Rich Harwood

Earlier this year, Escambia County, Fla., received national attention for banning more than 1,600 books, the most by any single county in the entire country. If you’ve been following book-banning efforts, many titles on the list won’t surprise you. But these might: multiple editions of the dictionary, various encyclopedias, and “The Guinness Book of World Records.”

Meanwhile, less than half of Escambia County third-graders are proficient in reading and multiple elementary schools in the area are in danger of state takeover due to persistent low-performance. Let me be clear: I believe youth success is not simply a school issue, but the responsibility of an entire community.

Saying we want our youth to succeed is easy. Ensuring we focus on what really matters so that they do is proving increasingly difficult. And not just in Escambia County. Culture wars over education are spreading all across California and other states as well.

Now, there are valid discussions to be had over the content we put in front of kids. Communities need to address such issues. But there’s a growing trend in our country today of too many communities getting distracted by an array of culture-war issues — typically stoked by a small minority — that divide people, diminish hope, and stymy wider progress.

So many community leaders tell me they don’t know how to respond effectively to these culture wars. I often see groups and organizations respond to the loudest voices by seeking to match them. They create their own group to oppose and fight existing ones; they raise money to mobilize people; they even weaponize their own agendas. As if raising the temperature could somehow quench the flames. The other tendency is for people to retreat entirely, ceding the public square to growing divisive forces. The result is that the community is held hostage, unable to move forward.

When I took my civic campaign — “Enough. Time to Build” — to Pensacola, the seat of Escambia County, people there, like people across the nation, told me they were exhausted by the culture wars. They were frustrated by a lack of progress on education and other vital community issues. They felt stuck and couldn’t see an alternative path forward.

My experience working to transform communities for over three decades proves that there is a better path that can inoculate communities against the culture wars. The way forward is for communities to temporarily set aside culture war issues and commit to coming back to them once their community has forged a new civic path.

What does this civic path look like? It starts with determining what we can agree on regarding issues that really matter to people. This means focusing not on “problems” or utopian visions but rather people’s shared aspirations. Then — and this is where I think too many civic initiatives also fall short these days — we must get in motion to take shared action on those issues. Action is key. We must build together. More talk isn’t going to get us where we need to go. Only by building together can we restore our belief that we can get things done and get on a more hopeful path.

Let’s be clear: Building together doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. It also doesn’t mean we have to like each other. But it does mean we must — amid our real differences — find where we can agree and get in motion on things that make a real difference in people’s lives. Starting small is key. Starting too big is a recipe for failure. The trick is to grow and spread our efforts over time, provide proof that positive change is possible, and create increasing momentum.

When we forge this civic path, I find there is greater energy in a community to move forward, to avoid distractions and even to realize that the issues we so often get stuck on are no longer of such great importance. But beware: We cannot simply sweep aside people’s persistent “culture war” concerns. Our task is to place them in a larger context and tackle them when more civic confidence and trust exists.

When I presented this alternative to a roundtable of leaders in Pensacola, they experienced a new sense of possibility. I wasn’t telling them this approach would solve their educational challenges overnight. But I was telling them real, tangible progress could be made. That by embracing a new path, they could inoculate themselves from the culture wars and start to tackle the real issues that were holding them back.

This is how we can get the future of our communities back on the agenda.

Rich Harwood is president and founder of The Harwood Institute. This is the latest entry in his series based on the “Enough. Time to Build” campaign, which calls on community leaders and active citizens to step forward and build together.