The difficulties now visible in American public life are not primarily a political problem. They are a civic one.

My name is Will Stewart and this conviction took two decades to develop, and it developed from the inside.

I came to civic life first as a newspaper reporter, covering a community I would eventually make my own. What I found was that observation wasn’t enough. The problems I was writing about required someone to build something. So I went into the work directly.

Over the years that followed I served as a community organizer, led a chamber of commerce, built a community organization, was elected to local office, ran a statewide nonprofit focused on young talent attraction and retention, and eventually became the executive director of a statewide civic leadership program that brings people from vastly different backgrounds into sustained contact with one another and asks them to practice the habits that civic life requires.

From each of those positions the view was different. The conclusion was the same. The informal agreements that once made democratic governance workable were quietly losing their hold. The structures that once organized cooperation were weakening. And the habits that civic life requires were becoming less practiced and less common, not because people stopped caring, but because the institutions that once developed those habits were no longer doing so as consistently, as broadly, or as deeply as they once did.

That observation became a conviction. And that conviction became this platform.

The people this platform most wants to serve are the practitioners doing the actual work of civic re-formation: the builders who have recognized a gap and are trying to fill it, the stewards keeping important institutions alive through difficult conditions, and the funders and institutional leaders who sense that their civic investments are addressing symptoms while the underlying condition worsens.

If that is you, you are in the right place.