3

Civic Infrastructure

The third session of the workshop first explored how youth view civic engagement and community health, then had a panel of scholars and practitioners discuss the current state and future of civic infrastructure. The session began with youth leaders sharing examples of their own personal civic engagement to promote meaningful actions and relationships in their community. Also during this session, panelists provided more detail on the connection between civic engagement and health, including some of the tensions and gaps in the current civic ecosystem and ideas and strategies for what it would take to strengthen infrastructure (session highlights are provided below).

YOUTH PANEL

Meira Levinson from Harvard University began the session by introducing two experienced youth council members from Gonzales, California. Isabel Mendoza, a former youth commissioner and former Gonzales Youth Council member, was a sophomore at Santa Clara University and an intern for the city of Gonzales California Community Engagement and Strategic Partnerships at the time of the workshop. Mendoza was studying psychology with the hope of becoming a clinical psychologist for children and adolescents or pursuing a career in the community connecting civic infrastructure with concerns about health equity. Aiden Cervantes was a graduating senior at Gonzales High School and a youth commissioner leading the Gonzales Youth Council. Cervantes said

he would be attending the University of California, Los Angeles, majoring in public affairs, and hoped to come back to his county and work in city or county governments.

Mendoza began with an overview of the history of the Gonzales Youth Council (GYC). The GYC is the official youth advisory mechanism to the city of Gonzales and Gonzales Unified School District. The city government and the school district first collaborated in 2006. In 2015 the GYC was established, made up of students in grades 6–12. Today the GYC is going on its seventh generation. Mendoza described one of the notable community projects implemented by the GYC—a mental health project begun early in the COVID-19 pandemic and continuing now. The GYC has also supported other communities to establish their own versions of a youth council.

Cervantes described the civic infrastructure of the GYC. The youth commissioner acts as the equivalent of a club president and runs the club. The process to become youth commissioner is extensive, Cervantes said.

Candidates must be sophomores, juniors, or seniors and must be recommended by a past youth commissioner. The application process includes an interview with the current youth commissioners. Cervantes added that he did not believe that anyone who completed the application process was ever denied the opportunity to serve. The roles and responsibilities of a youth council member are very different from those of the commissioner. A member, for example, will attend meetings and volunteer during public community service events. The youth commissioner works behind the scenes to make such meetings and events happen by developing the agenda and running the meeting. Commissioners are responsible for maintaining the partnership between the city and the school by meeting with officials and adult allies throughout the city and district of Gonzales. Commissioners are also the official student representatives for the city council, so they attend the monthly city council meetings and have their own agenda items to present to represent the youth. As of 2020, GYC youth commissioners are no longer included as an official representative for the school board; however, they still have a reoccurring agenda item, which allows them to present all the projects and events conducted throughout the year to help better understand the youth of Gonzales.

In the discussion Levinson asked about the substance of what the GYC has achieved, especially with the mental health project launched during the pandemic. Mendoza spoke about the challenges youth endured during the pandemic and the actions that were taken to help their community. Through a partnership with California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), a survey of middle and high school youth was launched to gauge overall student well-being and their anxiety concerning COVID-19 as well as how the students balanced responsibilities at home and school and general self-care. After conducting the survey the GYC, in collaboration with the CSUMB team, carried out quantitative and qualitative data analyses and presented them to elected officials to make them aware of the current status of the mental health within their community. In addition to spreading awareness, this project led to asking officials for more access to mental health resources needed for the community. Before this effort, the school district—consisting of three schools—had only one social worker, and now there are two new social workers available to their school district. Students in the GYC and at CSUMB are continuing to review the data and build on this project to ensure that students across the school district have access to the resources they need. “The mental health project is one of my favorite projects because of the real impact that we made,” Mendoza said. The project affected not only students, but the whole community. GYC members would post on social media to keep students engaged after the survey, and over time many people in

the community began to engage and interact with these posts and that suggested that more people were better informed about mental health. Cervantes added that “mental health is not really spoken about within our community,” so this project showcasing the mental health of youth inspired parents and other adult allies to also seek mental health assistance. The main goal was to show students that they are not alone. This is an ongoing project to ensure that students have access to the resources they need to progress, not only within the school district, but throughout the whole community.

