Habits of a Healthy Civic Culture: A Conversation with Eric Liu

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This content is brought to you by Travelers. 

A slideshow presentation. Text: Citizen Travelers (service mark) at the Travelers Institute. A Series on Civic Engagement.

Slide: Habits of a Healthy Civic Culture: A Conversation with Eric Liu. Logos: Citizen Travelers. Citizen University.

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JANICE BRUNNER: I'm Janice Brunner, Group General Counsel and Head of Civic Engagement for Travelers. I'm happy to welcome you to our special Citizen Travelers at the Travelers Institute program this afternoon. 

Citizen Travelers is our aggressively nonpartisan initiative to empower Travelers employees to take part in the civic life of their communities while building leadership and professional skills. Democracy depends on informed and engaged citizens, and when people better understand how our democracy works, they're better equipped to engage in constructive dialogue and action.

This kind of constructive engagement tightens community bonds and our broader national fabric. When communities come together, they foster innovation and growth by building trust, establishing fair practices and enabling people from all walks of life to invest in their lives and livelihoods, all of which is good for business.

It's with this in mind that we are pleased to host a series of programs examining civic engagement. Before we begin, I'd like to share a disclaimer about today's program.

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Slide: About Today's Webinar. Text: This webinar is supported by Citizen Travelers, the civic engagement initiative of The Travelers Indemnity Co., for informational and educational purposes only. 

The non-partisan views expressed by the speakers and/or Citizen University and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its employees are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Travelers or any of its employees. Travelers disclaims responsibility for any publication or statement by any of the speakers and/or Citizen University and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Please note that this session is being recorded and may be used as Travelers deems appropriate.

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I'd also like to invite you to submit questions now and throughout the program. Drop your questions in the Q&A feature at the bottom of your screen. 

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Slide: Speakers. Two profile photos appear. On the left is a woman with long blond hair, wearing a black jacket over a white shirt. Text: Janice Brunner. Group General Counsel and Head of Civic Engagement, Travelers. On the right is a man with short dark hair, glasses, and a purple shirt. Text: Eric Liu, Co-Founder and CEO, Citizen University. 

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With that, I'm thrilled to be joined today by our amazing guest. Eric Liu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Citizen University, which works to build a culture of powerful and responsible citizenship in the United States. Liu is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including most recently, You're More Powerful Than You Think, A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen, and Become America, Civic Servants on Love, Responsibility, and Democracy, a New York Times new and notable book. He is featured in the PBS documentary American Creed and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. 

In 2020, Liu was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences where he serves on its Trust and is Co-Chair of its Our Common Purpose commission on democratic citizenship. As part of that work, in 2024 they released a report titled "Habits of the Heart and Mind, How to Fortify Civic Culture," highlighting the components of a healthy civic culture.

We are so pleased to have Eric here with us today to speak about that report, as well as his important work with Citizen University. Eric, thanks so much for being here with us today.

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The slideshow changes to a split screen of the two speakers. 

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ERIC LIU: Janice, thank you so much for having me. It's so great to be in conversation with you all. 

JANICE BRUNNER: Likewise. So just to get started, can you give us a little bit-- speak a little bit about what prompted the report and how the commission worked on it, and who was on the commission, and how you all came together to publish such a worthwhile report?

ERIC LIU: You bet. First of all, I just have to say-- and I imagine most of the people tuning in are aware of this, but this is something special you all have going here. And it's a credit to you, Janice, to Alan Schnitzer, your CEO, that Travelers has made this commitment to this whole initiative called Citizen Travelers. I think it's kind of remarkable in the world of major corporations to recognize that kind of civic power and responsibility that y'all have.

Yeah. So as you mentioned, I've co-chaired for a number of years now this commission at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences called Our Common Purpose. And it's a nationwide, bipartisan commission of practitioners, scholars, advocates from around the country. And our work was really to come up with a set of recommendations about how to really strengthen our democracy in this time of change and challenge right now.

And one of the core elements of that report, which came out a few years ago, the initial commission report, was this theory of action, Janice, that when you zoom out and look at the big picture of a society, of a democracy in particular, there's always a relationship that's in a cycle. And it's either going to be a healthy, virtuous cycle, or an unhealthy, vicious cycle between, on the one hand, our political institutions and on the other hand, our civic culture.

When things are going well, you have political institutions that are responsive and adaptive and listening to the people and able to solve problems. And people feel like, oh, OK, well, I should participate. I should vote. I should go to meetings. I should understand who's deciding things.

And that in turn feeds a civic culture where people take responsibility, where people think of things not as someone else's problem, but as their own problem in a way, and where people actually believe that showing up could make a difference. That's the healthy, virtuous cycle version.

And of course, there are times-- we've been living through a time when a more vicious cycle has set in, where the culture is more of, you know what? What's the point of getting involved? The game is rigged. I'm not going to-- I'm not going to participate.

And having that mindset almost makes it so, and it allows our institutions to be a little bit more easily captured, a little bit less responsive to the people, which just actually makes people think, yeah, why should I bother? See how rigged and broken the government is?

And so when we put out this initial report back in 2020 called “Our Common Purpose,” it really struck a nerve with people. And we realized, well, this can't just be a one and done. We've got to commit to an ongoing body of work to make progress on the ideas that we've put out there. And the recommendations we set forth did run the gamut from things that were about our political institutions like, let's have ranked choice voting. Let's have independent redistricting commissions so that voters can choose politicians rather than politicians choosing their voters.

