About Civic Life

Civic Life is a new 501(c)3 non-profit organization lead by David Blankenhorn.

Our goal is to help give birth to a citizenship movement, by which we mean a steady change of view in the U.S. and other countries regarding the role of citizens in troubled times. We will pursue this goal through bipartisan public argument linked to a growing community of learning and action.

Our public argument strategy is to bring together diverse thinkers to call for that renewal of citizenship required for an era combining deep affective polarization with mutually reinforcing illiberalism from the left and the right.

Our community strategy is to convene a growing network of civil society organizations to sponsor education programs for their leaders and members combining the seminar-style learning with direct civic engagement.

We aim for the movement-launching phase of this work to culminate in 2030 with a founding convention of leaders and citizens centering on a “A Call to Citizenship” signed over the previous five years by one million persons and many society organizations.

Our inspirations include the American Revolution’s Committees of Correspondence, the 19th century Danish folk school movement, the U.S. schools of philosophy and open forum movements of the 1930s and 1940s, Czechoslovakia’s underground universities under communism, and the freedom schools in the American South in the 1960s. All of these movements made morally compelling public arguments, combined education and action, deepened civic engagement and capacity, and stood for freedom in times of testing.