The National Institute for Civil Discourse is preparing for America Talks, taking place June 12 and 13.
As Katie Couric shares in this brief video, NICD is helping Americans to listen with empathy and share different points of view with civility as we work together to bridge divides and recognize what we have in common.
Happy #ListenFirst Friday!
California sends mail-in ballots to all registered voters unless they opt out.
Voting rights experts are praising a U.S. Supreme Court decision Monday, which upheld a state’s right to set a grace period for counting mail-in ballots arriving after Election Day, as long as they were postmarked on time.
The challengers to Mississippi’s grace period argued accepting ballots after Election Day threatens election integrity. Supporters of the decision said the U.S. Constitution delegates election administration to the states.
Bernadette Reyes, senior staff attorney for the UCLA Voting Rights Project, said the decision means California can continue its current practice of counting ballots arriving within seven days.
“What they're saying is you cast your vote when you fill out your ballot, and as long as they're postmarked by Election Day, that means that they fulfilled their duty under the Constitution,” Reyes explained.
About 30 states currently offer some sort of grace period for ballots to arrive. President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring states to turn over their voter lists to the federal government. The order instructed the U.S. Postal Service not to process mail-in ballots for people in states refusing to comply. Last week, a judge put the order on hold. Reyes pointed out mail-in ballots are especially useful for Americans living overseas or people with disabilities making it difficult to vote in person.
“Having that big interference with this really important and accessible method of voting would do tremendous damage for voter turnout,” she observed.
President Trump called the decision a “tremendous loss” and urged Congress to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would restrict voting in the name of fighting election fraud.
Voting rights groups hail SCOTUS decision on ballot grace period. The decision was first published by Public News Service and republished with permission.
Suzanne Potter is a Producer with PNS.
That August morning was particularly special. The heat had already settled in, the kind that throws long shadows across the fields and makes the clouds look soft and deceptive — because in August, you never know when those gentle shapes will rise into tall thunderheads and drop a hard, sudden rain. Eleanor McLaughlin loved August. By then, the fields had a rhythm again. Hay and straw were being baled, and the strong men of Manhattan Township moved with the easy cadence of people who had done this work their whole lives. It was hot work, but it was good work, and it was done with good people.
Soon, threshing would begin, when farm families stopped being individual households and became something closer to cooperatives — groups of five, ten, twenty-five working as one. Eleanor loved bringing food and cold drink to steady the men as they worked. It made her feel part of something larger than herself, something she had longed for since childhood.
Her mother, Isabelle Delaney, died when she was four. Eleanor remembered running down the back alley screaming, the world suddenly too big and too empty. Her father, Charles, did everything he could to hold the family together while working long shifts in the steel mills. He was a sturdy, reliable, moral man, but he was now a single father with too many hours away from home.
Often, he sent the children out to Manhattan, where they were divided among relatives’ farms. They were shipped around a lot. Eleanor was most often sent to the third Delaney clan — the one with sixteen children. This was the branch of the family her mother belonged to — the sprawling Delaney household of sixteen. She never felt alone there. She learned early how family networks worked, how cousins and aunts and uncles formed a web that held you even when life didn’t.
Communities are often held together by people who carry private wounds. Their strength comes from what they survived, not from what they avoided. Angela responded to Eleanor for that reason. They shared something unspoken — the early loss of a parent, the kind of wound that never fully closes. Angela and Isabelle Delaney had been close, and that connection carried forward into her bond with Eleanor.
On that August mid-morning, she gathered the day’s provisions and headed out to the fields, and it was there, among the workers, that she noticed Ray “Red” Fitzgerald differently for the first time. They would see each other often over the next eight years. They instinctively understood the terrain. Red thought she was beautiful with her bobbed red hair. That spark propelled them into a lifelong partnership that produced four children — of which I am one.
They married in the middle time — 1938 — when America was just crawling out of the Great Depression and beginning to gear itself toward war. Eleanor had known real hardship; a steelworker’s pay didn’t stretch far, and she remembered cupboards that felt bare. Red had known none of that. As the son of Angela and James Fitzgerald, he had grown up secure. But he was aware of his luck, and he carried a quiet instinct for generosity, always making sure others had something to share.
