We partner with communities to build the relationships and capacity to shape their future together. And we make that capacity a lasting part of how that community works.
Strong communities grow from strong relationships—within groups, across groups, and between residents and institutions. Yet too often, the people shaping community life work alongside one another rather than with one another. Important perspectives remain disconnected, participation is uneven, and opportunities for collective action are missed.
Research shows that communities with stronger cross-group and resident-institution relationships are better able to govern, innovate, withstand shocks, and support community well-being. Yet too many communities lack that foundation, marked instead by low and uneven participation, gaps in representation, and growing disconnection and distrust.
What’s missing isn’t another program, but durable community capacity: the relationships, practices, and structures that enable both broad and deep participation in community life.
Through CivicWorks, TogetherUp partners with municipalities and local institutions to build Community Councils—locally representative, cross-sector networks of formal and informal leaders. Councils bring together people from local government, education, business, health, faith communities, nonprofits, philanthropy, identity groups, neighborhoods, and grassroots efforts.
Council members build trust across differences, listen deeply to the broader community, and turn what they learn into coordinated action. Through facilitated gatherings and TogetherUp’s Turning Towards curriculum, they develop the skills and practices to navigate differences, identify shared priorities, and mobilize people and institutions around them.
A Community Council is permanent civic infrastructure: a standing table where residents and institutional leaders continue learning, imagining, and acting together long after any single initiative ends. Over time, it becomes part of how the community understands itself, makes decisions, and gets things done.
Through CivicWorks, TogetherUp helps Communities:
- Map and listen to the community through a community-wide Listening Tour that identifies formal and informal leaders, surfaces local knowledge, and reaches people often left out.
- Build a representative Community Council that brings together trusted leaders across sectors, neighborhoods, identities, and lived experiences.
- Equip members to lead across differences through facilitated gatherings and the Turning Towards curriculum, building the skills to listen, navigate disagreement, and collaborate effectively.
- Translate community insight into coordinated action by identifying shared priorities and co-creating programs, practices, and policies that strengthen community life.
- Embed the work for the long term by developing local leadership, establishing lasting ways of working together, and measuring how participation, connection, and community capacity change over time.