What If It’s Simpler Than You Think?

By Sharon McMahon

I am a person who has read the Minnesota state constitution for fun. I realize this makes me unusual. But when I ask most people what they could do this week to strengthen American democracy, they either go big — vote, protest, run for office — or they go nowhere, because nothing feels like enough. I want to offer a third option. Civic engagement is not a personality type. It is a set of habits. And most of them are far simpler than you think.

Here is the truth that I wish someone had told me earlier: the most powerful forms of civic participation in America are not the ones you see on television. They are quiet, local, and unglamorous. They happen in school board meetings and city council chambers and county commissioner offices — places where decisions are made about your drinking water, your children’s curriculum, your property taxes, and your local roads. These are the rooms where policy actually becomes your life, and most of them are nearly empty.

So if you have ever wondered where to start, let me offer a few suggestions. None of them require you to run for office, join a political party, or get into an argument at Thanksgiving.

1. Find out who represents you. I do not mean the president. I mean your state legislators, your city council members, your school board officials. These are the people making the decisions that most directly shape your daily experience, and the vast majority of Americans cannot name a single one. It takes five minutes. Write the names down. This is not a small thing. You cannot hold power accountable if you do not know who holds it.

 

2. Show up to one local government meeting. Just one. You do not have to speak. You do not have to have an opinion on every agenda item. Just go, sit down, and watch how decisions get made in your community. I promise you will leave knowing more about how your town actually works than you learned in a decade of watching national news. Many of these meetings are now livestreamed, so you can attend from your couch if that feels more manageable. The point is to start paying attention to the level of government where your attention actually makes a difference.

 

3. Contact an elected official about something you care about. Call their office. Write an email. Send a letter. This might feel pointless, but I can tell you from conversations with dozens of legislative staffers that it is anything but. Constituent contacts are tracked and tallied. When a state legislator receives fifty phone calls about the same issue in a single week, it changes the calculation.

 

4. Support your local newspaper. This one surprises people, but the collapse of local journalism is one of the most urgent civic crises in America. When a community loses its local paper, research shows that voter turnout drops, municipal borrowing costs rise, government corruption increases, and fewer people run for office. Local journalists are the ones who sit through those city council meetings and tell you what happened. When they disappear, nobody is watching. A subscription costs less than most streaming services, and it might be the single most impactful civic investment you can make.

 

5. This is the one I feel most strongly about — join something. Not a political party. A civic organization. A neighborhood association. A library board. A volunteer fire department. A tutoring program. A community garden committee. The research on this is remarkably clear: people who participate in civic life through organizations are dramatically more likely to stay engaged over time than those who try to go it alone. We are social creatures. We sustain our commitments through community. Find a room full of people who care about something you care about, and walk into it.

I know what some of you are thinking. This all sounds fine, but does it actually matter? I understand the skepticism. We have been conditioned to believe that the only political actions that count are the big ones — the presidential elections, the Supreme Court decisions, the viral moments. But that framing is exactly what has left so many Americans feeling powerless. If the only thing that matters is the thing you have the least control over, of course you feel helpless.

The antidote is to redirect your energy toward the places where you have the most influence. Your school board. Your city council. Your county. Your neighborhood. These are the arenas where a single person showing up can genuinely change the outcome — not in theory, but in practice. I have watched it happen. A parent who attends school board meetings for six months and then runs for a seat. A resident who calls the city about a dangerous intersection until the city finally fixes it. A neighbor who organizes a voter registration drive at her church and gets forty new people to the polls. None of these people were professional activists. They were just citizens who decided to participate. (And by the way, a person who represents me in my state legislature has twice been elected by fewer than 50 votes.)

Democracy is not something that happens to you. It is something you do. And you do not need to do all of it. You just need to do something — consistently, locally, and without waiting for permission. The most important civic acts in this country have always belonged to ordinary people who simply refused to be bystanders, and it’s something available to each one of us, starting today.

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Sharon McMahon is a former government and law teacher turned nationally recognized civic educator. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Small and the Mighty, and the creator of the award-winning The Preamble podcast and digital magazine. Named to Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list, Sharon has built one of the largest online communities dedicated to nonpartisan civic literacy, earning recognition for her fact-based, historically grounded approach to explaining American democracy.