‘It's a beautiful thing': how one Paris district rediscovered conviviality

The Kensington Community Resilience Fund supports local initiatives through participatory grant-making, a process where advisory committees made up of community members – who are deeply familiar with their community’s needs – help decide which organizations should receive a share of the funding. Since 2020, KCR has awarded $760,000 in grants to neighborhood programs.

Together Baton Rouge connects different organizations and individuals to collaborate on important community issues, such as advocating for needed infrastructure work. The group helped bring about the restructuring of a corporate tax break program that brought in $282 million in revenue in 2021.

In a truly grassroots effort, organizers of a campaign to end partisan gerrymandering in Michigan mobilized more than 10,000 volunteers to rally support for establishing an independent redistricting commission. Through building meaningful relationships with everyday voters in each of the state's 83 counties, the campaign successfully gathered more than 400,000 signatures to get the proposal on the ballot, and the constitutional amendment was ultimately approved in 2018.

For the past year, community organizers in Baltimore have been going door to door to share Know Your Rights materials, as well as hosting trainings to help residents get involved in rapid responses against ICE operations in the city. Hundreds of people have been trained so far and the effort has led to the formation of about a dozen community-based ICE watch groups.

Moms for Housing reclaim vacant homes owned by investors to provide a place for single mothers to live. Advocating for housing as a human right, 13 organizers are currently living in these unoccupied houses and through civil disobedience, managed to negotiate temporary housing as they continue fighting for permanent solutions to the area’s housing crisis.

Through the Better for Democracy campaign, which is organized by Greater Cleveland Congregations, neighborhood “captains” are tasked with contacting low-propensity voters in their area at least five times each with phone calls, door-knocking, texts, a printed voters’ guide, and a follow-up thank you call. This relational approach to organizing resulted in 56 percent of those who were contacted showing up to vote in 2022, as compared to a 30 percent turnout rate for the city as a whole.

Through the Park Friends Network, local volunteer groups work to preserve public spaces in their neighborhood and communicate with the city about needed repairs or improvements. More than 140 Park Friends groups have formed in Philadelphia, with many hosting events such as cleanup days, school supply giveaways, and neighborhood meet-and-greets.

In some wards of Chicago, residents are able to directly weigh in on city council spending and projects through an annual participatory budgeting process. Citizen input has helped bring a range of capital improvements to fruition, from public exercise stations in local parks to efforts to replace lead-contaminated water fountains in schools.

A light pollution mitigation pledge in Philadephia called Lights Out Philly asks building managers to agree to turn off their lights late at night during bird migration periods to decrease bird collisions with windows.

New York City's Civic Engagement Commission has run two pilot projects implementing participatory budgeting, a process in which local residents help decide how local funding should be allocated. The latest pilot project allocated $1.3 million to 33 projects in "priority" neighborhoods, including youth sports programs and culturally-based mental health workshops.