But we also emphasized cultural changes, like let's promote national service. Let's find new ways for people to learn how to disagree agreeably. Let's really recommit to the teaching of civics, both in our schools and through institutions like businesses.

And that part of the cycle that's about civic culture, we realized, you know what? We need to go deeper on that. People get it intuitively, that culture precedes structure. Anybody in business knows the famous, I think, Peter Drucker line, that "culture eats strategy for breakfast," right?

That's a business maxim. But I think when you think about politics and government too, you realize, yeah. When you have a culture that's sick, and people are selfish and hyper individualistic and tuned out and checked out, then your ability to make change together in any direction, whatever party you might belong to, becomes very constrained. The system becomes very unable to move.

And so we put together a follow-up working group on civic culture to really put meat on the bones of the what, the why and the how of civic culture. What do we mean? Why does it matter to have a healthy civic culture? And how can we, everyday Americans, actually, where we live, build a stronger, healthier, more engaged civic culture?

And change the culture not of the United States. That's too vast a thing. But you can change the culture of Hartford. You can change the culture of Tulsa. You can change the culture of Tacoma. And thinking about where we are and what the relationships and the context that we are moving in every day, how we have some power to actually shift that.

And that's the report that you talked about there called "Habits of Heart and Mind,"

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He holds up a book titled, Habits of Heart and Mind: How to Fortify Civic Culture. 

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and it's the product of this great-- again, another remarkable bipartisan group of practitioners from around the country. And we can talk more about it, but it sets out a whole kind of playbook in a way for how you, wherever you live, can do a few things that actually move the dial and change the culture of your place. 

JANICE BRUNNER: I love that. I think it's so consistent with what we're trying to do at Citizen Travelers as well, is really inspire people based on other people's examples as to how little actually it takes to make change in your community. I think that's one of the things that I think I forgot before I started working on this initiative is it's just-- especially at the local level, really just showing up, you can make a huge difference. And there's so much need for that. And I think you talk a lot about that in the report, which is so worthwhile.

And maybe that leads us to our next question. When you were doing the report, were you focusing-- it sounds like you weren't necessarily focusing on national culture. You were focusing on local. And how did you all come to that decision? And what made that distinct? And how did you flesh that out in the report?

ERIC LIU: Yeah. That's such a great question, Janice. We, obviously, we live in a time right now where national politics is this magnet that sucks up our attention and draws so much energy. And that's, to an extent, as it should be.

But/and the old saying that all politics is local, all citizenship is local. All renewal of democracy is local. And remembering that, remembering that what matters most in a time of change is relationships in place and relationships with people who aren't just like you, who don't vote like you or pray like you or eat like you or dress like you.

But to recognize that every place we live, even the smallest towns in this country, have a diversity of people and worldviews that are a human-scale way to practice the core question of what it means to live like a citizen, which is, how shall we live together, right? That's, at the end of the day, the American question. How shall we live together in a way where we're not going to just cancel each other, flatten each other or kill each other?

And so the local is so central. And I think our work on this project with "Habits of Heart and Mind" was informed by what each one of us on the team that put it together brought to the table.

In my day job, I lead this organization that you mentioned called Citizen University. And we work with people all around the United States, people we call catalysts, civic catalysts. Because they might not be capital “L” leaders. They might not have titles or be in charge of something or be a big shot in their town.

But they're the people that everybody turns to to get something done, to make a connection, to be an elder on the block to guide other people. And Citizen University works with civic catalysts, again, rooted in place.

We're trying to figure out, how do we stitch together a stronger sense of place and a stronger sense of what it means to change our place? And so because of that lens that I have on what it means to practice democracy, I think that really influenced the way that, as a whole, this working group that put together this report on civic culture thought about the questions.

But I think at the end of the day, in a time right now-- forget even about national politics. Just think about digital media, right? It's so easy, given the way that we increasingly deal with each other in these mediated ways-- social media especially-- it's so easy to put people in two-dimensional little caricatures based on what you see in their profile, based on a couple of comments they might put into a chat or whatever.

And that makes it easier for us to prize this kind of righteous purity, this righteous certitude in everything we do, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing, wait. I myself am a complicated, contradictory person coming from a lot of sources and influences. And all of that mess and tangle that is me plays out in how I live in my community, right?

And there's no better way to be reminded of that than to actually be face to face and connected with people. And that's why I think a company like yours that's working-- again, y'all are a national, international organization. But at the heart of things, you are about people and relationships rooted in place.

An agent either does or doesn't know the people they're serving in their community, and they either do or don't know the things that they care about beyond premiums and risk calculations, and so forth. That larger context of, who are we and how are we living together, and what are the currents that I'm sensing in my town about what people are hopeful for, fearful of? And I think those skills that many people in your universe have to practice in their work is a thing that I think many Americans have forgotten how to do in our lives as citizens.

JANICE BRUNNER: That's so true and so important. I think the point that you made that people are nuanced is something we tend to forget today. Are there other things that kind of signify to you a healthy civic culture?

