By Mary Carr Lee, Mayors Innovation Project
Between the demands of daily life and the friction of navigating bureaucracy, engaging with local government can feel less like empowerment and more like a burden. This friction fuels a cycle of burnout, civic withdrawal, and growing distrust. True civic health—where community members actively participate and governments genuinely respond—has a massive, documented impact. Stronger civic engagement directly correlates with improved public safety, better physical and mental health outcomes, crisis response, and stronger educational systems. But how do we unlock these benefits when community bandwidth is at an all-time low? Panelists from around the country came together in Madison, WI at the Mayors Innovation Project Summer Meeting to talk about building and sustaining civic trust.
Beaverton, OR Mayor Lacey Beaty, who moderated the panel, set the tone immediately, and didn’t sugarcoat the pressure facing local governments. “The expectation of mayors and city staff right now to respond to everything—and to do it fast—is leading to extreme burnout,” she said. But she also pointed to a deeper risk: cities becoming “think tanks instead of do tanks.”
Beaty’s example came from the Portland metro region’s homelessness response, where cities must convince voters to renew funding. “We need to demonstrate that the government can work,” she said. “If cities want to deliver results, they must share power.” That demonstration requires more than messaging—it requires shared metrics, regional accountability, and community-centered storytelling about what progress looks like. Her framing set up the rest of the panel beautifully: if cities want to deliver results, they must share power.
Matt Leighninger, Vice President of the National Civic League, zoomed out to the systems that shape civic life. He reminded attendees that most public engagement structures were built for a different era. “Our public meetings do not allow for any of the things that make people feel heard,” he said. “The two-minute microphone process is a 70-year-old system built for transparency, not participation.” If cities want better outcomes, they need better systems.
He said civic health is a measurable condition tied to physical health, safety, economic mobility, and community resilience. “When civic health is higher,” he noted, “people are physically healthier. Their neighborhoods are safer. They do better economically.”
If Leighninger explained why power-sharing matters, Mayor Jamie Kinder of Meadville, PA showed what it looks like in practice. Her governing philosophy is simple: the people who have the problem should have the power to solve it.
Mayor Kinder walked attendees through community-led policies shaped directly by residents, from a renter-driven anti-retaliation ordinance to climate action planning, but her most powerful example was Meadville’s creation of a public ambulance service in just 90 days. “Somebody waited 19 minutes for an ambulance in a 4.4-square-mile city,” she said. “You could have walked them there faster.” Residents demanded change. The city responded by cross-training firefighters as EMTs, buying a pre-owned ambulance out of state, and building a service that now outperforms private providers. “Turns out, our ambulance service is one of the best,” Mayor Kinder said. “This year the state recognized us as the number one ambulance service in Pennsylvania.” The results didn’t stop there: Meadville has balanced its budget three years in a row, for the first time in city history, thanks in part to that new service.
Dr. Jabraan Pasha, Chief Health Officer of Tulsa, OK applied civic health to public health. His years in medicine led him to a simple but transformative insight: “Why are certain communities less healthy than others? It’s not a healthcare issue. It’s a neighborhood issue.” That realization brought him into the mayor’s office, where he now leads Tulsa’s Office of Health and Wellbeing—a structure designed to break down silos and coordinate health efforts across the city. “Every single thing we do out of our office is going to be in collaboration with someone else,” he said. And he meant it. The Mayor’s Health Coalition now includes 50 organizations, including market competitors, working together on shared priorities.
One of the Tulsa coalition’s most important components is its community engagement working group, led by a young breast cancer survivor turned advocate. “She is playing a pivotal role in the development of all that is coming out of our office,” Pasha said. “The priorities that emerged—maternal health, mental health, homelessness prevention—came directly from community voices.” And the results are visible: Tulsa now has three core working groups with measurable goals, cross-system collaboration that didn’t exist before, and was unveiled at the city’s most well-attended press conference ever, signaling broad stakeholder buy-in.
The final speakers, Nicole Storey of Charlotte and Christy Kumar of Madison, connected the dots between individual initiatives and citywide systems.
Nicole Storey leads Charlotte NC’s community-centered engagement practice, developing tools and practices that help governments design better public experiences. Charlotte’s Standard Operating Procedures for Engagement (SOP-E) provide a systematic, equity-centered framework for planning, evaluating, and right-sizing public participation on issues where public input can change outcomes. “Better public experiences are designed before they begin,” says Storey. “By applying consistent design principles across departments, governments demonstrate their commitment to the people they serve—earning trust one experience at a time.”
For meaningful public participation, Storey says the first step is knowing your stakeholders. “Intentional stakeholder analysis helps ensure the people most affected are represented in the process, informs how success is measured, and enables project teams to remove participation barriers by design.” Charlotte tracks engagement outcomes—who participated, what changed, and how resident input shaped final decisions—and reports back to the community how their input made an impact.
Kristy Kumar leads Madison’s equity and social justice work, ensuring that power-sharing is embedded in language access, disability rights, racial equity, and citywide inclusion. Her work underscores a key point: community-driven governance must be structural, not episodic. “Equity is a governance system, not a program. My role is to ensure Madison’s equity framework is built into citywide systems, not siloed initiatives,” said Kumar. Madison’s Community Connector program has Spanish, Hmong, and Chinese speaking employees who serve as community connectors who work directly with residents and with staff across all city departments. Kumar stressed that Community Connectors are not language translators for department staff or communications – their role is to share city information through culturally relevant, trusted communications channels. They listen to community experiences, ideas and barriers; and to connect community feedback to city departments in ways that can shape and improve outcomes.
Two concrete ways the city has deployed Connectors? First, increasing applications from non-English speaking childcare providers by sharing information about the City’s process on a Spanish radio show. Second, integrating Connectors into the City’s Emergency Services planning. “People with disabilities and people with access needs are disproportionately negatively affected in crisis situations because they don’t have access to the information that they need,” said Kumar. “You need to have a conversation with your emergency comms team, where you build out the language access infrastructure. So now our comms team includes our connectors—they work together.”
The final take-home message from the panel was unmistakable: cities that share power with residents—structurally, intentionally, and visibly—are delivering better policy, stronger trust, and measurable results. This year’s panel didn’t just describe community-driven governance—it showed what it looks and feels like, how it works, and why it delivers.
To access the briefing book and slide presentations from this panel, please visit our Summer 2026 Meeting webpage.