This project is a good example of how civic infrastructure is connected with public health and health equity, Levinson said. The GYC made political changes through civic engagement and tripled the number of social workers in the school district. In addition, the process of gathering data and disseminating the results also led to an attitudinal shift with students beginning to understand they are not alone but rather are members of a collective. Levinson added that the GYC story illustrates the potential of civic engagement in that individuals recognized that they could not solve problems by themselves and realized that they needed to move to a collective mindset to find and implement solutions together.

Cervantes provided another example of civic engagement. “Zoom fatigue is a real thing,” he said, which was a particular issue because the youth council members also had to be online not only for classes, but also for various other activities, including attending youth council meetings. To lessen screen time, youth council members volunteered to help with first grade students at the local elementary school. The class was divided into breakout groups for youth council members to tutor. This activity received positive feedback, and this type of relationship building ignited excitement among council members, especially during the pandemic when most learning was done virtually.

Levinson asked the panelists to further describe the challenges that the youth council has faced as well as some potential solutions. Cervantes said that youth counselors are limited in what they can accomplish because they do not have the same authority as the city council. If there are any community projects they want to execute, approvals must be obtained. This challenge was exacerbated during the pandemic when everything moved into a virtual world; instead of walking into city hall, a scheduled Zoom meeting was required, which was difficult due to the busy schedules of city officials. Other challenges related to being online included a lack of communication, such as people not responding to e-mails; the continuation of rescheduling meetings; a lack of motivation; and time management. “I think solutions to that is remembering your mission and your vision,” Mendoza said. “[Y]ou are doing this for change and trying to make a positive difference. . . . [I]f you have that passion

and drive and keep it consistent in your mind, I think you could definitely overcome the obstacles.”

Levinson relayed practical questions from the audience members interested in implementing a similar council in their communities. Cervantes explained that “it is a big commitment” and said that the ability to remain flexible and to manage one’s time is important. In addition to the experience, youth commissioners are given a stipend and are paid based on the hours spent working, and the city of Gonzales puts other resources into working with the GYC, such as liaising and providing support.

Levinson asked about health equity within the GYC and about how to promote equity effectively. For example, there may be issues of equity and participation within the youth council itself, such as being a bilingual speaker or balancing the time commitment with another part-time job. “I think the GYC has been incredibly diverse throughout the years,” Mendoza said. One challenge for the GYC has been increasing the male-to-female ratio, Cervantes added, but “we are always striving to encourage more students to join. We never have a cap on how many students can join and never reject anyone because we want to give everybody an opportunity.” Furthermore, the GYC has contributed to advancing equity through confronting educational disparities by providing financial support, tutoring, and wireless internet hotspots, which has helped many families.

CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE PANEL

Jocelyn Bissonnette, the special projects director of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP), introduced the civic infrastructure panel by describing civic engagement as “a collection of non-partisan ideas, activities, and field building that could help shift attitudes, behaviors, public policy, and politics with the objective to try to balance power on behalf of people in communities who are often marginalized from decisions and resources that affect them.” To further set the stage for this session, Bissonnette offered three basic assumptions: (1) that the health of members in a democratic society and the health of a democracy are intertwined; (2) that health and inequities exist because communities do not have equal opportunities to influence who represents them in policy decisions that affect their daily lives, including conditions around health; and (3) that improving health outcomes requires, at least in part, strengthening civic infrastructure and vice versa. The first question she asked the panelists was, “How do you see the connections between civic infrastructure and democracy and health, and what are some of the dimensions around that are the most important?”

Bissonnette introduced the first panelist, Jeanne Ayers, the executive director of the Healthy Democracy, Healthy People initiative. Ayers is also a fourth-generation farmer and grew up with a robust experience of democracy through a participatory decision-making process. For example, local policy decisions about utilities, roads, buses to schools, or creating a grain co-op, were the type of decisions made through conversations among the community that would occur in yards or town meetings. “I just grew up thinking that was what was normal and everybody had that experience,” Ayers said. This later led her to a career working at the intersection of community organizing and public health, learning how to build power. After a journey of governmental public health and political appointments, Ayers is now working at the intersections of voting, health, and civic participation. The Healthy Democracy, Healthy People initiative is a nonpartisan coalition of 10 national public health organizations that are working to advance health equity by ensuring that access to the ballot is available for everyone (Healthy Democracy Healthy People, n.d.).

