Mapping Civic Measurement

The Institute for Citizens & Scholars brings together diverse people, across traditional divides, to build a constitutional democracy that works for all. In 2019, Citizens & Scholars released the whitepaper From Civic Education to a Civic Learning Ecosystem: A Landscape Analysis and Case for Collaboration, which noted a surprising consensus among practitioners in the civic education space that the current approach to developing effective citizens needed to be updated for the 21st century. 

Building on that work, Citizens & Scholars has launched a multi-year initiative on Civic Measurement. The first major milestone is a new report, Mapping Civic Measurement: How are we assessing readiness and opportunities for an engaged citizenry?  

Mapping Civic Measurement is a comprehensive civic measurement landscape review and a first-of-its-kind framework for mapping civic readiness and opportunities.  

The report features a collection of measurement tools, rubrics, and more than 200 resources in use by practitioners across education, business, philanthropy, community institutions, media, government, and civil society. You’ll come away from the report with new ways to think about measuring civic learning impact, new research to inform your work, and new opportunities to connect with other practitioners. 

Now is the time to come together to cultivate people as informed, engaged, and hopeful citizens. Creating a common knowledge base and practices to measure civic readiness and opportunities will enable us to chart the course to a healthy and robust democracy that works for all. 

The Challenge

The diverse and active citizen development space lacks common knowledge base and practices to measure civic readiness and civic opportunities

The Research

Citizens & Scholars interviewed 75 experts and analyzed over 200 tools, reports, and resources across the civic space

The Impact

A shared path forward for cultivating an engaged citizenry and stronger democracy

The team at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars and I see a tremendous opportunity to collaborate across many traditional lines of division, build efficiencies, and galvanize resources to answer a question we all seem to have on our minds: how do we know if we are making progress as a democracy?

Rajiv Vinnakota
Rajiv Vinnakota

A Shared Path Forward

Whatever your role—educator, scholar, practitioner, researcher, policymaker, leader—this report will leave you with new ways to think about measuring civic capacities, new tools and resources to inform your work, new connections and ideas, and renewed energy for building a more inclusive, healthy, and robust democracy that works for all. 

Explore the report through this video of the launch event.

Mapping Civic Measurement provides a new framework for mapping civic readiness and opportunities, and a set of recommendations to develop field-wide measures. This is truly an effort to galvanize people across education, government, philanthropy, technology, and business to cultivate civic readiness across the country.

The report includes:  

  • A framework for how civic readiness and civic opportunities are measured  
  • More than 200 tools and resources organized by the civic dimensions they measure  
  • Insights from more than 75 experts across sectors, disciplines, and ideologies 

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