The Ring philosophy — endure, find common ground, build in good times and bad, show up for the community — paid off. But luck favors those who prepare, and the Rings were proof. The Great Depression had been, for them, something held at arm’s length.
World War II changed everything. Every boy in Manhattan became conscriptable. Eleanor’s brother Joe served, as did Red’s brothers Dick and Donnie. Farmers were considered essential to the war effort, but everyone felt the weight of the moment. Manhattan was no different.
After they married, Red and Eleanor moved into the old Ring homestead, already showing its age. They renovated it over the decades. Red rebuilt the foundations, rebuilt the barn, added a cattle barn extension, and tended twenty head of cattle and a couple of horses. He was an entrepreneur in the old rural sense of the word — not a man chasing capital, but a man who couldn’t stop looking for better ways to do the work in front of him. He even built the township’s first weed-killer apparatus, a small invention that got mentioned in the Joliet Herald and captured his spirit: practical, inventive, always improving the work.
Eleanor brought a different kind of strength into the marriage. She had known instability, scarcity, and the ache of early loss. She had been shipped from household to household as a child, learning how extended families worked, how cousins and aunts and uncles formed a web of support. That early training made her the emotional center of the Fitzgerald home. She understood how to hold people together. She understood how to make a house feel like a place where others belonged.
Like many men of his generation, Red struggled with alcohol. It never erased his warmth or his work ethic, but it shaped the household atmosphere in ways we all felt. Eleanor’s steadiness was not effortless. She coped. She kept the rhythm of the home, held the family together, and found her own way through the harder stretches without ever making a show of it. The drinking was part of our family story, but so was her quiet resilience.
Together, they built a life that blended their two histories:
• Red’s steadiness and quiet prosperity
• Eleanor’s resilience and instinct for community
• the Ring philosophy of endurance and cooperation
• the Delaney capacity for large family networks and shared responsibility
Through it all, their civic nature never wavered. Red and Eleanor responded instinctively to their community, upheld their faith, and were generous with their time and attention. To them, this wasn’t virtue — it was simply what you did. They showed up for neighbors, for church, for the township, for anyone who needed a hand. Stepping back now, I see how clearly they carried forward the best of the Ring inheritance: the belief that ordinary people strengthen a community not through grand gestures, but through steady presence, quiet service, and a willingness to share the load.
Over the decades, Eleanor and Red witnessed tremendous change on nearly every front — assassinations, corruption, civil and political riots, the deindustrialization of the Great Lakes, and finally the shock of the World Trade Center attacks. They felt each of these moments together because their values were so closely aligned. Yet they never acted disappointed in the time they lived in. Their family unit was strong, their faith steady, and they kept the local rhythm on beat.
They stayed curious enough to drive to Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, walking through Lincoln Park to see for themselves what was happening. They listened to Abbie Hoffman, watched the SDS crowds, and moved through the tension without giving a thought to their own safety, even though their generation was considered part of the problem. They wanted to understand their country, not retreat from it.
Several decades later, in early retirement, they spent weeks at a time traveling through Europe. They loved being in different cultures, seeing sights they never imagined they would see, and they brought their family along whenever they could. Their world expanded even as the country around them grew more divided and less sure-footed.
They were ordinary people who did extraordinary things — and they did them consistently.
Patrick Fitzgerald contributes to The Fulcrum, a nonpartisan publication dedicated to strengthening democracy through informed civic engagement and diverse perspectives. Raised in the Midwest and shaped by farm communities, he later spent 29 years in San Francisco, where the city’s civic diversity and neighborhood culture influences his writing. He focuses on rebuilding trust in one another and environmental stewardship. He now lives in Buffalo, New York, where he continues to write essays grounded in personal experience.
Alex Edgar has heard the line more times than he can count: Gen Z is our hope. Gen Z will fix this. And every time, from panel stages to private conversations, he gives the same answer.
“No, no, no; you’re not getting out of this so easy,” he said. “We have to do this together.”