ERIC LIU: Well, I think-- I would agree in part with what you said, and I would amend one part of what you said. The part I would agree with is for sure, a healthy civic culture is one where we are leading our leaders to solve problems, right? It's one where we're not just waiting for someone to fix things, and we're not just waiting for someone to ride in and say, I'll take care of this for everybody. You all just sit back and spectate and watch, right?

But rather where we realize, you know what? We need to actually put aside whatever preconceptions we have of one another and ask ourselves, how are we actually going to deal with traffic in our community? How are we actually going to deal with economic development?

How are we going to deal with the fact that jobs have been leaving, and our core downtown is struggling? How are we going to deal with the fact that homelessness is rising, or that our town is booming and housing's no longer affordable, and a whole swath of the middle class in our community is getting squeezed out?

There might be ideas that Republicans and Democrats have about how to fix these things, but there is no Republican or Democratic way to fix a pothole, to build a house, to house someone who is unhoused. These are problems that we have to solve in ways that are human and should be able to bring to bear the full breadth of our humanity. So that part I totally agree with, that a healthy civic culture is focused on solutions, right?

The part where I would slightly amend is when you said that in a healthy civic culture, people don't have to disagree, or what have you. I think it's actually almost the opposite.

In a healthy civic culture, we do know that we have differences of worldview. We do know that I'm more of a traditionalist, or I'm more of a radical, or I like to try new stuff. I like to keep things the way they are. I trust big institutions. I totally don't trust institutions, right? People are coming from all different vantage points and worldviews shaped by their life experience and the ways they were raised and formed, and so forth.

And in a healthy civic culture, we recognize that the point of civic life is not just free speech. It's not just free expression. It's not just, oh, everybody gets to state their pure, undiluted view, and then drop the mic and leave the room, right? That's the kind of way that social media is training so many people to behave, right?

Oh, I'm going to say my pure, perfect point of view, and then leave the room and not actually hear anybody else. The point of free speech is not merely free expression. It's free exchange. And this is one of the key parts of our report. It's one of the key habits of heart and mind that a healthy civic culture has.

The difference between free expression and free exchange is everything. Free exchange is, let's exchange views across our differences. Let's exchange views across our ideological or generational or racial or socioeconomic differences and talk about those.

And it's possible when we exchange views that we'll suddenly realize, oh, my perfect, pure view needs to make a little bit of room for something you just said. Or something I just said should really invite you to reconsider your assumptions, right? A healthy civic culture is one where we are practicing not avoiding arguments, but how to have better arguments, how to have less stupid arguments.

And there are many, many efforts afoot around the country to do that. One that we actually talk about in this report is called The Better Arguments Project. And it starts with that premise that even though things are so polarized and toxic in our national politics, the point shouldn't be to avoid argument altogether. It should be to have better arguments, less stupid arguments.

And to recognize, you know, America is an argument. We're always going to argue about a strong central government versus local control, or about how much we should emphasize total liberty and freedom versus really emphasizing equality and making things fairer for everybody. Those things are always in tension with one another.

We're always going to argue about how much to emphasize unity versus diversity, pluribus versus unum, to use the language of our national motto. And so a healthy civic culture is one where, OK, we know these arguments. We can see people are complicated. We can see that we are complicated.

And we can come in in some, again, problem-solving orientation to deal with each other and recognize that, you know what? When we all get in a room together having different points of view, it can go one of two ways. It can either be a train wreck because no one wants to deal with each other, or actually, we can solve problems even better than a room full of people who all think alike, because we're seeing things from different angles, right? And I think that way of thinking is something that is core to a healthy civic culture.

JANICE BRUNNER: I completely agree with that. And I think another way I've heard people say it is you may not-- you don't have to agree at the end of the conversation, but what is helpful is to see the humanity in the other person's position. So it may be that you don't agree, but you at least see where they're coming from, which I think is missing with the drop the mic, to your point. You say your view, and then you move on versus learning why the other person feels the way that they feel.

What other things are part of a healthy civic culture? And also, how can we get there? What can we do to- and one of the things we do at Travelers, I think, is a lot of this, working within our organization. When you're working on a team, you can't drop the mic. You have to sit next to that person--

ERIC LIU: [LAUGHS]

JANICE BRUNNER: --tomorrow. You'd better try and figure out why they think what they think, and how you can either persuade them or they can persuade you. But what can we do in our communities? And how do you-- how do you build this?

ERIC LIU: You know, let me give you a couple of concrete examples. And I notice already in some of the Q&A people naming the reality of our times, that as much as people want to believe in what you and I are talking about, that they have-- there's so much anxiousness about what's happening in national politics and the ways that it can-- well, let's put it nicely. It doesn't model what we're just talking about right now, right? And to put it even more starkly, there are many people who fear kind of existential or constitutional crises unfolding in national politics.

And look, we can come back to that in a minute. And people will have a wide range of views about one person's crisis is another person's opportunity. And there are a lot of people who are thinking about our national politics as being so broken right now that they just need this kind of disruption, and others saying, you know what? This kind of disruption-- disruption's OK, but it's got to operate within the framework of the rule of law.

And those themselves are great arguments to have, again, not at an abstract, national level, but bringing them back home, OK? So if you want to talk about, what does it mean to live together in a community that has a full spectrum of views and a full spectrum of views about what constitutes a good society and what's actually threatening our society, let's look at a place-- I mean, I'll start with a place at the scale of a state, the state of Arizona. 