In discussing the relationship between health equity and public health, Ayers said, health is conceived of broadly, i.e., “public health is what we do collectively to ensure the conditions in which all people can be healthy.” The focus is not just on programs, services, and disease surveillance, but also developing an understanding of having to collectively assure the conditions, Ayers added. What is missing, however, is the understanding that people need to build the collective power to influence those conditions. There are three practices that can be used to build these conditions: organize people and strengthen the capacity of communities; organize the narrative, knowledge, and data; and organize the resources and how policies and practices work. In using such practices, “we are working to build collective power,” Ayers explained. Those leading the Healthy Democracy, Healthy People initiative intended to recommend that the Biden Administration restore and prioritize metrics on voting in Healthy People 2030. In addition, the initiative is developing a health and democracy scorecard or index to highlight the interdependence of health and democracy. This scorecard could be used to

• analyze and illustrate the relationship among health equity, population health, and civic participation at the state level;
• build public commitment by expanding the understanding of the relationship between inclusive civic participation and collective health;
• support public health and health care professionals as champions for civic and voting participation;
• strengthen relationships across policy sectors; and
• identify policies and demonstrate practical ways to expand access to the ballot and improve population health.

Ayers also offered a call to action, which included embracing the imperative to address structural racism and promote policies that ensure and encourage civic and voter participation by being a civic health champion, promoting the understanding of the critical connections between healthy democracy and healthy people, building and using influence to shape policies, encouraging voter registration in all health services provided, and conducting research and data analyses.

Bissonnette then introduced the next panelist, Jeanine Abrams McLean, a vice president at Fair Count. Fair Count, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization seeking to end extractive organizing (i.e., going into a community to get what you want from it instead of actually investing and doing long-term power building in that community) in historically marginalized communities and to establish in its place long-term relationships using every iteration of civic participation (e.g., the U.S. Census, voting, and redistricting) as catalysts for continued civic engagement as well as for fair and accurate representation. Fair Count has a deep commitment to equity—equity in power, resources, and information.

Abrams McLean, a scientist by training, said “we could not have a healthy country if we do not have a healthy democracy.” Fair Count believes that the communities that are being undercounted in the Census, underrepresented at the polls, and that lose their voting power through redistricting processes are the same communities being overlooked and under-resourced throughout the pandemic and even further back before the pandemic in terms of overall health disparities.

Abrams McLean described some of Fair Count‘s work. First, the report Pandemic to Prosperity: South (done in collaboration with the Southern Economic Advancement Project and the National Conference on Citizenship) highlights 21 indicators of the pandemic’s impact on the South and offers policy recommendations to move the region from response to recovery (Fair Count, 2021). The indicators range from COVID-19 and vaccination rates to the impact of the pandemic on food security and the lack of internet access in communities, Abrams McLean said. Fair Count’s Count Me In program is a response to low vaccination rates and vaccine information in Georgia and other states in the South (CountMeIn, 2021). Organizers are on the ground engaging with and educating citizens through partnerships and events, such as distributing COVID-19 vaccines and expanding more ways to provide equitable and accessible health and knowledge to people so that they can make informed decisions about their health and the health of their families. Abrams McLean also described Science for Social Equity, a project that pairs community organizers and scientific researchers to target science-related issues together and work with marginalized and underrepresented communities to develop community-directed and community-informed solutions

to those problems (Science for Social Equity). For example, a team in Mississippi is working on vaccine distribution and education, a team in Washington, D.C., is working on health literacy, and a team in Florida is working on mental health education and providing needed resources to Black Millennials.

Archon Fung, the Winthrop Laflin McCormack professor of citizenship and self-government at the Harvard Kennedy School, was the session’s next panelist. Fung described what a healthy civic infrastructure looks like and why it is very important for health. First, one should consider the meaning of democracy—people having power. Fung said that when systems or public policies are failing to provide an environment where communities are healthy or when people are not able to exercise the power to stay healthy, that is a sign of a failure of democracy.

