Strengthen neighborhood belonging with your local election coverage

About three quarters of Americans report a sense of non-belonging in their local communities. If people don’t feel a sense of affinity within their neighborhoods, is it any wonder many people don’t engage with their local news organization?

At Common Agency, we help people self-organize their neighborhoods to feel more like home, by helping neighbors set up digital civic infrastructure. We think a lot about how to strengthen neighborhood belonging and define it as a combination of role and fit.

Role is someone’s ability to contribute their unique gift to shaping the community, and fit is someone’s ability to feel seen by their community and see themselves in their fellow community members.

Using this definition, building belonging also leads to collective efficacy, or the ability for a group to come together to achieve a shared purpose together, and more collective efficacy leads to strengthened belonging. A great positive feedback loop!

The framework might be helpful for local media, too — for community engagement around elections and beyond.

Start by thinking of “fit”

Many of us spend time with people who are similar to us because we assume these are the people who can understand us the easiest, so this seems like a straightforward way to achieve the ‘fit’ part of the belonging equation — seeing ourselves in others and feeling seen by our community.

This is a fine tactic, but in the modern era, it is very easy to find any sub-community online and never be put in the discomfort of socializing with people who are different. During this election season, this is exacerbated by the rise of perceptions of polarization. Many of us fear losing our sense of belonging with whatever ideology we affiliate with, so we avoid engaging with someone who might be from the ‘other side.’

In my experience, neighborhoods are one place where people are willing to overlook the ideological differences, making them great places to start deeper fit conversations. Perhaps it could be helpful to work with any of the 500+ bridge-building organizations to remind your communities of the middle ground most of us occupy.

Once we believe the ‘other side’ is actually part of the same community working toward a better future, we start to find more belonging with the bigger community of bridge-builders instead of our ideological camps. We’re less prone to assume the worst in others, and we build habits to take the time to learn new perspectives. As we increase this culture of curiosity, community members will get hungrier for more local news stories to learn more about where they live.

For election coverage, help communities consider what “role” looks like

While bridging work can help with the fit part of belonging, what about ‘role’?

Unfortunately, many of us feel uncertain about our role in affecting real change in frustrated systems. We need ways to increase our sense of agency as individuals and as a country. This is especially true when it comes to elections and national politics.

Within problems lay opportunity: I think it’s possible to use election coverage not as an urgent response to the many crises but as a way to leverage national attention to showcase the type of democracy you want to see in your own community or neighborhood.

Of course, shaping a democracy where people feel empowered takes time and requires more than just informing, voting and listening. As scholar Sherry Arnstein illustrated in 1969, people must also feel invited to lead change. This is where the local scale has a clear advantage.

Because of proximity, there is more time to pursue different types of engagement, including both thin and thick engagement, as defined by Matt Leighninger:

“Thick” engagement happens mainly in groups, either face-to-face, online, or both, and features various forms of dialogue, deliberation, and action planning; “thin” engagement happens mainly online, and is easier, faster, and potentially more viral — it is done by individuals, who are often motivated by feeling a part of some larger movement or cause.

Thick engagement requires people to meet up more often, and this is easier when people are within a short distance from each other. It also requires more psychological safety for people to feel comfortable exploring tension points — and there is a deeper level of commitment assumed in a local community, as compared to anonymous global online forums.

Invite people to brainstorm and get informed

One common tool within thick engagement is a citizens’ assembly, which has been proven to increase a participant’s sense of agency. A citizens’ assembly has three basic components:

1. Education
2. Deliberation
3. Action

These three components are usually facilitated in person as a gathering, and they’re often expensive because of the logistics involved. While some news organizations may instead put their energy and resources toward more general listening sessions or long-term advisory committees, there are aspects of citizens’ assemblies that media can implement through other efforts. In some cases, they already are.

What opened my eyes during the API Local Summit on Election, Trust and Democracy is how much local media is already contributing to these components to build stronger civic infrastructure that could be more permanent than the one-time facilitated citizens’ assembly. Three steps to taking action based on deliberations emerged during the summit.

• Ensure the group is educated about the policy or topic at hand. Initiatives like the LAist’s Election Guides and The Austin Common’s social media posts help people learn about what’s going on. Baltimore Beat asked young people about what issues were important, then used these to interview candidates to develop election guides delivered through their neighborhood ‘beat boxes.’ Signal Akron Documenters go upstream to document accurate, readable notes of what local government committees discuss. All of this asynchronous information enables local community members to learn about how complex political issues affect the day-to-day lives of community members.
• Invite the group to deliberate about a topic. This can be done in person through facilitated workshops or by giving people a chance to explore the topic in more casual ways, such as random encounters at local San Francisco radio station KALW 220’s Montgomery space. This can also be enhanced through online activities, such as Akron, Ohio’s Fighting to Understand’s usage of pol.is, a machine learning tool that surfaces differences and incentivizes participants to find nuanced commonalities in large groups of people.
• Support actions taken based on the deliberations. For instance, CivicLex out of Lexington, Kentucky, took the complex topic of redistricting and offered Paint & Sip workshops where people could share their input and followed up with a plain-speak breakdown of what actually happened with redistricting. Ideally, there could even be accountability further on, perhaps taking inspiration from The Public Ledger based in Pennsylvania, carefully digitizing all public records into a searchable, organized database to see if people do what they say and what unexpected connections may emerge.

All of these steps help community members build a sense of belonging. When they have educational information, deliberative space to explore that information, and a chance to realize their input matters in determining what actions are taken, they can deepen their sense of fit with their community AND understand their role in shaping the community.

The question now turns to your local media organization. How can you strengthen belonging by using this particular election moment? Who else do you need to invite locally, and how do you make sure the way you work together exemplifies the democracy you want to see?

Deborah Tien is the Founding Steward of Common Agency, an organization building & facilitating technologies, with a vision that everyone is proud of where we grow up and grow old. Prior to this, Deborah spent her time supporting local innovation ecosystems in Arusha, Tanzania, and other parts of the Majority World.