Gracious reader,
I write with two invitations and two stories. We have a wonderful problem in Iowa: too many people want to come talk about civility.
Next Tuesday, I’m headed to Urbandale, Iowa, for an experiment a year in the making. After that, I head to St. Ambrose University. I hope you can join me for both.
In Urbandale, were originally supposed to gather at the local library, in a room that holds fewer than 100 people. But the RSVPs kept coming, so many that the city has now moved us to Urbandale High School’s Performing Arts Center, which can hold up to 1,000.
Axios picked up the story this week. Apparently, in an age when we are regularly told that Americans have lost interest in one another except as objects of outrage, hundreds of Iowans wanting to spend an evening talking about how to live together is news.
I think it is, too.
The story
My favorite part is the story of how we got here.
Next month marks three years since The Soul of Civility came into the world. Almost immediately after it did, something happened that I had hoped for but could not have planned: leaders began reaching out to me with a wonderfully practical question. We lovedf you book, they told me. But how do we embody them?
One of the communities that decided to find out was Carmel, Indiana.
Carmel had endured its own seasons of division. Elections had become ugly. School board and city council fights had become increasingly bitter. And some local leaders decided they did not simply want to lament the state of things. They wanted to build something better.
So they invited me to the Carmel library to talk about The Soul of Civility. We thought a few dozen people might come.
Over than 300 showed up.
The hunger was palpable, and what began as an evening at the library grew into something much larger. Local citizens built Project Civility, a nonprofit devoted to carrying the effort forward. Then, last September, we partnered to convene the first Carmel Civility Summit, bringing together more than 100 mayors, city councilors, members of Congress, community leaders, and others from 17 states and Canada to explore what it looks like to build communities capable of flourishing across difference.
One of the people who came was Bob Andeweg, the longtime mayor of Urbandale, Iowa.
Bob saw what was happening in Carmel and told me that he wanted to do something like it in his own community.
Let’s get to work, I told him.
Not long after the summit, Bob and I got on the phone. He had a magnificent and characteristically mayoral vision: he wanted to build a civility initiative across the entire greater Des Moines region.
I loved it. But I asked him a question that has become increasingly important to me as I have traveled around the country talking with people who are discouraged about the state of our common life: What can you actually control right now?
Urbandale, Bob said.
So we started with Urbandale.
Urbandale was not a community in crisis. Bob has led the city for 25 years, and the community has spent decades investing in character and civic culture. Yet Bob did not want to wait until relationships had fractured, a controversy had exploded, or neighbors had stopped speaking to one another before deciding that the habits that sustain life together were worth cultivating.
He wanted to build before the crisis came.
Over the past year, that is what Urbandale has been doing. Bob started by gifting The Soul of Civility to his City Council. Then, the book became a community read. The city built a Civility Series around it. People have read together, gathered together, and practiced having the sorts of conversations that become much harder once we are already angry with one another.
And now, a year after Bob came to Carmel and wondered whether something similar might be possible in Iowa, I get to go see what Urbandale has built.
On Tuesday, September 22, I’ll join former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, Mayor Andeweg, and other Iowa leaders for Urbandale’s Civility Dialogues.
We thought we needed a room for fewer than 100 people.
Now we have a room for 1,000.
There is something here that I think we miss when we tell the story of America primarily through its ugliest moments.
We pay enormous attention to civic breakdown, and understandably so. We see the school board meeting that descends into shouting, the city council meeting where neighbors treat one another as enemies, the political fight that fractures a community. Those stories are real, and I have spent the past three years visiting communities living through them.
St. Ambrose
Last year, a professor at St. Ambrose University reached out and asked me to come speak.
But buried in his note was something much more interesting.
He told me he was teaching *The Soul of Civility* in an upper-level seminar on Public Discourse, and that he hoped to make the book a lynchpin of a new introductory core course on civil discourse.
So instead of simply saying yes to another lecture, I asked a different question: What if we built something together?
St. Ambrose had been wrestling with something I hear about on campuses across the country: the chilling effects that arise when people become afraid of saying what they actually think. Fear of reprisal. Suspicion of one another. The quiet calculation before speaking: What will happen to me if I say this?
A lecture might name that problem. It would not, by itself, change the culture that produced it.
So we began talking about something larger.
I shared what we were experimenting with at Cornell, where faculty were reading *The Soul of Civility* together and thinking about how its ideas might shape the culture of their institution. We talked about bringing together faculty, students, student life, and people already stewarding programs and communities at St. Ambrose. Not creating another committee for the sake of creating a committee, but equipping people who already shape the life of the university to bring these ideas into the places they lead.
And then something wonderful happened.
I invited the professor who first contacted me to become a Civic Renaissance Ambassador. He, in turn, began assembling his own Civic Renaissance Ambassador cohort at St. Ambrose, a group committed not simply to talking about civility, but to helping build and sustain a culture capable of flourishing across difference.
Over the past year, people across the university, and even in the broader Davenport community, have been reading the book and asking what these ideas might look like in practice.
Next week, I finally get to join them in person.
We will gather first for lunch, then for a public lecture, followed by a panel of practitioners from across the university sharing what they are actually doing to put The Soul of Civility into practice and bring its ideas to life.
That last part matters enormously to me.
Because the interesting question is no longer simply: Can we persuade people that civility matters?
It is: What happens when people begin building institutions around it?
A professor puts a book into a course. Colleagues begin reading together. Students enter the conversation. People already leading programs begin experimenting with the ideas. A cohort forms. The surrounding community joins in. And eventually the author showing up to give a lecture becomes only one small part of a much larger story.
That is what I want Civic Renaissance to help make possible.
And next week is not the culmination of what we are building at St. Ambrose. It is the beginning.
I cannot wait to see what we create together.
If you’re in the Quad Cities, join us!
The national story
Exciting things are afoot in Iowa. But another story is unfolding alongside that one, and I have had the extraordinary privilege of watching it happen.
People are building.
Mayors are calling other mayors. Citizens are starting organizations. Libraries are filling rooms. Communities are reading books together. Leaders are looking at what worked somewhere else, bringing it home, adapting it, and trying again.
And perhaps most importantly, they are beginning to reject the paralyzing question that so often accompanies our anxiety about the country: How are we ever going to fix America?
I don’t know.
But I know what happened when Bob and I asked a smaller question: What can you build, right here, with what is within your reach?
A year ago, Bob came to Carmel and saw what one community was building. He took an idea home to Iowa, and now hundreds of people want to be part of it.
That is how culture changes. Not all at once, and not because somebody somewhere finally fixes everything for us, but because human beings decide to cultivate the places and relationships actually entrusted to them, and then somebody else sees what they have built and thinks: We could do that, too.
There is a civic renaissance happening in Iowa.
And, gracious reader, I increasingly think it is happening all over the country.
If you are anywhere near Des Moines, I would love for you to come see it for yourself on Tuesday night. Bring a friend, bring someone with whom you disagree, or send this along to an Iowan who ought to be in the room.
Tuesday, September 22, 6 p.m.
Urbandale High School Performing Arts Center
The event is free, but registration is required. I hope to see you there!