A healthy civic infrastructure should have four elements, Fung said: engagement, equity, voice, and knowledge. Engagement refers to people taking part in efforts toward health and taking care of each other and themselves. Fung illustrated how the four elements for a healthy civic infrastructure have been important throughout the duration of two current crises, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Engagement in responding to the Flint water crisis was especially important in the advocacy domain, with community activists engaging in protesting against lead-contaminated water. Fung said that a quicker response to the crisis may have occurred if the civic infrastructure and the resources for that civic infrastructure had been more equitable and more robust from the beginning. For example, a healthy civic infrastructure allows for many voices to be heard and listened to. One tragic feature of the Flint water crisis was that residents and community advocates used their voice, but many government officials failed to listen. This was a failure of civic infrastructure in which some people striving to be heard and to disseminate knowledge did not get an equal hearing. Similarly, the quality of civic infrastructure has been important to the COVID-19 response. As a society, we were able to demonstrate having the right resources to enable communities to survive weeks of shutdown.

The next panelist in the session was Ahtza Chavez, the executive director of the Native American Voting Alliance Education Project (NAVAEP). The NAVAEP works with New Mexico’s native communities to unite community stakeholders to improve the quality of life for Native American communities and to support the continuity of cultures and communities. NAVAEP advocates for social, economic, and environmental justice based on principles of civic engagement and building a Native American electorate (NAVA Education Project, n.d.). The NAVAEP works directly with New Mexico’s 23 Native American communities, which includes 19 pueblos (i.e, Pueblo tribes, each of which is a

sovereign nation), the Navajo nation, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the Mescalero Apache Tribe, and 20th pueblo has members in New Mexico, but is primarily in Texas.

Chavez described efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve the civic infrastructure among these communities, especially efforts aimed at increasing voter participation. The pandemic caused many communities to shut down completely, which highly affected civic engagement. Tribal communities had to reduce the number of polling locations in the Native American precinct. These closures resulted in an almost 10 percent drop in the Native American voter participation compared with the previous primary turnout data. The NAVAEP spent a lot of time spreading awareness of these closures, Chavez said, and it worked during the general election to make sure that these lockdown measures did not disenfranchise voters.

Overall, Chavez said, COVID-19 highlighted the fact that there is a general lack of infrastructure—electricity, running water, or broadband internet—in some communities. When the CDC recommended hand washing as a preventive measure early in the pandemic, many communities lacked the running water to be able to do that. New Mexico Senate Bill 4 (SB4) (NM Legislature, 2021¹) was intended to help protect the health of elders and communities could be protected by limiting travel across tribal boundaries, while ensuring access to polling locations by members of Indian nations, pueblos, and tribes. In addition to the introduction of SB4, a social media campaign was launched, and a phone banking campaign took place along with an election ambassador program, which shared personal protective equipment and monitored polls on Election Day. A new method for community outreach was launched, using geospatial mapping that would be able to target cell phones, laptops, and tablets to spread the message. Within the social media campaign, county clerks were called upon for 80 precincts to make sure the community was aware of changes in early voting spaces and where to go, that the secretary of state promoted the absentee ballot, and that a tribal toolkit was created to make sure all the information was available to tribal nations. There was a 30 percent increase in votership due at least in part to these efforts.

Levinson brought the session to a close with a discussion of schools and their role in supporting civic infrastructure and health. She spoke of the ways in which schools strengthen the civic infrastructure currently and some of the challenges they are facing. American public schools were founded as crucibles of democracy, and over the last 50 years schools have been treated as engines of economic development. The U.S. government

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¹https://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/20%20Special/final/SB0004.pdf (accessed September 21, 2021).

first began providing funding for schools for white students and then eventually opened up to all students into public schools, with the intention of building democratic capacity and attitudes. Levinson noted, however, that the educational efforts at times included antidemocratic attitudes like white supremacy.

