The Jackson Foundation can make a big impact when it combines our grantmaking, the Jackson Leadership Fellows, and exercising our own civic leadership. Our strategy includes providing support to our partners and Fellows in a variety of ways.
Partnering with a Jackson Fellow
An example is our support of civic engagement involving Jackson Fellow Jillian Youngblood and Civic Genius. The Foundation was actively working to advance civic engagement, collaboration, and bipartisanship when Jillian, the executive director of Civic Genius, entered the 2024 Jackson Leadership Fellows program.
When Jillian moved to the Puget Sound region in 2020, both she and Civic Genius, an organization that highlights where Americans agree on issues and connects people with policy makers, were in transition. What could she do to meet the changing needs of Civic Genius while getting to know her new community and the civic environment in the Pacific Northwest?
“It was the best decision I could have made,” she said of becoming a Jackson Fellow. Funding is important, but so are connections and introductions to key players. Within its multigenerational, committed community, there is a wide range of expertise. This includes the community of passionate, engaged Fellows who welcomed Julian’s questions and wanted to see Civic Genius evolve and succeed.
Foundation Funding
For her Fellowship project, Jillian sketched a revamped “out of the box” version of It’s Your America, a workshop aimed at bringing people together in facilitated collaborative conversation about community issues. Following Jillian’s fellowship year, Civic Genius received a $5,000 Jackson Foundation Opportunity Grant to put on these workshops utilizing connections made through the Jackson Foundation to meet regional leaders. This supported her vision to hold workshops in Bellevue, Seattle, and Everett.
The initial workshops were well-attended and met Civic Genius’s goal of facilitating community discussion and encouraging citizen action through the deliberative democracy model. The grant also enabled Civic Genius to hold a virtual “Deliberative Democracy Deep Dive” to educate people so they can then advocate to bring tools such as It’s Your America into more communities.
“Washington State is a really excellent place to pilot this kind of work. The political culture is pretty collaborative,” Jillian said. “People are interested in these innovations and open to trying new things.”
Civic Genius then received a second Opportunity Grant from the Foundation. This funding powered a first-of-its-kind deliberative town hall in two congressional districts with the goal of making these convenings more representative of a district’s population and more focused on problem-solving. Although a new approach, the town halls hold true to the values of Senator Jackson to seek out diverse views to inform good policy.
“I am obsessed with the relationship between constituents and elected officials,” Jillian said. “You only really hear from certain segments of your constituency. You don’t have a great sense of what others in the district need.”
From here, Civic Genius will continue to invite funders, community officials, and individuals to engage in purposeful conversations and develop actionable recommendations in “citizen assemblies.” This interactive model—which Snohomish County will now be piloting—can be customized and scaled to all kinds of communities.
The Foundation is always searching for synergies between our policy areas, our partners, and our Fellows. In this case, we clearly saw where we could support a Fellow that was working in this strategic area. It’s amazing what we can do even with modest amounts of funding.
Funding is important, but so are connections and introductions to key players.
Jillian Youngblood
