There is new momentum behind the Building Civic Bridges Act (BCBA), a bill that would help communities address the root causes of division in America. This month, the League’s Center for Democracy Innovation worked with Resolutionaries, a nonprofit organization that has been advocating for the bill, to organize a meeting in Washington to discuss how the field can support this critical legislation.
Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA), who introduced the BCBA with Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) in the 119th Congress, described the bill’s intent to the meeting attendees. The BCBA would help build two kinds of civic bridges: stronger relationships among people of different beliefs and backgrounds, and stronger civic infrastructure that engages a wide range of people in public decision-making and problem-solving. It is a bill to support both pluralism and democracy.
Kilmer is stepping into a new role at the Rockefeller Foundation, and Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) is taking the baton to reintroduce the BCBA in the new Congress. Senators Chris Coons (D-DE) and Todd Young (R-IN) have led the bill on the Senate side.
Rep. Houlahan provided a video address for the meeting, and retired Generals Stanley McChrystal and Wesley Clark offered a military perspective on why it is important to address division in society. Richard Eidlin of Business for America described the toll that polarization is taking on business, citing a study by the Society for Human Resource Management that division in the workplace costs $1.2 billion in lost daily productivity and an additional $828 million owing to excessive absenteeism.
The BCBA also presents an opportunity for democracy-building organization to better make the case for our work. As is evident on the Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map, the democracy-building fields (including service, civic education, participatory governance, civic media, bridge-building, and civic technology, among others) in America are massive but also diffuse and disconnected. We do not have a strong shared message about democracy, we lack sufficient convening opportunities that bring together people from across these fields, and we do not have a coordinated approach to gathering data and measuring impact.
It is clear from public opinion research that when Americans hear more about democratic practices and reforms, they support them – but right now very few people are aware that these democracy-building fields exist. In supporting the BCBA and better articulating what democracy can be, we can advance these ideas in both Congress and our communities.