There are four important ways in which schools help strengthen student civic knowledge, Levinson said. One way is through teaching youth directly about formal government, civic society, nonprofits, levers of power, and history in addition to teaching from all angles and historical dimensions, which are equally important for thinking about students civic learning, she said. “How we teach history, whose history we teach, and the way students come to think about history, including the power of historical narrative, is one lever of power,” Levinson added. A second realm in which schools contribute to student civic learning is pedagogy, referring to how teaching can have an impact on youth, such as through classroom discipline, inclusivity, and making room for minority opinions to be voiced. The third piece is the co-curricular² and extracurricular activities—i.e., the formal courses such as civics and history as well as the outside-the-classroom programs such as debate, newspaper, student government, and media. The last realm Levinson described is school culture. If a student feels respected and treated equally during school, those validations will contribute to what the students learn about their own civic capacities.

Levinson said that thanks to more research on the strength of civic pedagogy, civic co-curricular, and school culture, these aspects of school have been improving over decades. Stronger standards are being developed, and other proposals and programs are being funded and supported by national and local governments and organizations, such as the C3 framework from the National Council for Social Studies, which emphasizes the acquisition and application of knowledge to prepare students for college, career, and civic life (NCSS, n.d.). Educating for American Democracy has a proposed curriculum which is a call to action to invest in strengthening history and civic learning (Educating for American Democracy, 2021) and the National Academy of Education has prepared the Civic Reasoning and Discourse Report (2020). Congress has a bill supporting civic education through a $1 billion initiative.³

Levinson described some current challenges to civic education. One challenge is state-level legislation being enacted around the country that is intended to reduce the ways in which history and civics are taught.

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² Activities that complement the curriculum.

³https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/879/actions (accessed September 21, 2021).

The objective of such legislation appears to be to counteract powerful pedagogies and many of the empowering, inclusive, and egalitarian approaches to history education (on such issues as racism) that have been developed over the last few decades in order to try and create a more equitable and inclusive civic infrastructure.

CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE DISCUSSION

Bissonnette introduced the panel discussion by opening with the question: How do you build trust? Building authentic relationships, she said, is so critical to achieving the work being discussed today. Abrams McLean began her remarks by speaking about how non-extractive organizing is effective and sustainable. For the past 2 years, the organizers at Fair Count have lived in the same communities they work in, which allows them the opportunity to build and maintain relationships that also help build trust in communities. Fair Count has been able to pivot from the U.S. Census to pandemic outreach to voter education and engagement. By building a strong civic infrastructure and maintaining relationships, the group is able to get people educated and vaccinated, and it plans to use these same relationships to make sure there is community engagement in the redistricting process. Abrams McLean strongly encouraged deep-dive organizing, building trust, and investing in communities.

Chavez discussed the considerable distrust of the government and other people coming into tribal communities. The NAVAEP had to build relationships and gain trust over a longer period of time. Chavez emphasized the need to move away from transactional, extractive organizing. “We want to make real change, and you cannot do that if you do not have people from your community . . . at the table.”

Ayers spoke about the different roles that public and government officials may play while building civic infrastructure. Certain tools may be provided that encourage more transactional encounters, such as inviting a community member to advise government officials. But those tools may also be used to nurture more transformational, deeper relationships, and those could serve as the starting point to strengthening trust over time. “It is a matter of how we lead with investing in the people and the relationships,” Ayers said.

Fung said that an invitation from the public sector is really important; the desire to build a constructive relationship with public agencies and services is very helpful because trust is dependent on the culture. The second dimension is power-sharing. Public agencies and public officials should take the lead by sharing power with community members and citizens and providing a real voice and opportunity to influence agency decisions and determinations.

