Announcing New National Initiative
Today, I’m announcing a new national initiative called Engaging Frontline Civic Leaders in Responding to COVID-19. We’re sending this questionnaire to you and thousands of public innovators in our national network. These open-ended questions will help us all to better understand how you and others are responding to COVID-19 and what we need to do to move forward in our communities and as a nation.
The questionnaire will take just 10-12 minutes to fill out. I hope you’ll do it today—and send it in.
I commit to you that the Institute will share the insights from this questionnaire with you, our network, and beyond. We’ll write about the insights, speak out about them, and hold webinars for you to learn about and respond to them.
Like you, I am committed to a more hopeful, inclusive path for our communities and our nation. To get there, I believe we must hear more from the local civic leaders and community change agents who will be critical to blazing this new path. You’re the ones closest to the ground now, and you’ll be instrumental in leading local work moving forward. Your voices and views must help shape this new direction.
COVID-19 has brought at least two divergent realities into stark focus. First, the inequities and disparities in our nation are vast and great. So many people who have been living on the edge are now even more vulnerable. These include fellow Americans who have lost their jobs, who need drug treatment, and who do not have internet access and/or laptops to do their schoolwork, among many others. Providing dignity to all, ensuring hope is more than a campaign slogan, and making community a common enterprise is our shared mission.
The good news toward this shared mission rests in the other reality I want to highlight—the amazing ways in which so many people and groups have been “doers” in their responses to the pandemic. Public libraries, United Ways, community-based foundations, schools, faith-based groups, arts and cultural institutions, and social service agencies, among others have stepped forward in new, innovative, often remarkable ways to meet our common challenges.
And individual Americans have once again demonstrated that we each hold innate capacities to make a real difference in the lives of each other when we decide to step forward.
We can—in fact, we must—bridge our divides and create a new culture of shared responsibility in America. This is the mission and the work of The Harwood Institute.
Please fill out the questionnaire and let us, together, create a more hopeful, inclusive path in our communities and as a nation.
