$900,000 from Knight Foundation Launches New Civic Health Collaborative

Very big news from CivicLex today! Thanks to a $900,000 investment from the Knight Foundation, we're launching a new civic health peer learning collaborative with our friends at The Village Square in Tallahassee, Kansas Leadership Center in Wichita, and Richland Library in Columbia.

Over the next two years, we'll work together to explore how to strengthen civic health by helping residents understand and engage in local issues, connect with their neighbors, and reimagine how decisions get made. Through the grant, CivicLex will be making investments in projects focused on civic health in each of our three partner communities.

I'm so grateful to Lilly Weinberg, Marisa Kwiatkowski, and everyone at Knight for their support of our work and their confidence in our vision for translocal scaling – communities learning from each other, building things together, and ultimately, reimagining civic life from the bottom up.

And, of course, I'm so happy to be working with Liz Joyner, Chris Green, and Georgia Coleman, and their wonderful teams.

Our hope is that if we find this to be successful, we'll be able to add more folks to this collaborative soon. If you want to learn more (or make an investment to support this work), reach out to me!

Just a final note about why this feels particularly special to me: This level of support from Knight really feels like things coming full circle for us. Some may have heard me say that CivicLex wouldn't be what it is without the Knight Foundation. CivicLex started to take shape in my mind because of a $5,000 project grant I got through their support of 8 80 Cities' Emerging Cities Champions program in 2015. The following year, Knight made a $25,000/year grant to CivicLex through the Blue Grass Community Foundation and the encouragement of Lisa Adkins, J.D. It may not sound like much, but it helped match our local giving and that combined $50k annual budget for the first year or two allowed me to work on building CivicLex full time. We just may not be here without it.

And, I have to give a special shoutout to Lilly Weinberg, who has been one of our and my biggest advocates over the past decade. Knight has a unique connection to specific places, and Lilly holds so many of those relationships – including ours here in Lexington. It's amazing what can happen when we build durable, long-term, trusting relationships in place.