One of the places we describe in this report, "Habits of Heart and Mind," is a wonderful organization based in Phoenix but working statewide, based in Tempe and working statewide called the Center for the Future of Arizona. And they've been catalyzing all of these remarkable initiatives not just in the big cities, but in rural places and between urban and rural across that state to really, again, rehumanize civic life and get people talking about, what does it look like to build a common narrative about the future of Arizona?

And when you actually invite people into the work of building an affirmative common narrative, not, what are you angry about, what are you against, but what do we want to build here together, it maybe will or won't surprise you that Arizona, which is the swingest of swing states, and contains very red and very blue, and contains all of these contested, independent voters, it turns out that there is a huge and a surprisingly large consensus about core things that the people of Arizona, ranging from very red places to blue places, want to have done and see done in that state on everything from a more humane immigration system to an education system that actually prepares people for work and citizenship, to really stewardship of their water and natural resources there in a state that, like it or not, can't deny the costs of a climate crisis, right?

And people are recognizing, OK, we can't ideology our way out of some of these things. We've actually got to come together and figure it out. And the Center for the Future of Arizona just invites people persistently in relationships statewide by showing up over and over again, not a one and done, and inviting people over and over again, not a one and done, to meet people who initially don't seem like them or vote like them or think like them to recognize, hey, we actually have some shared goals here.

Now, we'll have differences in opinion on the ways to get to those goals. And each of our respective parts of the political spectrum do contain people who are quite on the extreme and don't want to sit in a room like this, and just want to blow things up, but they're not actually the majority.

The polling research organization called More in Common has done this remarkable body of national research that shows that the largest block of Americans at every scale in Arizona, in Phoenix, in a rural county in Arizona, the largest block of Americans is always what More in Common calls the exhausted majority. That's who most of us are, not the loud voices on the wings, right? And so I think the Center for the Future of Arizona is one example.

Another example, I'll tell you, Janice, that we talk about in this report actually comes from a piece of work that Citizen University does. So one of our programs at Citizen University, the organization that I lead, is called the Civic Collaboratory.

And the Collaboratory is-- you can think of it as a mutual aid network. It's this format that invites people from many different sectors and silos of work to come together and not just network and talk about, oh, the big problems, but actually take turns asking for help and receiving help from each other.

And so this started as a national thing, the Collaboratory. And so you had people who were left and right, from Tea Partiers to Black Lives Matter activists, people who are working on veterans’ issues, people who are working on technology and democracy, people who are working on civic education issues, all kinds of things, coming together and taking turns.

And they'll come. And when it's your turn in rotation, you present a project you're working on or an initiative, and then you have several asks for help. And then what the rest of the room does is not offer critique or commentary or nitpicking but actually making hard commitments of help and investments of capital of every kind. Social capital, intellectual capital, relationship capital.

Oh, we can connect you to this organization. Oh, my organization knows how to do this. We can help you on this. Oh, we know these funders who love to support this kind of thing. Oh, we do media work. Let us help tell the story of what you're doing. And then what goes around comes around. It'll be your turn in rotation next after you made that kind of commitment. And so you create this habit.

Before our webinar started, Janice, you and I were chatting about some of the things we've got to remember right now seem new, but they're actually deeply, deeply old. And this kind of mutual aid circle is old, old stuff. It's as old as a lending circle.

It's as old as Indigenous and Native American traditions of pooling resource. These are ancient ways of people supporting each other and lifting and carrying each other through times where it seems like nobody has enough. But you suddenly realize when we-- we're all better off when we're all better off, right?

And this Civic Collaboratory model had worked so powerfully nationally that we decided a few years ago to start planting seeds for the same format to unfold locally, rooted in place. And it turns out that it works even better when it's rooted in place.

And so what we talk about in the "Habits of Heart and Mind" report is one example, which is the Atlanta Civic Collaboratory. A remarkable cross section of civic catalysts in that community have come together and now built this very robust mutual aid network where people-- and that's a city that is dynamic. It's interesting. It's, again, part of a state that is contested in every national election, part of a city that has a huge history, both in the realizing of the promise of America, but also the long history of slavery and its legacy.

And so you have this complicated place, and you have people coming from all quarters of that town who haven't encountered each other before, who haven't crossed paths before, much less helped each other on projects and on work. And when you do that, you build bonds of trust and affection that last beyond that single project or that single commitment.

And look, I'm not being Pollyanna. There's crises going on nationally. But the only way through this stuff is by seeding more things like the Atlanta Civic Collaboratory or supporting more things like the Center for the Future of Arizona that are going to renew things from the bottom up.

To me-- yes, there is-- there are things that have to happen on the national level, to make sure things unfold within the rule of law. But I think that the only long-term way to fortify things is what we're talking about here. And those are just two examples of things that are happening all over the country right now, off the kind of media narrative and the radar screen of national politics.

I'm still net hopeful. This kind of stuff is happening everywhere, and people are coming together everywhere to try to bridge these divides toward problem solving.

JANICE BRUNNER: I love that. I think there's so much-- there's so much there that we can take away and think through. One of the things that I noticed in the report, which you hit on here, is this idea of what's old is new again and needing help. And when we talk about-- a lot of times we try and [INAUDIBLE], why are we so polarized? Why are-- people often like to point to all sorts of things, social media being one, etc.