Discussion turned to the topic of power-sharing. “Philanthropic sector and government can be powerful forces for change, but these institutions can also reinforce inequities through the ways in which they develop priorities or silo work, in ways that undermine intersectionality, and how they distribute resources,” Bissonnette said. How can funders and government institutions be better partners both in centering equity and in strengthening the current civic infrastructure? Chavez noted that there are cases where community members may feel like outsiders are trying to “save” them, so working with community members as equals is key. It is also important to provide ongoing, sustained, and adequate support to achieve community goals. Time is lost when grants that are awarded over short periods of time also require re-applying; grant writing and reporting take time away from the actual mission. Moving away from the extractive mindset is key and is crucial for communities, Chavez said. Abrams McLean introduced the concept of sharing wealth and distributing funds fairly and more widely. There are many instances where the government will fund larger and well-known organizations, and many grassroots organizations are often left out, she noted. There should be federal funding allocated for grassroots efforts that can make an impact on the ground level. Speaking from an academic perspective, Levinson reflected on the fact that education is supported by large philanthropic organizations which have arguably weakened the democratic control and voice over schools and through schools. These philanthropies have replaced public deliberation with their decisions on the behalf of the community. The work of youth organizers may cause a shift back to a healthy democracy within schools. Youth organizations and youth leaders have demonstrated sizeable impact for Dreamers, the March for Our Lives, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Youth efforts are also directed towards education and schools, displaying democratic engagement, which demonstrates the potential of schools as a component of civic infrastructure. From a governmental or professional public health perspective, Ayers added, “we have to center our work in intentionally building power with the people who are most impacted by health inequities.” The work required is different from this perspective. Even when doing local work in and for communities, government officials need to work with community-led organizations to figure out what the needs are and how to get funding for these groups. This requires long-term relationship-building with organizations that are committed to doing this work. This is not included in current metrics, but it can and should be, and is an example of what government can do differently, Ayers concluded.

Fung provided a description of the breakdown of civic infrastructure in Flint, Michigan, and the lessons to be learned. First, Michigan enforces an emergency manager rule (Michigan Legislature, n.d.) which allows the governor to appoint an emergency manager to balance the budget in a

financial emergency for a local government, regardless of the cost. In the case of the Flint water crisis, “one of those costs turned out to be switching the water supply that would end up contaminated with lead,” Fung said. At least half of the communities that are subject to the emergency manager provisions in Michigan are predominantly communities of color, and the state-appointed manager can overturn decisions of the local city council. In Fung’s words, “if you can’t balance the books because you happen to be a community that is low-income and predominantly of color, you don’t get local democracy.” Secondly, building an alliance with external experts in community-based science gave Flint the voice and attention to ignite change. When community members made claims of contamination in the water supply, the State Department of Environment and the sewage district insisted the water was clean. The results from officials were countered by the community’s results, which brought the attention needed in the first place to address this issue. Bissonnette said that when communities are fairly represented, counted, and presented with the opportunity to elect a community member, it has profound implications on policies and resources for health. These outcomes can also be achieved through census organizing and organizing around elections and redistricting.

Chavez provided examples of recent successful strategies that were achieved through mobile organizing during the U.S. Census, 2020 election, and the pandemic. According to the census, 78 percent of the Native Americans reside in a hard-to-count area in New Mexico (NM), so the NM Native Census Coalition collaborated with every tribal nation and urban relatives at the community level to get everyone counted. Challenges were endured, such as receiving census packets late and shortened time frames due to COVID. Free communal meals, gift cards, and other efforts, promoted through a robust social media platform, were executed to gather data, which incentivized people to get counted. There is still lack of data in these communities that needs to be addressed in the future; however, since this partnership and community-led initiatives, the data shows an increase in the population. Currently, tribal communities represent 11 percent of people in New Mexico, but the true representation is assumed to be closer to 15–18 percent. It is important to achieve fairer community representation, Chavez said, and to identify strategies to build long-term power, strengthen coalitions, and educate communities on advocacy. Through collaborating with organizations across the state, legislation was passed to promote equity and work towards a more sustainable economy. The Climate Solutions bill⁴ will help disproportionately

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⁴ House Bill 9. State of New Mexico, 55th Legislature, 1st Session (2021). https://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/21%20Regular/bills/house/HB0009.pdf (accessed September 21, 2021).

affected communities plan and prepare for climate change. This taskforce has eight positions for people in tribal nations who can properly advocate the needs for their community. For the 2020 Census, Fair Count partnered with E Pluribus Unum (n.d.) to launch the Census in the South: Road to Recovery bus tour, which focused on communities in six Southern states that were both historically undercounted in the census and disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Fair Count hosted online events that featured speakers and trusted voices who talked to communities about the importance of the census and how participation in the census could shape pandemic recovery. “A key takeaway is to meet people where they are,” Abrams McLean said.

