Civic Participation at the Speed of Trust: The Intersection of Art and Community Organizing

Collaborative governance—or “co-governance”—offers a model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding their trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power. Cities around the world are experimenting with new forms of co-governance, from New York City’s participatory budgeting process to Paris’s adoption of a permanent citizens’ assembly. More than a one-off transaction or call for public input, successful models of co-governance empower everyday people to participate in the political process in an ongoing way. Co-governance has the potential to revitalize civic engagement, create more responsive and equitable structures for governing, and build channels for Black, brown, rural, and tribal communities to impact policy-making.

Still, co-governance models are not without challenges. The hierarchical and ineffective nature of our current governing structure is difficult to transform. Effective collaboration between communities and politicians requires building lasting relationships that overcome deep distrust in government. So far, effective models of co-governance tend to be local and community-specific—making it critical that we share stories of success and brainstorm ways to scale.

In this series, we share stories of co-governance in practice. For this interview, New America’s Hollie Russon Gilman and Sarah Jacob spoke with Savannah Barrett about the intersection of art and community organizing.

Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange (RUX) is a creative leadership program that focuses on relationship building across geographical, racial, and economic divides. With a focus on using art and storytelling as tools of engagement, RUX has brought together over 300 Kentuckians to learn, listen, and connect. The program was founded in 2014 between Art of the Rural and Appalshop. In 2019, with support from the McKnight Foundation, the RUX model was replicated in Minnesota. The first cohort was brought together in 2022, kicking off the two year pilot program of RUX Minnesota.

Can you walk us through how RUX and yourself think about civic engagement?

I’ve been talking a lot lately about how we define civic participation. I think what indicates a strong community in terms of civic strength is when people see themselves as integral to their community’s future. They believe that their community won’t be able to move forward as well without their contribution. This idea isn’t novel; it’s the world I grew up in during the ’80s and ’90s in Grayson County, Kentucky. My working-class family believed that their service to the community was essential to its thriving—because it was.

I think many of the problems we face now, like loneliness and the risk of radicalization, are symptoms of people not believing they matter to their community’s future. Instead, they think their community doesn’t care about them. What we try to do is help people build a sense of connection to their place and to others, which builds their confidence, capacities, and skills to contribute meaningfully. It also helps them see their place differently and their role within the ecosystem differently.

RUX is a statewide network that unites Kentuckians in common purpose through programs that strengthen intercultural leadership, narrative change, and civic health. This work began in 2014 as a pilot exchange between the city of Louisville and the coalfields of Appalachia.

Over the decade, it has grown into an alumni-led leadership program that brings Kentuckians together to experience cultural exchange and peer learning while developing their capacity to bridge divides and make change. RUX now has over 300 Kentuckians from 65 counties collaborating for Kentucky’s future. Each summer, we host RUX in three regions of the state and design it with local communities to help participants understand and value the culture, landscape, context and people of each place.

The way we do that is simple yet radical––by listening. We believe that true leadership is about deepening connections with other people and places, and vulnerability is the currency of connection. But vulnerability isn’t just about speaking; it’s also about listening. We train our cohorts to listen differently—with openness—to recognize that people in a place are the experts of their lived experiences. Multiple truths can exist at the same time, and when we truly listen, we do so with the openness to change our minds.

It sounds simple, but when you train people to listen differently, they begin to see the world differently. They start to notice the nuance and complexity in a place, as well as the opportunities to build relationships and work towards change. This isn’t about trying to correct people or bring them to your side. It’s about digging into the challenges with them to find solutions that work for everyone.

As we build that listening capacity, we’re also building relational capacity, which is really bridging capacity—the ability to work meaningfully with people who differ from you. You learn how to listen, practice openness, build trust, and develop collaboration skills.