But one of the things that I think you touched on, which I think is so important, is this needing each other, right? So we're living in this society where-- and I think you have this in the report-- we don't need each other as much. If you need-- it used to be if you had something-- you were sick or you were in bereavement or something, people would bring food, right? Now people still do that, but you don't need that as much because you can order on Seamless, right? [LAUGHS]

If you need a ride somewhere, you don't need to go next door and ask your neighbor to give you a ride. You can actually just call an Uber. So there's less of this kind of getting together or kind of depending on others.

And because of that, the fabric of, oh, and maybe I don't agree with my neighbor about everything, but you know what? I need them to drive me [LAUGHS] to pick something up, so I'm going to make it work. You don't have to make it work anymore.

And I think that what you're saying is maybe you don't have to make it work, but there's so many benefits from making it work. And these collaboratives are actually doing that, making people realize how beneficial it can be to meet other people in their neighborhood. So I love that. I wonder--

ERIC LIU: You just expressed that in a way that I hope people really-- I hope it really sinks in with people, because it's not a technical thing you just said. You said something that is almost-- I mean, it's a mindset thing, but it's almost a spiritual thing, remembering that we need each other. And remembering that when we ask for help, we actually end up doing someone else a favor in a way, that it is this circulation of power.

At Citizen University, we have this very simple equation to express what we mean by citizenship. And the equation is power plus character equals citizenship, that to live like a citizen means both recognizing that you need to be fluent in power and understand, who decides things in my community?

How did this thing happen? How is it that they just decided to upzone my neighborhood or cut bus service to my part of town? Or why is my part of town a food desert? All these things. Like, who decided that? It's not some big blob out there called they. I can't believe they decided it, right? Being literate in power means understanding and participating in the ways in which those decisions get made, and building that muscle of realizing that decision-making is something that actually we can do, right?

But then the more you learn about that kind of power, to couple that with a grounding in civic character, that it's not just about me. It's not just about me getting what I want now most efficiently. That's a path to sociopathy.

What we're talking about is civic character of recognizing what you just said. We need each other. We hold each other up. What does it mean to serve each other? What does it mean to forbear and kind of hold back when you want to slash somebody and cancel somebody, and actually be a little bit compassionate or a little bit curious about, are they having a bad day? What's going on there? What formed them in that way? What the heck was that about?

And those kinds of habits are habits of the heart. That term, the title of this report, "Habits of Heart and Mind," comes from Alexis de Tocqueville when he came to the young United States in the 1830s and looked-- this young aristocrat from France who was kind of sympathetic to what the American experiment was doing. He was trying to figure out, how is this working? What's going on?

And he looked and he realized, well, what made this young-- and let us be honest, it was a young, white republic then. I mean, it wasn't like, Janice-- a young, white male republic. You and I wouldn't have been participants in that in the 1830s.

But he looked around and he said, what makes this place tick is not actually the national government. What makes this place tick is this incredible ecosystem of people joining in circles and associations and clubs and asking each other for help. And when they think they need something, saying, I want to make a circle of people who want to solve this thing, and can someone help me? People want to join me? And people just having this relentless habit of doing that. That was the secret sauce.

And over the ensuing 200 years, the more that our life has been mediated and the more that technology has made things super-efficient, it's just like you said. We have squandered that secret sauce, right?

And I'm mindful. Again, in the Q&A, some questions have arisen about, well, how do we restore that? It seems like national politics makes things insurmountable to doing this. And where do I start?

And it's the same thing you just said, Janice. We start in the first place with our own hearts and minds, being of a mindset, not only of-- a mindset of, I'm not helpless, actually, and I'm not alone. I can get help, and I can join with others. That's a mindset, heartset thing.

But then from there, I think the next magic key that unlocks everything is this. Join a club. Join something. Doesn't have to be-- it doesn't have to be political or civic.

Join a gardening club. Join a neighborhood group. Join a sports thing. Join the PTA, whatever. Join something that's going to meet more than once where you're going to see people you don't know as well as people you might know, and where you're going to have to learn how to deal with each other, working towards some kind of common goal, right?

Or if you're really moved to, start a club on something that you care about, right? But the act of joining on anything-- pick one thing. And people right now are like, ah, there's so many issues. I don't know what to join or what to start on.

Pick anything and just say, for the next six months, I'm going to go deep on this issue. Maybe that issue is gentrification in my community, or maybe that issue is supporting refugees and immigrants during this time of anxiety, or maybe your issue is going to be cutting through all the thicket of regulation that's kind of choking small business in my town, right?

Whatever it is, go deep on that. Learn about it. Learn the people who work on that. Meet the people who care about that. Join in things. And again, build that muscle, right?

After six months you may decide, you know what? That's not actually the issue that really floats my boat that I care about. But now you'll have that muscle, and you can deploy that muscle on some other issue that you realize, oh, you do care about, right?

And I think that is the thing that we can do right now is not get paralyzed either by the scale of crisis in national politics or by the kind of overwhelming paradox of too many options of, I don't know where to start. There are too many crises. There are too many things. Just picking one thing and diving in and joining, and recognizing that when you join, over time you literally build muscle, both on the power side of my equation and the character side of the equation that will help you live like a citizen.

