“If we want to be We the People, then we need to Be the People.”

That’s the battle cry of a collection of more than 50 of the most prominent philanthropic organizations and donors in the country, who are launching a new national campaign this summer to revitalize citizenship.

The campaign is called Be The People.

Seems a growing number of private foundations have decided not to leave the future of democracy in government hands.

“Funders are getting more concerned about the health of American democracy, the future of the democratic experiment and pluralism and inclusion,” Kristin Goss, a professor who directs the Center for the Study of Philanthropy and Voluntarism at Duke University, told The Associated Press.

The initiative is targeting more than $200 million for its first-year budget to help mobilize hundreds of millions of individual Americans in efforts to solve local problems. Instead of giving money to the usual do-gooding suspects, the campaign is focused very much on activating individuals and hyperlocal organizations in a bottom-up, grassroots revival of civic can-do. And then spreading their stories across the country.

“This project is a really incredible multisector partnership of not just a couple of big institutions, but really dozens and dozens of incredible organizations who are working all the time to bring people together in conversation and to serve communities and to work with people in communities,” said Asha Curran, CEO of GivingTuesday, one of the partners who happens be very active in Colorado.

One of the first events the partners are planning is TogetherTuesday, a national day of community action on June 23. The effort builds on GivingTuesday’s work to mobilize millions for a day of charitable giving. TogetherTuesday is similarly expected to deploy millions for a day of community-building activities such as checking in on a neighbor, organizing a donation drive, or volunteering with friends.

“Basically, Be The People and GivingTuesday believe the same thing, which is that people can come together and create solutions. Period,” Curran added.

The approach aims to move beyond “checkbook philanthropy” to promote “active citizenship,” where individuals are encouraged to actively participate in rebuilding the civic infrastructure in their communities. It will prioritize strengthening local networks, civic education and shared spaces.

“The most fundamental metric of whether we have a healthy country or not is whether our citizens are able to be in civil conversation with one another and care for one another and express their accountability to each other and their belonging to each other through, you name it, generosity, volunteerism, contributions, civic action,” said Curran.

Founding members range from nonprofits — including GivingTuesday, Goodwill Industries, Habitat for Humanity and More Perfect; businesses like Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and the National Basketball Association; to funders like the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Spearheading the effort is Brian Hooks, the CEO of Stand Together, who frames it as a response to a “red alert” for the country that came via a 2024 Pew Research survey finding that most Americans didn’t believe the U.S. could do anything about its most pressing problems.

“People don’t believe we can solve our problems,” echoed Todd Rose, the co-founder and CEO of the think tank Populace and one of the driving forces of Be The People.

Rose believes we have lost a crucial civic layer of society, which means we have lost the muscle to solve many local problems ourselves.

From roughly the 1960s through the 1990s, the intermediary institutions that once structured civic life — fraternal orders, labor unions, mainline churches, civic clubs like the Elks and Rotary — declined dramatically. These weren’t just social clubs. They were schools of civic practice: You learned to run a meeting, negotiate disagreement, build consensus, and accept losing a vote while remaining in community with the winners. When they hollowed out, that informal civic curriculum went with them.

The result is a kind of civic learned helplessness — people feel that politics is something that happens to them, not something they do

“As the government takes over more and more things, it takes away our agency,” Rose said.  “It takes away our sense that we matter.”

“We saw the collapse of American communities,” he adds. “We just lost that layer. And this is what Be The People has to recreate. We’re a nation of joiners. We solve problems. We’re still a charitable people. When you lose the civil portion of society, you’ve got to replace that.”

Curran seconded the notion. “I think that citizens feeling hopeless is a threat to democracy,” she added. “I see that as being one of the main things that this initiative wants to tackle. When somebody feels hopeless, they automatically feel a lack of agency, right? ‘There’s nothing I can do to make things better.’ ‘I see everything being bad around me.’ ‘I sense all this division. I sense all this distrust, and I don’t know what to do to make it better.’”

The campaign builds on research that indicates many people want to contribute to their communities but don’t know how. Research by Populace shows that more than 70% of Americans aspire to contribute to their communities and make a difference in the lives of others. But only 30% feel like they are.

Be The People aims to activate and empower the potential civic leaders who are already there in local communities.

“We’re building a platform that allows people to coordinate, to see what’s possible, to get engaged,” Rose said.

“No one size fits all solution,” he added. “So we’re partnering with hundreds of community organizations that are in their communities, that are local. We’ll work in partnership with them. We’re engaging prominent influencers to allow their participants to participate.”

Though Stand Together was started by conservative philanthropist Charles Koch, it has established itself as a convener that can bring coalitions together across ideological lines. Stand Together already partners with 320 other nonprofits to pursue nonpartisan bottom-up solutions to societal problems.

Charles Koch and his late brother David used their wealth to wield significant political influence in conservative and libertarian circles for decades, and Charles has continued to donate to libertarian causes since David’s death.

But this new nonpartisan campaign is separate from Koch’s political arm, Americans for Prosperity. The campaign already has the support of the Martin Luther King Jr. family and many liberal-leaning foundations.

Rather than incorporating as a new nonprofit, Be The People will act as a banner for groups to organize under and connect to resources.

Hooks told AP the country’s 250th anniversary is a unique moment “to show people that they matter, that they have a part to play, and that the future is unwritten, but it depends on each one of us stepping up to play our part.”

Be The People will also host cultural events and a media and storytelling campaign that helps connect people to opportunities to get engaged in their communities.

The 250th is a rallying point, but organizers see this as a long-term play, 10 years long.

Hooks said the initiative would launch a major data collection effort to track whether people are actually more engaged and whether problems are actually getting solved.

“The good news, in my view, is that when people engage in generosity and their community, or toward other people, it’s generative,” said Curran.  “There’s such a profound emotional and mental, and I would say, even physical, payout. We are healthier the more we give to others. And so we want more of that feeling.”

Curran sees Be The People answering an enormous unarticulated hunger out there right now.  

“I think if there’s any upside to this fractured social media ecosystem that we live in right now, it’s that people are going to increasingly want to get offline,” she noted. “Because there will be a greater sense of authenticity, and real connection than they can find online, where everything is filtered through an algorithmic bubble that just reinforces our own beliefs and our own outrage.

“So if you want to escape that, there’s one surefire way to do it, and it’s turning the computer off, going out your front door and actually doing something hand in hand, whether literally or metaphorically, with your neighbors. Engaging in local community. I mean, I don’t know if I want to be cold in saying this, but I feel almost it’s like it’s our last real hope.”

Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.