MAURY’S REMARKS
OPENING & THANKS
Good afternoon.
Thank you to the National Conference on Citizenship for convening us this year around the theme of Building Civic Resilience. This gathering has been, for me, a vivid reminder of how much creative energy is moving right now in the civic-renewal space.
And thank you to David for introducing Braver Angels’ new initiative, Citizen-Led Solutions, and to the panel of leaders who just shared their perspectives on letting citizens lead.
What struck me most about their reflections was not only the opportunities but also the honest acknowledgement of the challenges we face as a country in equipping people to lead and in strengthening what some of us have come to call “civic muscle.” Especially at this time with so much pain and hatred.
As Braver Angels’ new CEO, I’m still adjusting. It’s been I think 7 weeks. To be honest, it feels a bit like I was handed the playbook for “How to Heal America,” but when I was a third of the way through, I turned the page and read, alone on a blank page “You’ve got it from here.”
But that’s my learning curve. And I will learn from all we are doing together. I suppose we’re writing the rest of the chapters together.
It is a privilege to close this conversation – to step back and reflect on what these ideas mean for all of us, across this ecosystem, who care about the future of American democracy.
THE PROBLEM (& WE’VE SEEN IT BEFORE)
Heaven knows we don’t need another litany of statistics to prove we’re in a civic crisis. The events of the past week alone demonstrate the collapse of social trust and hatred present in some circles.
We know these patterns: rising polarization, declining trust in institutions, mistrust of the media, the spread of misinformation, and despair about whether democracy will survive. We are living the experience of accelerating political violence and the inability to have productive conflict.
I am from Utah.
I live 25 miles from UVU campus. My wife and four of our children have attended UVU. Each year it’s where our high school graduations are held. Last Wednesday, my nephew and his wife were at the Charlie Kirk event. My daughter’s friend was seated in the front row.
No matter your feelings about Charlie Kirk, his methods, or his words, each of those people observed the assassination of a young father engaging in open debate on a college campus. Those memories will not be forgotten.
I have other nephews and nieces who attended the same school in southern Utah as Tyler Robinson, the accused shooter. They and their parents are trying to process how someone from their small town could move from online discussions to hatred sufficient to take the real-world steps to kill someone… for their words.
I think of Tyler’s parents… making the decision to help their son take responsibility for his actions.
But those actions are indicative of our crisis. We have allowed the narrative to be defined by conflict entrepreneurs, people who make money and gain power off our division.
To many Americans, our system feels distant, out of control, and, most importantly, something that we the people have nothing to do with.
But this is not true. We will not experience change until we take accountability for the reality in front of us. It only works for the industrial outrage complex when we participate in their scheme.
As Americans, more than anywhere else in the world, we have the power to shape the society we desire to live in and leave for our children.
It is worth remembering: this is not the first time America has lived through such fracture. At the turn of the 20th century, the nation was convulsed by the upheavals of industrialization, mass immigration, and stark inequality. Political machines and corporate monopolies dominated public life. Racial terror was codified into law in the South. Leading writers and thinkers as well as everyday citizens worried aloud that democracy was failing, that corruption and rancor had hollowed out the civic heart of the country.
And yet, history reminds us: that low tide did not mark the end of the American experiment. It marked the beginning of a new wave of renewal.
Ordinary citizens — not elites, not politicians, not professionals — stepped forward to build new civic institutions. Settlement houses, Rotary, the Scouts, the NAACP, 4-H, the League of Women Voters, the United Way. Things we now take for granted as institutions in the United States once began as fragile, scattered experiments. Critics at the time dismissed them as too small to matter. But they multiplied, scaled, and became the civic infrastructure that carried us forward for a century.
The lesson? Fragility is not failure. In fact, fragility is the natural first stage of resilience.
Let me return to Utah over the past week.
Within two hours of the assassination, a group of us, all Utahns, gathered on a call. We had become friends over the last 5 years through our work in the community. And we also happened to be involved in 7 different national organizations working on civic renewal and peacemaking.
We moved quickly. We crafted a message to our friends, families, and neighbors in Utah about the meaning of this moment and the imperative to act instead of react. Within 24 hours we built a website inviting people to Turn Toward each other and offering them easy access to all of the resources, tools, and upcoming events that could help people consider what to do in their own sphere of influence. And within 48 hours we were up at the Capitol building in Salt Lake with 100+ Utahns and the media releasing this resource and calling on citizens to take control of our own response as individuals, as families, as neighbors, as a state.
We presented simple, accessible, and effective resources for people. We were not promoting our respective organizations. We were acting in solidarity. We moved quickly.
The morning of the event our PR partners recommended we postpone because they had caught the shooter and the story was going to shift. But we knew the story Utahns needed and the story we wanted to shape. We continued, people showed up. No elected officials. Just citizens.
Now, there is a long road ahead for us in Utah. And for us in the United States of America. Make no mistake. What we are doing today, and everything we are about, is a counter-cultural movement in our time.
CITIZEN-LED SOLUTIONS & BRAVER ANGELS EMPHASIS
But that is the spirit behind Citizen-Led Solutions. To bridge the political divide in a way that cannot be ignored nor overlooked. My friend Manu Meel calls it “outrageously bridge build.” We call it courageous citizenship.
Braver Angels launched Citizen-Led Solutions — or as we call it, CLS — this year not as a departure from what we’ve done, but as a deepening of our mission. For nearly a decade, Braver Angels has been known for depolarization. Our work has touched thousands of lives and has proven that well-directed dialogue matters when it’s driven by energetic volunteers with good training.