JANICE BRUNNER: And I think that you touch on that in the report by calling it civic health. And when you think of it as-- when you think about-- we talk a lot about physical health. We talk a lot about mental health. If you think of physical-- or civic health as another thing that you need to not only work like a muscle but also maintain.

Because to your point, when you have healthy civic-- when you make your civic health a priority-- and this is hard, because everybody has so many things on their list of trying to keep healthy about. But when you make civic health a priority, you are-- I think it's so empowering, right?

Because to your point, when you start to go and do some of these things, one of the things that's really-- I've been amazed by as I've started doing this work is how easy it is to make a difference. And I keep saying the same thing.

But when you talk to people at the local level, it's really just by going to the meetings and listening, or reading the documents, or whatever it is that's your ability to engage, you realize, wow. You can go from knowing nothing about what this chosen thing you decided to do is to really being important when it comes to that.

And just by showing up, because it's just not that common. People just don't do it. And so you can really have an impact, and it really helps the civic health of feeling like you are actually-- and I think you say this. You have more power than you think, right?

ERIC LIU: Yes. Well, look, I think the other thing too about civic health-- you're absolutely right-- is a reminder that my message here is not, eat your vegetables, right? It's not a scolding message.

When you join, when you participate, when you learn what's going on in your community, when you share what you learn and when you circulate among others, that actually is purpose-giving. It is joyful. It makes you feel alive. And I think the surgeon general-- the previous surgeon general of the United States had issued some remarkable, unprecedented reports about the epidemics of social isolation and loneliness in the United States. 

And it's endemic. I mean, it is everywhere, right? Being online together with other people is not the same as being with people. And watching cable news and yelling at the TV screen is not actually participating. Joining with people, dealing with something, creating something, fixing something-- and again, it doesn't have to be political or civic.

If it's an arts group and you're painting together, whatever, that spirit of co-creation is not an eat your vegetables thing. What I'm offering is not a scold, but an invitation into a sense of actual belonging and purpose that people have forgotten is possible in American life.

And I think, again, some of through line of some of the questions that have already come through in the Q&A feature, one of through lines is basically fear. We live in an age of fear right now. And people-- and that's not just about the current administration or about the most recent elections.

We've had 50 years in this country of increasing concentration of wealth, increasing concentration of voice and power in a way that's making more and more people fearful that they're not going to be able to live the American dream, and more and more fearful that their place in society is getting eroded.

And when you get into that kind of fear mindset, you start thinking in zero-sum terms. You start thinking about how the other guy's going to try to rip you off. You start thinking about how, you know what? I don't want to pull in with other people. Like, I've got to look out for me and my own, right?

And that's Republicans and Democrats. That's young and old. That's white and nonwhite. That's immigrant and Native. Like, that is everywhere, kind of in the water and in our air right now. And that's been unfolding over the better part of our lifetimes. And that's not going to be fixed overnight.

But the only way it can be fixed is by actually showing, by being the ones to show that a different way is possible. And that's true both on the matter of spirit and culture, and then that's true as well on policy, right?

I mean, again, the reason why I applaud Travelers for-- y'all are a big Fortune 100 company, maybe even a Fortune 20 company. I don't know how big you all are. But you don't have to be doing this, but you are spending time and energy and literal capital to do this. Why?

Because you also, on some level, believe that we're all better off when we're all better off. And I don't mean that in some either naive way or some communist way. I mean, you recognize that when a community is healthier, when neighbors are more aware of themselves and their own and each other, when people feel connected to their community, that helps prevent the kinds of bad things that unfold in a community, against which you insure.

And also, it helps actually a community to be stronger and more resilient in the face of disasters that you can't predict so that when something awful does come-- a natural disaster or a fire, or whatever it might be, a wildfire or a flood-- that a community is more able to deal with that not in the dollars and cents paying of insurance payments way, but more in the, is this community going to hold together so that we actually don't completely fall apart after the physical structures have burned or been waterlogged?

And so you realize that to be in the business that you're in is ultimately a business of people recognizing we're kind of in this together. And that's a cultural norm. That's a cultural norm that during crises can be hard to hold together.

And so one of the other questions was, how do I get over the fear of being, in a sense, the first one to take the step to invite someone else into this different way of being, or the first one to engage in what could become a really nasty, toxic argument or a conflict, especially if I don't like conflict?

And I think one of the things that we can recognize, No. 1, is what we talked about earlier, which is, orient things away from just ideological, abstract conflicts and more toward, what's the problem we're trying to solve here? What are we actually trying to build or fix here? That's No. 1.

But No. 2-- and this is a little bit harder, but it's actually the first principle-- in that Better Arguments Project I alluded to earlier. And by the way, betterarguments.org is just the website for that.

Principle No. 1 that The Better Arguments Project teaches people is, take winning off the table. If you engage with somebody who you know you're going to disagree with on something and engage them not to win, not to beat them in an argument, not to crush them and own them like you would like to if this were some kind of online chat but actually engage them to understand.

Like, I actually just want to understand where you're coming from. I want to understand why you think this is the problem, why you see things this way, why you think-- whatever the issue might be. And I'm not playing gotcha. I'm not going to ambush you. I want to understand.