Levinson spoke about the opportunities for advancing civic infrastructure and health equity in different types of geographies. She began by saying, “there is not one best way of engaging civically.” In each moment, there is a repertoire of opportunities and strategies, such as helping a neighbor or writing an amicus brief, that can make a difference and strengthen communities. It is crucial to strengthen the civic infrastructure that schools provide for young people, and students need opportunity and experiences to practice civic engagement. One example is found in states such as Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, and Oklahoma, which have passed laws that encourage students to take civic action and receive school credit for it. However, 21 different states have restricted student engagement in civic action and in civic skills development, which includes learning about race and racism in this country. Such barriers constitute a threat to civic infrastructure, Levinson said, and also constrain student learning about identity and collaborating in solidarity with others to make changes, as Chavez and Abrams McLean also commented. Exclusion creates bad outcomes for health and democracy, Bissonnette added. Schools are components of civic infrastructure that serve for future building through the telling of the past, Levinson noted. The dialogue about understanding the past, its meaning to the present, how to move forward, and the nation’s identity as a democracy is also being translated into the curriculum taught in schools.

Fung shared an example where power is given back to the community in different states and geographies. Typically a state legislature is responsible for district mapping, which may lead to unjust treatment of some diverse communities that may lose representation or find their voting power diminished. Some states, such as Michigan and California, have a citizens redistricting commission that allows citizens, rather than the state legislature, to draw the district maps. This power sharing empowers the community, encourages civic engagement, and shifts the locus of power to the community.

Bissonnette relayed audience questions to the panel. She asked speakers to describe success at the local level for effective civic engagement

strategies when addressing COVID-19 vaccination. Tribal communities were incredibly well prepared, Chavez said, and some of the first vaccinations were provided to these communities; more than one million Native Americans in this country have already been vaccinated. The Navajo nation was one of the most affected communities, and in the summer of 2021 the nation’s vaccination rate reached almost 100 percent in New Mexico. Tribal communities have also reached out to urban communities, so people who were not tribal members came in to get vaccinated to protect the entire community.

Ayers responded to an audience question about requiring community members on boards of companies or in political leadership positions. The idea is more complex than to merely suggest a community representative hold such positions in order to check a box. Ayers said that representatives may have different viewpoints but they need to represent a group of people so they can be held accountable to create change. Overall, it is important to include meaningful community participation and provide the opportunity to wield influence, but more attention should be focused on the process of decision making and the commitment to long-term engagement. Bissonnette offered some insights on the most effective arguments that organizers can use to encourage investments from funding institutions in both philanthropy and government to build relationships and power to advance health equity. The central core work at FCCP, Bissonnette said, is to encourage investment in organizations and communities in ways that could build long-term power and resilience to really shift the balance of power and to put trust in those that are on the ground and who know the needs of their communities.

The last question Bissonnette shared with the panel was “What gives you hope or what is our best opportunity to advance health and democracy in this country?” Fung began with the experience in the pandemic, which showed how the engagement between communities and individuals may have played a major role in helping keep some people healthy. The pandemic also showed that people cannot count on the government and public health officials alone; communities’ ability to practice social distancing and regulate behavior for the sake of the community may have played an important role in protecting health. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing health inequities, Fung said, but also showed that what facilitates equality “has more than anything to do with equalizing voice and equalizing power.” Levinson said that she is encouraged by the growing recognition of the interconnectedness of justice with environmental, educational, economic, and political health. Schools, Levinson added, are “visible sites of inequity, but also of possibility,” and the connections to health and to democracy offer an opportunity to find synergies and make progress on multiple fronts. Ayers echoed the observations about

growing engagement to advance health equity and the recognition that it will require building power in communities. She added that this was the first election cycle where she observed deeper commitments to civic infrastructure. Chavez said she finds hope in the reawakening of youth to want to engage civically as well as in Native representation in leadership positions, such as the new Secretary of the Interior, and in national coalitions that are being created. These developments can change the narrative of the “vanishing Native” and show “we are still here and very much alive,” Chavez said. Abrams McLean said that what gives her hope is seeing the change over time in communities—from someone waiting for their American Community Survey to arrive in the mail to a young person talking about the importance of voting.