Nourishing Equitable Civic Engagement

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This article was published in Issue 05 of The People’s Practice, which highlights the role of democracy in equitable community development, including in planning processes, economic systems, and generally promoting a healthier community.

We caught up with Erika Anthony to discuss democracy building beyond election cycles and fostering an equitable civic ecosystem.

What do you believe that equitable civic engagement means, or what does it mean to you?

Erika: I credit the Kirwan Institute for its report, Equitable Civic Engagement, that distinguished between engaging community in a performative, surface level way versus building deep trust and relationship with community. It gave us the vernacular to hold ourselves accountable to our practices. Listen to those most proximate to the challenge, seek solutions from them.

As a small organization, Cleveland VOTES can only serve so many of the nearly 300,000 folks that make up the city. I’m a Black woman, and I identify as a Black woman. I have made a concerted effort to establish relationships in different facets of Cleveland’s communities, but I also recognize that our lived experiences are different. For that reason, we identify partners who can speak to their communities’ needs, and our role is to provide the tools and resources they need to do their jobs most effectively. There are urgent needs before us, but we have to go at the pace of community. My intention is not to necessarily be the lead on all things related to democracy, but instead ensure we listen deeply to understand how best, together, we can create solutions.

Could you speak more to building partnerships, and how we can practice a stronger cross racial solidarity, especially as Black leaders in civic engagement?

Erika: There is a deep commitment within our community to speak truth to power and reconcile with the tensions we see within the city. For some community members, the long legacy in Cleveland’s community development infrastructure works, and for others, not so much. Part of building relationships was naming the truths we heard. We facilitated conversations around a mobile exhibit, “Undesign the Redline.” It was a launchpad to have real conversations. Affirming folks that they are not disillusioned about their feelings and experiences. Our neighborhood doesn’t look like this by chance. It’s by design.

Another example was in the 2020 Census. There was concern if folks honestly responded to potential citizenship questions. We had to say, we don’t know. We couched it to consider ramifications of less resources for our community without an accurate count. That’s part of how we’ve been able to build relationships – creating authentic spaces where folks can learn. And we also learn from them.

Also, our region does have a tremendous amount of “resources,” but often we’re not working systematically together. It’s important for us to stay clear on our mission, which sounds simple. But it’s hard. So many outside factors want to pull us in other directions. We are not doing on the ground canvassing, voter registration, because folks are already doing that. Our priority is strengthening the civic infrastructure. Nevertheless, people who don’t know the granular nature of our work ask about our number of voter registrations. But our work is not just about “the goal of the election,” and that’s hard to say both to funders and community. If folks are not seeing metrics like voter turnout shift, there’s a perception of failure. Feeling that pressure is real because the voter turnout is not increasing.

We are seeing the civic ecosystem grow in part because of what we’ve contributed. There is always that internal tension, are we doing enough? Should we shift? But to actually see equitable civic engagement, that’s not something that just happens. This work is ongoing. You have to nourish it, like you would any living organism.

You’re creating better systems, and that is harder to talk about. Could you speak a little bit more about your newer programs, Democracy Collective, and More Than My Art?

Erika: In our organization’s first strategic plan in 2022, partners responded, the DNA of Cleveland VOTES is beautiful and transformative. More people need to know about it. More people need to be part of it. We translated that as, how could we embed ourselves throughout our community?

We have leaders in our community. We don’t lack brilliance. We don’t lack ingenuity. However, there’s not a common hymn book. If you are a doctor or accountant, there’s some uniformity to your training. Community work is more abstract. Folks may come to it as a result of a crisis, not necessarily with a plan of how they will address it. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, time does not allow for us to ask, what are your skills? The Democracy Collective provides community leaders the main tenets of community building. Fellows create an activation project that speaks to their priorities. In many leadership programs, you’re in this beautiful, amazing, utopian bubble. And then it ends. It’s hard to translate theory into practice, but doing the activation projects during the program helps to troubleshoot in real time.

We also pay participants versus charging them. You should be compensated for community work. Some individuals think that folks should do it out of the goodness of their heart. Where’s the equity in this hierarchical understanding of who is deserving to be paid and who is not? We wanted to invest in leaders not only through time, but also through compensation, especially regarding deep, systemic work.

Through More Than My Art, we are building a more holistic relationship with and providing tangible tools for creatives and culture bearers. I wanted to expand our network to folks that aren’t involved in the same way as me but have a vested interest because they are critical members of our community. We are co-creating solutions, not limiting creatives to an identity. Folks are more than being a visual artist, sculptor, poet. They are a whole human. An artist once said to me, “Don’t look at us artists as a utility, or just call us when you want the mural. Invite us to the table to create with you.” It’s not just about the output.

This grounding quote from bell hooks is our other growing edge. “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is; it’s to imagine what is possible.” I think we’re doing great work. But if we think it’s all figured out, how can we grow? Part of that is inviting others to push our imaginations in ways that we never could envision.

Some of these programs are helping to shift power. What does it look like to shift power? And what could this mean for shaping democracy in our future?

Erika: Everyone plays a role in the landscape of our democracy. Shifting power is expanding imaginations beyond voter turnout. Elections happen twice a year. People fly into a community a week before an election, they’ll have a concert, but what’s the lasting legacy of that? You have the financial means to do something. What are you leaving behind? We’re asking people to consider the ways democracy shows up in our lives every day, year round.

In 2020, a bunch of us came together and felt like the powers that be were not effectively ensuring that Black and brown communities had masks and PPE. We said, “We’re gonna use the power that we have. We’re gonna fundraise. We’re gonna get people what they need to be safe and healthy.” That became Masks for Community, a kit that included information about the Census, COVID safety, voter engagement. It was an acknowledgement that we understood the election and Census was important for us as an organization, but we would be woefully disrespectful if we didn’t understand the global health crisis unfolding before our eyes.

Some may say, how does that fall into democracy, or our mission? Because we’re part of community, and we have to acknowledge all conditions of community. We could not do our work without making sure that we were protecting the health of our community first. That’s part of the mix to create this more equitable democracy. Having a healthy community requires a healthy democracy.

The People’s Practice is dedicated to anyone who cares about anti-racist community development work and wants to be part of the movement to move anti-racist practice forward in the sector. This work attempts to build an understanding of structural racism in community development and pathways to racially equitable outcomes that promote health equity. This work is made possible by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

About ThirdSpace Action Lab: ThirdSpace Action Lab was created to disrupt the vicious cycle of disinvestment + displacement that negatively impacts the vitality of communities of color with low incomes. ThirdSpace is a grassroots solutions studio dedicated to prototyping creative, place-based solutions to complex socio-economic problems. The organization works as institutional + community organizers, turning multidisciplinary research into evidence-based strategies and activating “third places” to co-create more liberated spaces for people of color.