When you come to an engagement with that point of view seriously, it is contagious in the best way. They realize, oh, you're not trying to trick them. Oh, they can let down their guard. Oh, they can actually engage you with more complexity, right? And that is the way we transcend that fear.

But yeah, it does take us choosing to catalyze, choosing sometimes to be the one to take that first initial small step. And again, y'all at Travelers are trying to encourage us to do that by having this whole initiative. And I think we can do it.

JANICE BRUNNER: Well, and it's interesting. You say one interesting thing in the report that I liked on that point. You say, you have to come to the conversation willing to change your mind. You're trying to change the other person's mind in a way, but you have to be willing to change yours also.

And that is so hard, right? Because most people-- and I'm thinking about this in my own family when we're having a discussion, right? Like, I'm coming to it because I do want to win that discussion ultimately.

But I have to be willing to think, I might walk away from this actually with my mind changed. But once you do that, it is really-- it's almost a fun exercise, right? Because it's almost-- and this is why I think people love being-- formal debate, right? It's the exercise of actually learning, what is the other argument? What does the other person have on their mind?

And we do something at Travelers which is similar, but a little bit-- when I came to Travelers, one of the things that kept popping up and what people will always say is this idea of assuming positive intent, right? So if you keep that overriding-- and this goes to your point of, you don't know what the other person is going through, whether they're having a bad day, what they have going on in their life. But if you assume positive intent, then maybe you don't pounce. You wait. You listen. You think. So easier said than done, for sure.

ERIC LIU: Easier said than done, for sure. And look, again, I don't want to be-- I'm tracking some of these questions that are coming in. And Cindy asks, are we preaching to the choir? For those who-- anybody who's come to this webinar, she says, already wants to engage in this way. That may or may not be true, actually. I bet there's more than a few people who've signed up here for whom this is their first step.

I can't tell you how many conversations I've been having since last year, and certainly since the election, of people who are telling me, I've never been engaged before. And now I feel like things are a little bit on fire, and I need to figure out how to start. Where do I start, right?

And Cindy, actually, I would point you to-- and maybe Jessica can find this while I'm talking. I recently did a podcast with Slate, the online magazine. They have a podcast called How To! where they have listeners submit their, how do I do this? And they get different experts to answer how to whatever. And it can be how to fix something in your house, or it can be how to change something in your schools.

But I got this question from a stay-at-home mom in the Midwest named Connie who has never been involved in anything civically, has never voted and decided this year she needs to. And her question was, how do I get started? 

And we had this almost hour-long podcast conversation, really about her and about why she'd never been involved before, about how she started to feel like she needed to, about what she's scared of, many of the same comments that have shown up in chat here. She's scared of getting canceled. She's scared of doing the wrong thing. She's scared of-- she's scared that so many people know more than she does, and she's going to seem like the ignorant person.

And we talked through all those things, right? And thank you, Jessica, for putting that into chat, the podcast link. And I think that-- and as we talked it through, she realized, again, some of the stuff that, Janice, you and I have been talking about here today, the small steps, the heartset and mindset of, I can actually do something. I don't have to be scared. And if I come in with-- in good faith and with positive intent, even if somebody doesn't reciprocate, even if they come back at me in the same old, political way, that's on them. It doesn't diminish me, right?

But I think that for so many people who aren't engaged-- but the deeper part of Cindy's question isn't even people like Connie, the stay-at-home mom who wants to get involved, but doesn't know how, but maybe this much broader group of people who, they don't even want to get involved.

They're tuned out completely. Maybe at election time, they listen to Joe Rogan, or they watch an influencer, and that might make them vote. But otherwise, they're completely checked out. And this question of, how do we engage them?

And here's my key verb here. The verb to use is not to engage. The verb to use is invite. What can you invite someone to? I want to invite you-- and an invitation, anytime you want to invite somebody into anything, you've got to think about, what's their motivation, right?

If you're talking to somebody who has completely never participated in anything and you think, OK, what does this person care about? Do they care about-- what is it that they actually care about?

Is it-- do they just care about their job and their workplace? Do they just care about their neighborhood? Do they care about the fact that they're trying to provide home care for their aging parent, and nobody's helping them, and nobody's looking out for them? Do they care about-- whatever. There's something that as a human being they care about, right? And that is the basis of an invitation.

Well, let me invite you into a conversation with some other people who also care about that, who are really frustrated too, that our home care system is completely busted and that only if you have tons of money can you get help for someone who has dementia or memory care issues, or whatever. Let's talk about that. Like, we who don't have a lot of financial resource, let's talk about how we can actually deal with that and help each other.

And that might be a doorway into learning that, No. 1, you're not alone, and that there are people trying to solve this thing and work on this thing. But that spirit of invitation, I think, has to be key.

And again, in our work at Citizen University, we-- the other thing that we do-- one way that we create these invitations is through ritual. Ritual also matters.

And one thing I want to mention, we've had a long-standing program at Citizen University called Civic Saturdays. And Civic Saturdays are just-- they're simple gatherings that are like the civic equivalent to a faith gathering. It's not church. It's not synagogue or mosque. 

But on purpose, it has a little bit of a structure and the flow of a gathering like that where you're going to walk into a room and be greeted by somebody, and you're going to be seated next to maybe a stranger. And then pretty early on, you're going to be asked to turn and talk to that stranger about a question that blows past small talk, right? Not, how about those Mariners or how about those Yankees?

