By Nancy Van Milligen
When people worry about the future of democracy, they rarely picture Ryan, Iowa, a town of 383 people, raising $579,000 for their own endowment. They don’t imagine residents in McGregor banding together after a disastrous tornado. They certainly don’t think about childcare centers in Clayton County as democracy in action.
But maybe that is what democracy does look like—it is neighbors learning to talk across difference, identifying shared priorities, and making collective decisions about their future.
Building Democracy Through Community Engagement
Ten years ago, we began facilitating Community Heart & Soul, a community engagement process that helps residents reconnect with what they love about their towns and create blueprints for their futures. We work with small communities across seven counties in rural Iowa, and what we discovered is that democracy doesn’t just happen at the ballot box. It happens when a Somali woman in Postville tells us she’d appreciate separate swimming times at the local pool. When a Ukrainian immigrant shares their hopes for their new hometown.
In Postville, a town still healing from a devastating 2008 immigration raid, we deliberately sought out historically marginalized voices. We hired translators. We collected hundreds of stories in Spanish, Hebrew, Somali, and Ukrainian. What emerged wasn’t just a planning document, it was a new civic infrastructure built on trust across difference.
“With trust comes change,” says Crystal Duffy, the Postville library director who coordinated the effort. That trust translated into action: a welcoming committee for newcomers, restored ESL classes, and work to engage new Americans on the city council and other leadership bodies. The work reveals a truth often lost in national debates: when immigrants are welcomed as neighbors, everyone’s civic capacity grows.
From Engagement to Permanent Civic Capacity
We believe deeply in community engagement. We get people talking and facilitate communities creating visions for their towns. We work hard to involve everyone and build trust across differences. That work is essential.
But, here’s what ten years of practice taught us: engagement is only half the story. Without permanent civic infrastructure—structures that outlast individual champions and election cycles—momentum fades when leaders change. Democracy needs both: the engagement that sparks civic life and the infrastructure that sustains it.
That’s why we created the Small-town Dreams Initiative, pairing community engagement with community philanthropy. With challenge funding from an anonymous donor, we invite communities to build their own permanent endowments. The structure is simple but powerful: raise $150,000 locally to unlock a $75,000 match, then raise another $225,000 to reach a $450,000 endowment that generates roughly $20,000 in annual grants forever. Communities also receive $25,000 in immediate grantmaking funds when they reach their benchmarks.
Here’s what makes this truly transformative for democracy: the endowment creates a permanent hub for civic life where residents can continue to invest, leaders gather annually to make grant decisions, community members bring new ideas, and planning for the future becomes embedded in community practice. Leadership changes, but the structure remains.
The results exceeded our expectations. Nine communities have completed the full challenge. Total endowments raised: $5.93 million. Annual grants already distributed: more than $455,000—and that number will grow every year, forever.
Democracy in Action
In Clayton County, residents identified childcare as their top priority through community conversations. When they reached their first benchmark, they immediately deployed $15,000 to eight childcare centers. Their second benchmark funded a coordinator to develop a countywide childcare strategic plan. This is democracy: communities identifying their own needs, mobilizing their own resources, and making their own decisions.
In Manchester, the campaign built such momentum that the community established its own 501(c)3, recruited a volunteer corps, and now leads projects independently. They’ve raised $558,000 and distributed $46,755 in grants. In McGregor, a town rebuilding after a tornado, team members raised $123,000 among themselves for recovery.
This is local knowledge and accountability in action. These aren’t foundation program officers deciding what communities need. These are neighbors sitting around kitchen tables, organizing fundraisers, and governing the endowments they’ve built together.
The Democracy Dividend
The outcomes go far beyond dollars raised. We’re seeing new leadership emerging—young people who’ve never served on a board learning to facilitate meetings and make grant decisions. Civic skills are spreading as communities learn to run capital campaigns, assess needs, and make collective decisions. Social capital is multiplying. In Postville, residents now describe their town’s diversity as its greatest asset—a remarkable shift from the divisions that defined the community after the raid.
Most importantly, permanent infrastructure is forming. These aren’t temporary initiatives dependent on grant cycles or individual champions. When a new challenge arises in 2035 or 2055, there will be a structure in place, resources available, and practiced leaders ready to respond.
Our ability to do this work at scale has recently been supported by the Trust for Civic Life, a national funder that invests in community foundations and nonprofits that are strengthening democracy through grassroots engagement. Together we’re proving that philanthropy and democracy-building aren’t separate endeavors. They’re the same work.
The Community Foundation Advantage
Community foundations bring four distinct advantages to this work: local knowledge, networks, accountability, and continuity. Our experience confirms all four, but I’d add a fifth: proximity.
We don’t parachute in with solutions. We live here. And the trust we’ve built has created something unexpected: a regional network that enables us to align programs and resources across communities in ways that would be impossible without these relationships.
This proximity creates something essential for democracy: mutual obligation. These aren’t our programs being done to communities. These are community efforts we’re privileged to support.
Communities now invite us to work on disaster preparedness planning, regional education strategies, and contentious environmental issues. In one county, our relationships enabled cross-sector collaboration on student absenteeism and summer learning. Across all our counties, we’re convening environmental organizations to coordinate climate resilience work. This is the hidden power of genuine engagement: it doesn’t just build civic capacity within communities, it creates the networks and trust required for regional systems change.
A Call to Community Foundations
Community foundations have a unique edge in supporting democracy, but only if we claim that role deliberately.
Support is out there. Community Foundations for Civic Health, an initiative of CFLeads, the Rhode Island Foundation, and the National Civic League, is aimed at increasing the number of community foundations confidently engaging in strengthening civic health in their communities.
This is hard work. It requires patient capital—that $1 million challenge grant supports campaigns that take two to four years to complete. It requires letting go of control—communities make decisions we might not make. It requires genuine belief in local wisdom—trusting that residents of a town of 383 know what they need better than we do.
But it works. Fifteen communities have gone through the endowment building process. Nine have completed full endowment campaigns. Three more are past the halfway mark. We have prospective communities lining up for Small-town Dreams 2.0. and ultimately, hope to reach 40 communities.
Most importantly, we’re seeing democracy strengthen from the bottom up. Not through national initiatives or top-down programs, but through neighbors meeting neighbors, learning how to have difficult conversations, identifying shared priorities, mobilizing resources, and making collective decisions.
If community foundations truly want to reinvigorate democracy, this is the work: showing up in the communities we serve, facilitating rather than dictating, building permanent capacity rather than dependency, and trusting that when people have the tools and resources, they’ll build the civic life they want to see.
The endowments we’re helping communities build will generate grants forever. But the real forever is this: Leaders who know how to empower others. Neighbors who care for and trust each other. Communities that believe all voices matter because they’ve seen their ideas become reality.
That’s democracy.
Nancy Van Milligen is the President and CEO at the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque, which serves seven counties in Northeast Iowa and manages more than $190 million in assets.