Young people, he argues, simply don’t hold power in American society in a way that lets them make the changes they’re constantly told to make. And a generation that has watched movement after movement — March for Our Lives, the climate strikes, Black Lives Matter — produce incremental wins that were later rolled back has drawn a hard conclusion: not just that they can’t make change from the outside, but that even inside the institutions, they wouldn’t be allowed to. “The onus is so on our existing leaders to reach out their hands toward our younger leaders,” he said.
Edgar, a member of the Democracy Architects Council fellowship from the Bridge Alliance Education Fund and Civics Unplugged, has spent his young career building the structures that make that handoff possible. As youth engagement manager at Made By Us, he co-founded Youth250, an effort to put young people at the center of America’s 250th anniversary; work that has reached millions, engaged thousands of organizations, and earned him a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for social impact. He is the first Gen Z board member of Points of Light, the youngest-ever appointee to the Census Bureau’s 2030 Advisory Committee, and a Simi Valley, Calif., native who spent his childhood begging his parents to let him quit Cub Scouts. He made Eagle Scout instead.
The through line, he says, was service; a father who taught community college for more than 40 years, a mother deeply involved in the PTA, volunteering “whether I liked it or not” every month of his childhood. The catalyst came in high school, when a mass shooting in the town next door pushed him into organizing, then March for Our Lives, then a citywide youth voter registration drive during the pandemic. At UC Berkeley, where he led campus voter engagement, he grew frustrated that civic engagement had been reduced to voting — so he co-created and taught an undergraduate course, Civic Engagement 101, at the Goldman School of Public Policy to show students everything else it could be.
That instinct for unlikely rooms recently produced one of his most unexpected bylines: a Fox News op-ed on young men, isolation, and service, co-authored with Neil Bush. Edgar knows the topic can read as a culture-war flashpoint, and he refuses to frame it as a zero-sum contest. “Young men and boys not doing well is bad for young women and girls,” he said, arguing the divide is “far more about class than it is gender.”
The 250th anniversary presents a similar trap, and Youth250 was built to walk between its two camps: American pessimism on one side, American exceptionalism on the other. Most Americans, Edgar says, live in between. When his team asked the hundreds of applicants to the Youth250 Bureau a deliberately open question — are you patriotic, why or why not? — the answers refused to sort by politics. The most striking pattern: first- and second-generation immigrants who said their family’s story was exactly why they were so patriotic.
Within the Democracy Architects Council, Edgar describes himself as the only fellow who has worked deep inside the formal democracy field, and he’s come away skeptical of its borders. “Even the fact that there is a democracy space is antithetical to the type of work that we want to be doing,” he said. The field’s weakness, in his telling, is that elite institutions often prize being perceived as experts over elevating the people most directly affected. The council, he believes, is a rare bet in the other direction: trusting young people with visioning, then connecting that vision to people with the resources to act on it.
Asked to finish the sentence “By 2035, American democracy will ___ if we do our jobs,” Edgar didn’t hesitate long: “actually be representative.”
And his ask of anyone reading this is characteristically intergenerational. If you’re young, have a real conversation with an older person you’re not related to, about who they are, not what they think politically. If you’re older, do the reverse. “We are so age-segregated as a country,” he said. “The lack of connection across difference... is one of the most powerful opportunities in our democracy that does not get tapped into.”
The Democracy Architects Council, presented by The Bridge Alliance Education Fund and Civics Unplugged, offers a paid, one-year fellowship for eight fellows ages 18 to 28, each selected for their work across a distinct sector of democratic life.
Kristina Becvar is the executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
As the United States approaches its 250th year, we are returning to a ritual as old as the republic itself: the work of taking stock — of measuring the country we have inherited against the country we were promised.
Some look at America today and see a nation in decline, divided by politics, frayed by distrust, unsettled by economic anxiety. Others see its enduring strengths — its genius for invention, its long habit of self-correction, its singular capacity to begin again. Both are describing the same country. For America has never been a finished thing. It has been, from the start, an argument we are still having with ourselves about who belongs.
That is the through-line of American history. Not the steady accumulation of wealth or power, but the steady widening of the circle — the slow, contested, sometimes painful expansion of who gets to participate in the life of the nation. Each generation has been handed that question in its own form, and each has been measured by its answer.
