Real Conversations, That You Need To Hear
We’re here to make sure you have the information you need to understand the major issues facing us as a country,
What We DoCivic Forum brings credentialed, nonpartisan experts directly into the communities that national media and national politics routinely skip over. We host live, public conversations on the issues that actually shape people's lives — wages, housing, healthcare, energy, the economy — and we ask the questions that don't get asked when the cameras are pointed the other way.
We're not here to tell you what to think, or which party has it right. We're to make sure the people with power don't get a free pass just because no one in your town was in a position to ask.
The Gap We’re Closing
What's changed in the last 40 years?
Wages have stagnated, jobs have disappeared as the economy has shifted, and local newsrooms have closed by the hundreds — hitting hardest in the towns and small cities the national conversation rarely visits.
How big is the gap?
172 media markets sit outside the country's top 25 — home to 62% of U.S. voters.
Zero scaled, nonpartisan civic institutions have been built to serve them.
Why does it matter?
Civic knowledge shouldn't be rationed by zip code.
How We Think About It
We don't measure ourselves by likes or follower counts. Attention that doesn't turn into something durable evaporates as fast as it arrived.
So our work follows a simple discipline:
Say something worth hearing, consistently enough that people know where to find it.
Message
Build the local infrastructure — venues, moderators, partners, volunteers — before we need it.
Organize
Turn an audience into participants: a follow-up conversation, a volunteer shift, a local commitment.
Mobilize
Act
Do the unglamorous, continuous work. Civic capacity gets built one action at a time, not one viral moment.
Where We Stand
Civic Forum isn't red or blue. We're not interested in relitigating Party A versus Party B. We're interested in new ideas, new voices, and the questions that don't get asked enough. The ones that hold power to account no matter who's holding it. When we come to your town, we're not telling you what to think.
We're giving you better questions to ask, and we're not letting anyone off the hook for the answers.
Why Now
The vocabulary that shapes what's politically possible — on labor, on housing, on healthcare, on how the economy actually works for people outside a handful of zip codes — doesn't get built in national TV studios.
It gets built in libraries and high school auditoriums and county fairgrounds, years before anyone's watching.
That's where we start.
Next Events:
Columbia, South Carolina
New York, New York
Manchester, New Hampshire
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Who’s Behind It
Civic Forum was founded by Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project and host of The Home Front podcast, out of a simple observation: the people best equipped to explain the forces shaping American life almost never talk directly to the Americans living through them. Civic Forum closes that distance, one city at a time.