We foster these collaboration skills primarily through something we call Abundant Futures. Developed by RUX based on the Delta Leadership Academy, our Abundant Futures curriculum supports the cohort’s ability to meaningfully work together across differences. Members are coached to consult on one another’s ideas, identify potential solutions to challenges, and consider new strategies to leverage community assets. This protocol is designed to be accessible to those who have difficulty sharing in a group setting and hone listening capacity within those that have trouble with silence. Abundant Futures groups are thoughtfully curated triads who are selected to benefit one another as thought partners. They are convened once per intensive for a focused workshop that prepares cohort members to pitch their project ideas.

Naturally, this work leads to connections. Someone in your consultancy might say, “This is a great idea, I want to be part of it,” or they might connect you with someone else working on something similar. Last year, we saw a lot of these connections happen, with people forming teams or meeting at RUX alumni weekends.

We often say that civic work happens at the speed of trust, and what RUX does is accelerate that speed. We move at a lightning pace because we’ve already done the work to build the trust that’s needed for collaboration.

In my experience, strengthening civic muscles isn’t just about helping people understand how government works or how to participate in it. It’s about strengthening their ability to work in community with their neighbors. Once people know how to navigate challenges in their neighborhoods and work with those who differ from them, civic participation becomes much easier. Once they see themselves as integral, they’ll figure out how to navigate the system—especially if they have networks to support them. The real challenge is helping people believe that any of this is solvable.

What are some products of the alumni network, and what does that process look like?

We are in our 10th year, and one of the things we emphasize in RUX is being adaptive, evolutionary, and responsive. We take a ton of data from our members and reckon with it every fall as a steering committee. We also try to stay attuned to the cultural moment in Kentucky and respond to it.

This year, one change we made is instead of having three community-based intensives for the cohort, we now have two. We were in Campbellsville and Owensboro this year. The Third Weekend intensive, as we call it, is now an opportunity for the class that just graduated—in this case, the class of 2023—to plan the alumni gathering, creating a bridge between current members and the alumni network. It’s been such a joy to watch the recent graduating class host a three-day weekend full of alumni-led workshops.

Last year, we gave away $5,000; this year, we’ll give away $70,000 because people at Mercatus Center at George Mason, National Endowment for the Arts, Springboard for the Arts, and state and regional organizations like Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Fund for the Arts, have continued to contribute to the fund. Third Weekend workshops focus on a broad range of arts, cultural, and skill-building sessions designed to strengthen relationships and capacities across the network and include specialized workshops on topics like identifying native plants, herbalism, caving, cyanotype, shadow puppets for kids, writing, and culinary experiences alongside traditional RUX programming like Abundant Futures, story circles, square dances, potlucks, and open mics.

In addition to the joyful, connection-building gatherings we host, we also offer a micro-grant program. This year, we implemented two rounds. The first round was open to Kentucky artists and culture bearers who wanted to create work around rural-urban solidarity and interdependence, especially as we head into an election season. We received 31 applications from across the state. The grantees will be selected by a peer review panel of alumni from different regions.

The second round of grants uplifts intercultural collaboration. It requires at least two people or organizations, working across differences or geographic distances, to address a community challenge. One grant went to building healthier streams and better access to stream banks, another to reimagining monuments and cemeteries, and others to building civic engagement and stronger civic infrastructure. Many projects focus on arts and health––we are seeing increasing interest among applicants in the arts and climate change. We hope to include a project on addiction and recovery, though we’re still looking for a sponsor for that.

Another major initiative is our annual public forum, “the Golden Thread.” It’s a series of short, linked conversations where participants move across the stage in an interview chain. These conversations address our civic and social health and take place at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts, one of the biggest stages in the state. The forum showcases people working on impactful projects across sectors and geographies. Examples include the founder of the Mayfield Minority Enrichment Center, which engaged youth in western Kentucky after the tornadoes hit in 2021, and Val Horne, who won the James Beard Community Award for her work on aging food systems after the floods in eastern Kentucky in 2022. We also highlight efforts like the Kentucky Farmland Transition Fund, which addresses Kentucky’s rapidly dwindling farmland, and Forever Green, an organization that stewards the biologically diverse Green River.