The founders staked everything on a proposition the world called naive: that ordinary people, governing themselves, could do better than kings. The generations that followed spent two centuries proving the proposition by enlarging it. Property requirements fell. Slavery was abolished at terrible cost. Women claimed the vote. And in our own near memory, a movement of ordinary citizens confronted the machinery of segregation and forced the country to honor, at last, the plain words of its founding creed. Time and again, Americans widened the circle of participation and, in doing so, renewed the republic itself.
Few carried that work more faithfully than John Lewis.
Lewis understood that democracy is not a spectator's faith. It is not something a citizen watches; it is something a citizen does. It asks for participation, for sacrifice, for the stubborn belief that the institutions we inherit can be made more just than we found them. He crossed a bridge in Selma knowing what waited on the other side, because he believed the country was capable of becoming what it claimed to be.
His generation expanded the circle of political participation. The task before ours may be to expand the circle of economic participation.
Political rights remain the foundation of everything — but a foundation is not a house. A democracy cannot stand indefinitely while large numbers of its citizens feel they have no stake in its prosperity. A citizen who comes to believe the economy has no place for him will not long
believe the republic has a place for him either. Where participation is promised in principle and denied in practice, faith erodes — first in the market, then in the government, finally in one another.
You can see the erosion across the country. In small towns where opportunity left before young people did. In neighborhoods where ambition runs into barriers that are invisible to anyone who has never had to climb them. In the lives of millions who work hard, raise families, follow the rules, and still cannot say with confidence that the future will offer their children more than it offered them.
We are accustomed to filing these under economics. They are something larger. They are questions about the republic itself — about whether the promise of equal citizenship reaches all the way down to the conditions of an ordinary life, or stops politely at the ballot box.
For the health of a republic has never rested on the right to vote alone. It has rested on whether citizens possess a genuine stake in the future — through ownership, through enterprise, through education, through the ability to build something that outlasts them.
History offers a pattern worth remembering. America's strongest democratic chapters have tended to arrive when the nation deliberately widened the gates of opportunity. The Homestead Act put land in the hands of people who had owned nothing. The GI Bill sent a generation to college and into homes of their own, and built the broadest middle class the world had ever seen. Each was imperfect, and each left people wrongly outside its reach. But each understood a truth we have half-forgotten: that prosperity broadly shared is not charity to the republic — it is the republic's lifeblood.
The question at 250 is what that expansion looks like in our time.
It will not be answered by a single party or a single law. It will require lowering the barriers that keep capable people from rising — the entrepreneur who cannot reach capital, the worker whose skill the system cannot see, the family one opportunity away from a different future. It will require us to recognize what every previous expansion understood: that economic exclusion and democratic decay are not separate diseases, but symptoms of the same one.
Most of all, it will require us to recover a fuller understanding of citizenship itself.
Citizenship is more than voting, though we should vote. It is more than debate, though free people must debate. Citizenship is the conviction that we share responsibility for the institutions we inherit and the opportunities we leave behind.
Every generation holds the country in trust for the next.
That belief has long been one of America's greatest strengths. It is why generations of citizens built schools they would never attend, roads they would never travel, and institutions whose full benefits they would never personally enjoy. They understood that democracy is not merely an arrangement among the living. It is a covenant between generations.
Two hundred and fifty years after its founding, the United States stands not at the end of its story but at the beginning of a new chapter. Two hundred and fifty years on, the next chapter of this country will not be written by its economic statistics or its newest technologies, remarkable as they are.
The question is whether we will continue the oldest work in our national life: the widening of the circle, the enlargement of the promise, the patient labor of making opportunity as broad as citizenship itself.
Every generation inherits an unfinished America.
The duty is not merely to preserve it.
The duty is to widen it.
If those who came before us expanded the promise of political inclusion, ours must expand the promise of economic inclusion. That may prove the defining democratic test of America's third century.
And it may be the truest way we can honor John Lewis — and the long line of Americans who left the circle of opportunity wider than they found it.
Mansur Kasali is a social entrepreneur and founder of EmpowerHer Capital, focused on expanding access to capital and economic opportunity. He is a 2026 recipient of the National Association of Secretaries of State's John Lewis Youth Leadership Award.