But depolarization, powerful as it is, is not enough. If dialogue ends at understanding, people walk away hopeful but often still asking, “now what?”
CLS represents a new emphasis for Braver Angels in two ways:
First, we are infusing our depolarization activities with opportunities for citizen action. We want our training, debates, workshops, and discussions not just to bridge divides but also to spark collaboration on shared local challenges.
Second, we are doubling down on our strategy of building and equipping local Alliances — our 120+ chapters across the country— to become epicenters of civic renewal in their communities. Alliances are where Braver Angels members put dialogue into practice, and now, where they will also put collaboration into action.
Every Braver Angels activity is designed so that ordinary people like teachers, parents, students, retirees can run them — not civic professionals. We’ve learned that when local citizens lead, the work has deeper legitimacy and greater staying power.
LESSONS FROM HISTORY
If history rhymes, then here are two key lessons, among many others, that it teaches us:
First. Renewal begins locally, and multiplies nationally. Hull House started with one Chicago neighborhood. Rotary started with four friends. The NAACP started with a handful of organizers. Scale came later.
And, second. Resilience doesn’t just come from structures. It comes from practice.
Think of it as civic muscle. Like any muscle, civic muscle only grows by being used.
We grow stronger in self-government not by being led through exercises designed by others, but by lifting the weight ourselves — tackling problems together, improvising solutions, building trust rep by rep. Institutions can provide the gym, but people must do the training themselves.
TODAY’S CIVIC RENAISSANCE
That brings us to today. We have a choice. Is this the end of a dark chapter? Or is it the beginning of a much darker one?
I believe in the aftermath of, and even before, this string of assassinations, we are seeing the first signs of another civic renaissance.
We see them here today. This is our national week of citizenship. 238 years ago tomorrow, the framers of this American experiment signed this great document. Next year we celebrate 250 years from the moment it all started. This is our moment.
It is a choice. Our choice. Each American. Each of us here today.
Bridge-building efforts like Braver Angels, The Dignity Index, Living Room Conversations, and BridgeUSA are giving neighbors, students, and communities the tools to cross divides.
Deliberative democracy efforts — citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting — are putting residents in charge of setting priorities and allocating resources.
Dialogue-to-action initiatives like CLS, Convergence, and National Issues Forums are creating structures where citizens co-design solutions alongside local leaders.
Service corps, volunteer networks, and resilience hubs are giving people the chance to build together in tangible, practical ways.
Civic tech platforms like Democracy Works are amplifying citizen participation rather than replacing it with technocracy.
And common ground policy efforts like CommonSense American are helping Americans weigh in on solutions to crosspartisan issues and see them through to becoming the law of the land.
None of these are perfect. Many look boutique, scattered, and fragile. Some funders or policymakers dismiss them as marginal.
But that is exactly what critics said about settlement houses, scout troops, league of women voters and community chests in 1900.
If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s this: fragility is not a reason to doubt. It is a reason to invest.
THE CHALLENGING ROLE OF EXPERTS AND PROFESSIONALS
Now, let me address a reality many in this room grapple with: the roles of philanthropy, professionals, and institutions. They are indispensable. We cannot do this work without all three.
And yet, too often, even with the best intentions, they default to models that place citizens at the margins. Citizens are asked to participate in programs designed elsewhere, to “engage” with agendas crafted by experts, or to provide input into initiatives they don’t really own.
This is not because of malice. It’s because citizen-led efforts often look messy, hard to measure, and difficult to scale. Professionalized organizations, by contrast, look predictable, manageable, fundable.
But history also tells us when citizens are at the margins, civic renewal stalls. When citizens are at the center, civic renewal spreads.
The question is not: “How can institutions better lead people?” The question is: “How can institutions better support citizens to lead themselves?”
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” echoes from the words in 1961 of a later assassinated US president.
INSPIRATION FROM AMERICA’S CITIZEN-CENTERED ETHOS
All of this rests on a deeper truth: American democracy has always been citizen-led.
Our founding promise is that sovereignty resides with the people. From the Declaration of Independence to the Progressive Era to today’s renewal, the through-line is the same: civic health is not handed down from above. It is generated by citizens themselves.
And that health depends on more than laws or policies. It depends on culture. The early 20th century civic renaissance worked not just because it built organizations, but because it built rituals and habits of belonging — badges, service days, pledges, community halls. These gave people a sense of identity, agency, and shared purpose. If we want civic renewal today, we must create modern equivalents that shape culture as much as they shift policy.
Theodore Roosevelt put it plainly in 1899: “The main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.”
Local organization is what fascinated Alexis de Toqueville about America in 1831.
It is people who must lead. History calls them “ordinary” or “average.” At Braver Angels we know they are both courageous and capable.
CALL TO ACTION
So let me close with a call to action.
If we are serious about Building Civic Resilience, then our task is not simply to design better institutions, policies, or programs. Our task is to equip Americans to trust each other and to lead together.
Let us commit to making our work less about how institutions, professionals, and experts can better engage citizens — and more about how people can engage with each other to lead their communities and, together, our democracy.
That is what civic muscle means. It’s not something institutions give to people. It’s something citizens build by using it.
Like Sara from Oxford in one of our CLS case studies said about her community’s efforts to address affordable housing: “We own what we make.” And her neighbor, Lynn, offered this hope: “If you’re thinking you could do this in your community, you can.”
History tells us this is possible. The present tells us it is necessary. And the future will depend on whether we have the courage to trust our citizens — and ourselves — to lead.
Thank you.
