This is sometimes a function of how CBOs are funded and organized. Because we typically rely on grants, each of which has a different purpose and set of measurements, our approach can be splintered and lack a cohesive vision. The culture of our organizations has also typically been pragmatic: We pride ourselves on acting quickly to respond to needs as they emerge and are often underresourced to engage in analysis of the bigger picture.

Across the broader field of social justice work, practitioners and writers have noticed a common challenge related to the need for a more robust and lasting political framework for our work. For her book Unrig The Game, Vanessa Priya Daniel interviewed 45 women of color leaders in social justice organizations to identify trends across the field. One of her interviewees, Linda Burnham, made the case that social justice organizations should deepen their commitment to intentional political education: “We’re not grounded. Our organizations are so vulnerable because we’re not good at articulating the relationship between broad social justice values, what we are doing in a given campaign or project, and our longer term vision and goals.”

CBOs are often a blind spot for these larger, democracy-focused organizations, and there is real potential for building bridges between these two

She pointed out that when staff are not aligned around values and strategy, and instead are loosely committed to a set of broad principles, there is more opportunity for staff to turn their attention to conflicts within the organization rather than outward to the communities to which we are accountable.

Bhargava and Luce draw a complementary conclusion from their research. In their discussion of collective care, they noted that “if care infrastructure is built with a political goal in mind, it can seed transformational change.” By extension, if we don’t bring a political analysis to collective care work, we’re less likely to connect the dots and build from individual to larger-scale change. Bhargava and Luce also speak to the need for a long-term vision. “If there’s a distinctive historical weakness of the U.S. Left, it may be its inability to coalesce around, or even come up with, a long-term plan….We believe that practical radicals should build plans that span generations, as the Right has done.”

In addition to the need for more explicit political education and vision, there is a disconnect between the larger universe of organizations focused on “democracy”—whether through thought leadership or organizing and mobilization—and those on the ground, providing services and building community at the local level. CBOs are often a blind spot for these larger, democracy-focused organizations, and there is real potential for building bridges between these two spheres.

The Work Starts Here and Now

What might this sort of shift look like? As discussed, many of these pieces are already in place. While we shouldn’t impose a framework or program on these organizations from above, there are ways to draw on existing strengths and weave in new perspectives. As CBO leaders, we can scan our current work and activities for ways to integrate civic engagement opportunities throughout our organizations.

Some ideas and questions for leaders of CBOs and others to consider:

• Community building is a core part of CBO work. Can we use opportunities for community building and connection—block parties, graduation celebrations, cultural events—as entry points for participation in political education and organizing activities?
• Training and education about political context and history—for staff, program participants, and members of the wider community—can help the organization’s stakeholders develop a common analysis and connect the dots between local work and broader pro-democracy efforts. How can the CBO integrate this kind of training and education into existing work?
• What partnerships can be developed between CBOs and broader policy and advocacy organizations to tap into the strengths of each? How might these organizations collaborate effectively?

The building blocks for a stronger foundation of our democracy are here, in our local organizations. As we engage with these questions, we can use our collective wisdom and strength to move beyond our current crises to create a better future for all.