Scalable solutions for America’s dangerous divisions
With the support of our direct and aligned philanthropic funders, Civic Health Project is deploying solutions with the potential to overcome America’s dangerous divisions, rapidly and at massive scale:
Technology
For the past several years, Civic Health Project has invested funding and staffing resources in transformative projects that demonstrate how emerging technologies can connect rather than further divide us. Collectively, these projects show that we can leverage emerging technologies to detoxify our online interactions and foster social cohesion at massive scale. In 2024 we are consolidating our technology investments into a newly-launched social tech incubator. Our ALGO Solutions (Algorithms and LLMs for Good) incubator is focusing on a small number of flagship projects with the potential to impact social media users, audiences, and platforms at meaningful scale within the current year.
Entertainment
We’ve all seen the power of entertainment to catalyze culture shift around America’s most pressing social issues. In 2023, Civic Health Project launched Bridge Entertainment Labs (BEL) to unlock the power of popular entertainment to help repair and transform America’s divides at massive scale, thereby strengthening our democracy. Powered by philanthropic funding and deeply embedded in the entertainment industry, BEL is uniquely positioned to enlist studio executives, project greenlighters, creative storytellers, and America’s bridge-builders in a shared project to foster social cohesion at scale.
Today, BEL is driving compelling discussions and inspiring creative narratives across multiple genres that tell “new American stories of us,” helping all Americans to dispel the stereotypes we hold and to see each others’ full dignity and humanity.
Movement Building
Civic Health Project’s catalytic grant program (2019-2023) helped launch and scale many of America’s most prominent and effective bridge-building organizations. Today, Civic Health Project continues to invest catalytic funding and in-kind resources into critical fieldwide endeavors that aim to equip millions of Americans with the skill, will, and opportunity to bridge divides.
We support broad-based awareness campaigns (such as #DisagreeBetter and the National Week of Conversation), as well as sector-based and place-based bridging initiatives, to massively scale the reach and impact of bridge-building work across the country.
Research and Measurement
How does Civic Health Project know that the massively scalable solutions we are deploying will actually repair and transform America’s dangerous divisions? For five years, we’ve invested substantial funding and in-kind resources to develop critical insights that guide our own work, while also informing and improving America’s bridge-building ecosystem.
We funded the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a massive and highly publicized study of more than 30,000 Americans testing short, online, depolarizing interventions. And we co-chair the Bridging Movement’s Goals and Measures Working Group, which produced the Social Cohesion Impact Measurement platform, a free, accessible, and academically-vetted evaluation tool that is being deployed broadly by bridging and bridging-adjacent organizations.