In short, the alumni network offers opportunities to continue building and practicing the deep relationships formed in the program. Members can travel across the state, experience joyful gatherings, access resources to move their work forward, and participate in educational events that help build a more progressive and diverse narrative for Kentucky’s future.

What is the importance of sharing narratives? And can you share an experience of someone that felt seen and empowered through storytelling?

We use arts and cultural strategies as a fundamental part of our leadership development program, which I realize might sound a bit unusual. But we do this because we know that the arts are a powerful tool to help people build meaningful connections. As I’ve mentioned, we believe that true leadership is about deepening connections with other people and places, and vulnerability is the currency of those connections.

Cultural strategies encourage vulnerability, listening, and openness, all of which help build stronger relationships. They also create the right conditions in the brain to facilitate change. It’s not just about having willing participants come into a room ready to change their minds. Instead, we guide them through activities that they don’t expect. Through what we sometimes call “benevolent confusion,” people become more open. Storytelling, deep experiences, body activation, and mindfulness—all of these elements help create the conditions needed for change.

Another reason to use the arts is to help us meet folks where they’re at. We aim to create an experience that flattens class and marginalization in Kentucky, bringing together people from radically different backgrounds who might not initially value one another. In Kentucky, we know that storytelling is deeply ingrained in the culture, and many Kentuckians are musicians, performers, or makers of some kind. We use the cultural strategies that resonate with them as a shortcut to building the trust and openness needed to make deep relationships possible.

As a result, some truly special things have happened, particularly around how people reckon with their identities. Personally, this work has been deeply healing for me. It helped me overcome a persistent need to prove myself, especially as a first-generation college student from a rural working-class background in Kentucky. There are often biases stacked against people like me in certain spaces, and it’s easy to feel like you need to have a chip on your shoulder.

Many Kentuckians feel this way. But we’ve found that by doing this work together and hearing each other share their “I come from” stories with pride, participants start to feel proud of where they’re from too. They realize the value of their unique, authentic experiences and how being close to some of the country’s biggest challenges actually makes them experts in ways that can upend certain biases.

The result is that people have deeply healing experiences. They come out of these programs—especially rural people, queer people, and people of color—feeling like, “I belong here.” They feel that they’re important to this place, that their story is part of the story of this place, and that they know how to tell it in a way that asserts their importance in shaping its future.

The impact that these arts-based programs have on people are one of the most transformative and meaningful experiences I’ve ever witnessed, and it happens every time. We’ve figured out the formula, and it’s incredibly powerful to watch.

What is the role of digital technology in engaging members?

I think digital technology plays a significant internal and external role. Externally, it’s quite visible. We have many members creating content based on their experiences and recommendations. For instance, one of the current cohort members wrote a piece for Queer Kentucky. There are people at the Frazier, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the University of Kentucky who are being supported by their employers to participate in this program. They’re writing internal summaries about what they’re learning and who they’re meeting, as well as how it can impact their work moving forward.

Internally, we have a Slack group that is its own buzzing ecosystem, where participants can connect with one another across cohorts, within their alumni network, and their own “homerooms.” I’m a bit of a technophobe myself, so I’m truly amazed by the meaningful interaction that folks find in a relatively simple tool like a Slack group. Just today, people from across the state made five posts sharing their work, challenges, and opportunities to get together.

Additionally, we have a substantial amount of digital knowledge-building materials. We created a comprehensive toolkit for Minnesota to replicate our initiatives, with online coursework, a handbook, and a workbook to help participants evaluate strategies in their own cultural contexts. We also published case studies at our five-year mark and are working on the third round of case studies for our 10-year mark. This trove of internal content makes replication more straightforward. Additionally, we have a couple of dozen folks who have led the program over the past decade and can provide technical assistance.

What advice do you have for practitioners trying to mimic a similar approach in their community?

When we talk about the “secret sauce,” we mean combining proven strategies. We are a very evaluation-rich network. When we say we build trust and openness, we can back it up with qualitative and quantitative proof. We can demonstrate that we build confidence and collaborative potential, showing that participants feel less competitive and more willing to collaborate on grants and resources.