But actually, what's broken in your heart right now? What are you afraid of in your community right now? And people are like, oh, OK. All right. Let's talk about that. Let's go there.

And then people sing together to actually have that experience of literally vocalizing not alone. And you're singing songs from different parts of the American tradition. There will be a text that is read, a text from our history that might be famous or might be something you've never heard of that is like a piece of civic scripture that you sit with and you think about for a minute.

Someone will give a civic sermon that's trying to make sense of our times and figure out, what do we gathered here in this room, in this neighborhood, in this town, what do we have to do with this now? What are we going to do?

And then at the end, people form up into circles, civic circles, to actually do what you and I have been talking about here, Janice, which is inviting each other into, well, we work on this issue. Does anybody want to join me? Or I'm looking for a way to get involved in this. Does anybody know about that?

And people kind of realize that we can carry each other through this. And these rituals, this simple gathering, are just one of an incredible, diverse multiplicity of such things unfolding all over the country.

Someone else in Q&A asked about Braver Angels, another organization that is doing work that is similar in spirit. They are doing things in somewhat structured ways to get people from the left and people from the right in roughly equal numbers to meet each other and talk to each other in a structured way about their differences. That's going at it very frontally, and that's one way to do it.

What we do at Citizen University is maybe coming at things a little bit more indirectly and inviting people to-- but I'm not saying one is better than the other. What I'm actually saying is, we need all of it. Like, whatever thing you can think of-- Braver Angels, Living Room Conversations, the Weave project at Aspen Institute-- all these different programs and projects that exist all over the country. And some are national, and some are very rooted in place.

Civic Nebraska, if you live in Nebraska. The Kansas Leadership Center, if you live in Kansas. Civic Canopy, if you live in Denver or in Boulder, Colorado. 1050 Forward if you live in Oklahoma, which works on micropolitans, towns between 10,000 and 50,000 population and trying to stitch together a sense of stronger civic culture in those kinds of communities. You have things going all over the country.

And if you're trying to figure out, well, where do I find more of those, go to our website, citizenuniversity.us where we tell a lot of stories of organizations like these. Go to a wonderful organization called Our Towns created by Jim and Deb Fallows, journalists who've created this compendium and this kind of living blog of people in small towns across the country who are just trying to fix stuff.

These are happening everywhere. And some of them, like Braver Angels, are explicitly trying to bridge left-right divides. Some like Citizen University are just trying to equip everyday Americans with the tools and the mindset that we can fix civic culture where we live, and that it's that bottom-up effort that over the long haul is going to fix us. And others are focused on a very specific issue, maybe K-12 schools, maybe climate crisis, maybe elder care, whatever it is.

But if Tocqueville were to come back today, I think he would be a little bit alarmed [LAUGHS] at how things have changed. But if he looked long enough and hard enough, he'd realize there's still enough of this associational life. There's still enough people wanting to live out these habits of heart and mind.

And we who've shown up here for this webinar and all of us who've been connected now through Citizen Travelers, we've got to be the people to amplify this work and this way of being. And if we can commit to each other and ourselves that over the course of-- well, the rest of our lives, but even, say, the next five years, we're going to by 5x, 10x, 20x increase the number of people we know who care about this stuff and engage on this stuff, that's reachable.

You can increase by 5x or 10x the number of people you know who care about this stuff. That's completely doable if you just set your mind and heart to it. And Janice, I'm just so grateful to you and your team for giving us that prompt and that invitation.

JANICE BRUNNER: Well, I'm grateful to you for all you're doing and for being here with us today. I think what you've described is also leadership, right? Being willing to say, you know what? Maybe other people aren't doing this, but I'm going to. And I'm going to get started.

And then I think what happens is-- and this is what I really think I learned through Citizen Travelers when I talk to these employees who are doing great things, and we spotlight them. It's really inspiring to other people. It's inspiring to me.

And you might be surprised how much impact that has by just doing it yourself, how many people will start to do it as well. People that you might not have expected.

ERIC LIU: Might get invited a couple times and first be reluctant. This is a time for us all right now to say yes. I'll close with the great civil rights organizer Ella Baker once said, strong people don't need strong leaders.

And on the left and the right right now, I think we can say, we are not a strong people right now. There are cravings across the political spectrum for a strong man to show us the way forward. And we the people have to fortify ourselves and build that muscle and work on that civic health, Janice, that you're talking about so that we can guide each other toward the kind of beloved community that we think still is possible in this country.

(DESCRIPTION)
Slide: Citizen Travelers (service mark) at the Travelers Institute. A Series on Civic Engagement. Text: Watch Replays: travelersinstitute.org. LinkedIn Connect: Janice G. Brunner. Take Our Survey: Link in chat. #CitizenTravelers. 

(SPEECH)
JANICE BRUNNER: We have a lot more-- as you said, I think we have more power than we think. It's great to give some people some ideas about how to make a difference in their lives and the lives of others. And thank you for doing this report. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for all you do. 

ERIC LIU: Thank you, Janice. Been wonderful to be here.

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(DESCRIPTION)
Text: Citizen Travelers (service mark) at the Travelers Institute. A Series on Civic Engagement.