The Growing Democracy Project

The GDProject envisions building a national transformative civic educational system with and through other civic organizations that promote democracy. Its job would be to develop legions of highly competent democratic practitioners from the ranks of everyday people to make democracy the predominant social and political force in our country, however long that would take.

To be clear, the GDProject is not about solving specific problems. It is about developing the motivations, dispositions, and skills for everyday citizens to manage conflicts and address common problems together. That is, their capacity to govern themselves at all levels of interaction—one-to-one, group, community, organization, society.

Fixing what we have is urgent, but that won’t make a big difference long-term. We have to grow our democracy in ways we never have before.

No one knows how to do that yet, but we know enough to get started. In 5 years we can build the core infrastructure of a project that can be a foundation for building a national project spanning generations. 

A unique set of ingredients are called for: 

·        A coalition of organizations committed to consciously developing our democracy;

·        An innovative and highly developed training capacity for advanced democratic practice; 

·        Several resourceful communities to incubate the project locally; 

·        A steadily growing Democracy Corps to organize and sustain local “schools” in advanced democratic practice; 

·        A dynamic network that weaves all of this effort into a coherent force as a learning-and-building organization. 

We see all of these elements coming together to form a Transformative Civic Education System for everyday citizens.