However, finding the right people who yearn for a different relationship with their community and bringing them into meaningful collaboration is much more challenging. In addition to having the interest, they need to practice the skills and civic muscles that will help them build the community they dream of living in. This challenge was evident in Minnesota, which has a very different cultural and philanthropic context compared to Kentucky.

Minnesota has significant resources for the arts, thanks to the legacy amendment, Initiative Foundations, and major philanthropic organizations. They spend seven dollars per person on the arts publicly, while we spend less than a dollar in Kentucky. This creates a vastly different nonprofit ecosystem. When we started RUX Minnesota, we worked with high-level steering committee members who were program officers at major foundations—folks with decades of experience building rural-urban ecosystems.

While RUX Minnesota has been impactful, the personal connection to the work isn’t as strong as it is in Kentucky. I believe it’s crucial to find people who are hungry to work differently in their geography, who also have the time and capacity to engage in a deeply adaptive process of trying, listening, reevaluating, rebuilding, and trying again.

The secret sauce includes a commitment to distributed leadership and bringing more people into decision-making processes. This approach, though more challenging, builds broad trust, which ultimately helps us work faster in the long run. The work has to be values-based, and those values must be articulated based on the culture and context of the network. It also has to be place-based and respectful of people with diverse backgrounds and ideologies, which shouldn’t be as complicated as it currently is, but here we are.

If you have these ingredients, you can replicate this program quickly in other geographies. We can provide the materials to help make this happen. However, I think some rural-urban contexts pose more challenges. For instance, California is a vast state, and I was humbled by its scale when I lived in Oregon for graduate school.

Kentucky is about 12 to 13 hours across, making it feasible to drive somewhere meaningful within that time frame. But in California, it’s not possible to travel from Lassen Volcano to San Diego or Baja California in a weekend while also having a meaningful experience. The geographical boundaries, like rivers and mountains, really divide the state. For example, the little town of Petrolia is hard to access, even from nearby towns.

I think it would be difficult to do a rural-urban exchange across the entire state of California because it might be more challenging for people to find commonality and identity. However, the philanthropic infrastructure in California could facilitate connections, perhaps making it easier to bring people together.

Similarly, it could also be challenging to do this work in states with one very large city and predominantly rural areas, like Georgia. In contrast, places like Texas, which have many large cities and rural spaces in between, might present more opportunities for shared sense of place and community identity.

Ultimately, I believe it’s about fostering a shared sense of place. Thank you for letting me share my thoughts as I work through the different contexts that each state poses.

How do you deal with hyper-partisanship, and do you believe that some individuals might not be suited for this model? I think there’s power in acknowledging that this approach isn’t for everyone.

We’ve been grappling with this issue increasingly over the past two years. When we started this work in 2014, partisanship wasn’t viewed as a core, non-negotiable difference; bridging distance and identity were more important. At that time, people, especially in Kentucky, identified with their local communities. Our aim was to help collapse the resulting cultural distances between different identities. However, as the partisan rift has widened, many individuals have developed biases that become entrenched very quickly.

I believe it’s my responsibility to engage with the people in my life who are on the fringes. I won’t bring them into a safe space until I’ve built a respectful relationship with them, ensuring they can enter that space authentically. You can’t force someone who feels fundamentally disrespected and alienated to see themselves as part of a solution when they are in a separatist mindset. This dynamic isn’t given enough thought in the bridging movement; it’s essential to recognize that those feeling marginalized aren’t likely to join any bridging effort unless preliminary steps are taken to address that constraining mindset.

For those who are skeptical of this work or unsure if they will be supported in joining initiatives like ours, we’ve developed several mechanisms to ease participation.

Through projects like Bridging Networks and the Golden Thread conversations, we are engaging those who may never have joined conventional frameworks of collaboration.

We would like to thank Savannah Barrett for their incredibly helpful comments and editing support. Thank you also to Kelley Gardner and Jodi Narde for communications support. This would not have been possible without them.