Civic Culture Initiatives of The James Irvine Foundation
Craig McGarvey, Program Director

The Goal of Irvine's Civic Culture Program

The central goal is to help Californians build inclusive Communities from diversity, diversity that is, arguably, unprecedented in the history of the world. This work--building a cohesive culture out of many cultural backgrounds--is, we think, some of the most important work of our time

Theoretical Assumptions

We've been pursuing essentially three strategies, but there are a few underlying hypotheses behind them. First is a belief that the community is built through shared experience--through the process of coming together, across the lines that tend to divide us, to identify the problems and issues and turn them into solutions and initiatives.  There is also a belief that, if the question is one of culture, these are learned behaviors and therefore education matters. And there is a belief that it's important to link, in true partnership, the practice-building of communities with the knowledge-building of applied research.

Our main strategies have been to help Californians develop institutional bases for their community problem solving, to support the development of the field of human relations in California, and, in a geographically targeted priority, to help build, in California's Central Valley, a voluntary, self-perpetuating capacity for naturalization and full civic participation.

Institutions for Community Problem Solving

Here we are exploring both the role of organized religion and the role of the arts and humanities in community building, as well as Seeking partners who are developing their own local institutional bases for bringing people together and building their capacity to solve problems.  An example of the latter would be the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment, in South Central L.A.  Born as a response to the crack cocaine epidemic, the Coalition is essentially an organizing effort.  They go door to door with questions and surveys, encourage people to come together to identify issues, help these folks to learn how to do research and deal with governmental authorities, etc.  On the practice/knowledge front, the Coalition has a deep partnership with evaluators from The Imoyase Group.  Evaluation (they call it empowerment evaluation) is really an ethic with them; everything they do they "cut up," that is, dissect, analyze, and improve.

We are only beginning to explore the role of the arts and humanities in community building, but we've been at the exploration of organized religion now for about 18 months.  We've selected congregations for several reasons:  they are important voluntary associations at neighborhood levels, they work from a values base that includes respect for human dignity and inclusiveness, organized religion is one of the only institutions that has stayed where poor people are, etc.  In the work we're pursuing three strategic avenues.  We're supporting the training of congregations in secular, civic work, mostly through faith-based Community organizing.  We're also looking for partnerships that bring together networks of congregations, so ethnic and denominational lines will be crossed and they can learn from one another (the Bay Area's FAITHS Initiative, a collaboration of some 350 congregations, is a good example).  And, to turn practice into useful knowledge, we are trying to foster partnerships between congregations and university applied research efforts.  The anchor institution for us in this last category is the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC.  The Center is doing ethnographic research and developing an interactive data base of civic work in congregations.  But they are also brokering relationships, bringing community people and their ideas together, and experimenting with a variety of media (on-line, journalistic, still photography, video) in reflecting back to the community the lessons that are being distilled from their research.  Making useful, useable knowledge.

Human Relations Capacity Building

With our partners in community we've been trying to envision what a mature human relations "field" might look like, then "planning backward" to see if our grant making can help put pieces in place and connect the pieces.  The underlying assumption is that there is no such field yet in the State.  If there were, it would likely include, among other things, formal and informal networks so that people could learn from one another, a link to knowledge-building so that practice could be turned into best practice, a centralized clearinghouses of some kind for the knowledge that was being developed, identifiable anchor institutions and leaders, and educational efforts to develop such leaders.

Our key partners here include CAHRO, itself, as the organization builds its capacity throughout the State. Educational efforts include programs in tolerance, conflict resolution, and leadership education.  In the last category, we've been exploring the conceptual notion that the kind of leader who will be necessary to our communities is the person who can "bridge the borders" that divide us--race and ethnicity, class and ideology, etc.  Irvine has an opportunity, we think, and a responsibility, to support such leaders, to help them mentor the next generation, to build an understanding of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are necessary and the guided experiences that can help to develop them, and to build public support for the importance of such leadership.

The Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship

This work--to build community capacity in naturalization and citizenship that is voluntary and self-perpetuating--is a pretty fascinating experiment with about fifteen, now, community partners.  Each organization has its own grant, but all of the proposals were shared amongst the group so we could look for complementarities, ways to work together over the long haul, ways to make something bigger than the sum of our parts.  Everyone in the Partnership meets regularly to share learnings, and we've built in consultant assistance to be mutual learners, to use technology together, to use applied research, to use video.  The working hypothesis here--and we are still testing it--is that, if we build capacity in the individual organizations and in the collective partnership, we will be able to move that capacity out into the community.  As our "learning coach," Isao Fujimoto of U.C. Davis, says, everything we learn how to do, we share with others.

Challenges the Foundation Faces in Working on Civic Culture

Creating an effective "learning partnership" is the biggest challenge.  The work of the effort is to build trust among ourselves, so that we have comfort in being honest about sharing our failures as well as our successes, our weaknesses as well as our strengths.  There are lots of natural forces to contend with--the uneven playing field of the foundation and community-based organization arena, the competition for funds--and it's not easy.  But it's from the things that don't go right that we learn.  As Joseph Campbell said, dig where you stumble if you want to find the treasure.  Digging for treasure is the challenge.