Reviving Local Civic Infrastructure: Why Philanthropy Must Shift Beyond National Campaigns

y loves telling you civic life is collapsing — and that only their next big check can resurrect it. According to a new American Academy of Arts & Sciences paper by AEI senior fellow Daniel Stid, the prescription is the same one Tocqueville handed us two centuries ago: rebuild the "art of association," one neighborhood at a time.

The Diagnosis Nobody in the Boardroom Wants to Hear

Stid's argument lands where it should — on the people who've been skipping the work. He ran the Hewlett Foundation's U.S. Democracy program as its inaugural director and watched more than $100 million flow to democracy-strengthening nonprofits while polarization kept widening. The Academy's 2020 "Our Common Purpose" report gave him cover to say out loud what democracy reformers kept avoiding: institutions and culture meet in civil society, and you cannot rebuild one without the other. His new paper picks up Strategy 4 — "dramatically expand civic bridging capacity" — and points the money where it has always belonged: local civic infrastructure, not glossy national campaigns.

The Generosity Numbers Tell a Different Story

While the Academy polishes its civic renewal thesis, GivingTuesday's State of Generosity report reminds us that ordinary people actually showed up in 2025. Per Candid's writeup of the data, 58% of U.S. respondents donated money, 68.6% donated goods, and volunteering jumped 9 percentage points to 49.7%. Globally, individual giving — remittances, donations, bequests, congregational gifts, DAFs — totaled roughly $1.6 trillion. Institutional philanthropy plus government aid together hit $328 billion. Remittances alone, $690 billion, dwarfed both, and roughly 75% of that money stayed with recipient families paying for food, medicine, and school. The headline for grantmakers: regular people are doing the heavy lifting while your strategy decks keep quoting Tocqueville.

What NYC Nonprofits Should Actually Do With This

Skip the panel circuit. The Art of Association framing is useful precisely because it tells NYC funders what they've ignored for a decade — bridge-building happens at the block level, not in foundation strategy memos. Watch the Devex coverage of P150, the 450-adviser network steering ultra-high-net-worth giving, because the next wave of philanthropic dollars will route through those desks. Track the Urban Institute's work on K-12 data privacy funding as a test case for whether philanthropy can move fast when federal policy shifts. And pressure your own boards: if the 2020 strategy hasn't moved your grantmaking past the press-release stage, the problem isn't civic decline. It's leadership content to run boardroom theater instead of funding the unglamorous work of association-building. The Academy just handed you the language. Use it, or admit the vanity metrics won.