Civic Life in America Resources
The Corporation for National and Community Service and the National Conference on Citizenship are both working to build a movement toward greater participation in civic life in order to support healthier, stronger communities.
The term "civic engagement" or "civic life" can be used to describe diverse activities, and generally includes activities that build on the collective resources, skills, expertise, and knowledge of citizens to improve the quality of life in communities.1 Civic engagement is, in essence, the common thread of participation in and building of one’s community and can be done alone or with a group, and can also include activities that are done formally through an organization (such as volunteering with a nonprofit) or less formal. While many varieties of social and civic participation could be classified as civic engagement, our research focuses on activities that can be classified into five main categories:
- Service, including formal volunteering through an organization and less formal ways of helping others, such as working with neighbors to fix or solve a community problem;
- Participating in a group; including participating in activities of religious institutions and community associations;
- Connecting to information and current events, including accessing news in print or online;
- Social connectedness, including the informal ways that people interact with their family, friends and others in their community such as exchanging favors with their neighbors; and
- Political action, including registering to vote and voting.
Please read the Issue Brief to learn more about each of these categories.
The resources on this page have been developed to help you increase the capacity of your organization, program, or community by sharing ideas to engage your stakeholders to come together and solve problems in their communities.
For this first release, we are providing specific resources to support the Civic Life in America research and have narrowed the focus to three key civic areas: informal service, social connectedness, and Internet use.
Informal Service:
Resources for organizations to empower people to support them in ways other than traditional volunteering.
You are familiar with formal volunteering through or with an organization (i.e. going to an after school program weekly to tutor a student), but there are a lot of ways in which people can serve outside of organizations. For example, a family in your neighborhood was devastated by a fire and you and your neighbors start a clothing drive to help them rebuild.
We are showcasing a number of activities going on in your communities that people initiated because they saw a need.
Social Connectedness:
Resources for organizations to help them partner with existing social networks such as churches, schools, local clubs, or sports groups.
There are groups in your community that are meeting on a regular basis that you can reach out to and engage in addressing a local need. These organizations have members, attendees and visitors who are natural sources for one-time and even longer-term volunteers. For example, Mocha Moms is a group of mothers who want to make a difference in their community by partnering with local barber/beauty shops and creating reading nooks for the children in the shops who are waiting for their parents.
Here you will find examples of people using various social connections to solve community problems.
Internet Use:
Resources for ways people can use the Internet to increase opportunities for people to engage and for organizations to understand and learn more about the Internet. One example shows how to start an e-mentoring program on a college campus.
Here you will find resources that show how you can use technology to support civic life.
1 IUPUI Task Force on Civic Engagement
