OCP Communities
Sign up for our newsletterAn initiative to highlight local examples of democracy reform and citizen engagement and cultivate a network of municipal officials and community leaders from across the country committed to strengthening American democracy.
With politics at the national level increasingly polarized and dysfunctional, it is easy to be cynical about the future of American democracy. Looking at the local level, however, reveals a very different story. From coast to coast, in red states and blue, America’s cities and towns are adopting innovative reforms to increase citizen participation, make government more responsive, and build bridges across cultural and political divides. These changes benefit the communities that make them, but they also serve to normalize democratic reforms, making their implementation at the state and federal level more achievable. One barrier to reform at the local level is that cities and towns often have fewer resources and less consistent access to information about how to make these changes.
With the Our Common Purpose Communities Project, the Academy aims to use its convening power and the expertise of its OCP champion network to overcome these challenges. We are building a network of communities across America that agree this is a pivotal moment in the history of the American experiment. OCP Communities commit to work toward advancing one or more of the recommendations in the Our Common Purpose report. They gain the opportunity to learn from the Academy’s community of experts and to support each other in the vital work of reinventing American democracy for the 21st century.
To learn more about this initiative, please contact Jess Lieberman.