Utah State University's Environmental Dispute Resolution (EDR) Program, in partnership with the USU School of Social Sciences and Heravi Peace Institute, is offering its 2026 Collaboration Certificate Course, a seven-session online training in the art and science of collaborative problem-solving and conflict resolution. Led by EDR Director Danya Rumore and Associate Director Emily Gaines-Crockett, the course combines lectures, case studies, peer sharing, and simulation exercises to build practical skills in convening, facilitating, and sustaining multi-party collaborative processes. Participants gain techniques for identifying when a situation is ready for collaboration and for leading stakeholders through conflict toward shared solutions, with graduates invited into an ongoing Collaborative Leadership Network. For dialogue and deliberation practitioners, the course offers a rigorous, hands-on path to strengthening the facilitation and consensus-building capacities at the heart of NCDD's mission.

The Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University recently facilitated a deliberative process with the City of New Westminster's Community Advisory Assembly, Canada's first ongoing deliberative mini-public tasked with advising municipal staff and Council. Working with 36 randomly selected members chosen to reflect the city's demographics, the Centre guided the Assembly through a structured learning-and-deliberation model to develop recommendations for New Westminster's first Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Plan. The process paired technical climate information from City staff with residents' lived experience, showing how facilitated dialogue can turn a complex, policy-heavy subject into actionable community guidance. By demonstrating that a demographically representative body can meaningfully shape climate policy, this work offers a replicable model for practitioners seeking to deepen public participation and strengthen deliberative democracy at the local level.

Montevallo Main Street, in partnership with the David Mathews Center for Civic Life and Keys to the City Community Coaching, recently completed a series of four "What's Next, Montevallo?" community conversations that brought together roughly 50 residents to discuss the city's future. Rather than starting from problems, facilitators asked participants to first identify what they value about their community, then guided the discussion toward shared priorities around downtown revitalization, housing diversity, and walkability. The initiative is already shaping concrete next steps, including a housing study and an upcoming open house to share findings and gather further input. This effort illustrates how structured, well-facilitated dialogue can move a community from conversation to actionable planning, offering a practical model for NCDD's network of practitioners working to strengthen local civic participation and deliberative practice.

New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani signed an Executive Order on January 2, 2026, establishing the Mayor's Office of Mass Engagement — a new City Hall office designed to fundamentally transform how New Yorkers participate in city government by reaching communities historically excluded from policymaking, creating transparent feedback loops between residents and decision-makers, and coordinating the city's existing civic engagement infrastructure under a unified strategy. Led by Commissioner Tascha Van Auken, a veteran grassroots organizer whose field operation on the Mamdani campaign mobilized over 100,000 volunteers and generated the highest mayoral election turnout since 1969, the office represents one of the most significant formal governmental commitments to mass civic participation by a major American city in recent memory. The announcement directly advances NCDD's mission by demonstrating that participatory democracy and inclusive community engagement are being embraced not just by civil society but by government institutions as essential functions of democratic governance.

The National Civic League's 2026 All-America City Award Event, taking place June 26–28 at the Grand Hyatt Denver, brings together twenty finalist communities to present their civic health and trust-building efforts under the theme "America at 250: Strengthening Civic Health and Building Trust." The event features jury presentations by finalist communities, keynote addresses from philanthropy, government, and nonprofit leaders, peer learning workshops, and a new It's Your America Workshop designed to deepen civic practice. Individual registration is open at $150 per person, providing full access to all programming, receptions, and the awards ceremony. This event offers NCDD members and civic practitioners a timely opportunity to witness and connect with community-level democratic engagement at a pivotal moment in American civic life.

The Trust for Civic Life has launched Digital Civic Experiments, a pilot grantmaking portfolio supporting eight organizations that use digital tools to strengthen community connection, increase civic participation, and drive meaningful offline engagement among underserved and place-based communities nationwide. Grantees range from Entidad, which builds documentation tools for farmworkers, to Front Porch Forum, a Vermont-wide neighborhood network that consistently moves online interactions into real-world civic life, to the Relational Tech Project, which builds hyper-local tools collaboratively with and for approximately one hundred neighbors at a time. Informed by the Trust's own community research, the portfolio reflects a community-first philosophy that treats trust, local design, and offline impact as core criteria for what makes digital civic technology worth funding. For NCDD members navigating the intersection of technology and civic engagement, this portfolio offers both inspiration and a useful framework for distinguishing digital tools that genuinely serve dialogue and deliberation from those that merely replicate its surface features.

New Profit, a venture philanthropy organization that has invested over $350 million in social entrepreneurs since 1998, has launched Connected Futures, a new Catalyze cohort offering $100,000 unrestricted grants and a year of structured support to organizations that help people bridge active divides and work together toward collective goals. The cohort targets organizations whose core programming builds the skills, relationships, and structures needed for productive dialogue, civic participation, and collaborative problem-solving across differences in background, belief, or identity. Discovery Forms are open through May 26, 2026, for U.S.-based nonprofits with annual expenses between $250,000 and $2 million and at least two years of programmatic operation. Connected Futures represents a direct and significant funding opportunity for NCDD members whose work strengthens the relational and structural conditions that make dialogue, deliberation, and democratic participation possible.

Brendan Halloran, an independent consultant specializing in strategy and learning for democracy organizations, and Suvarna Hulawale, Senior Director of Strategy and Learning at FairVote, have co-authored a discussion paper calling on the pro-democracy field to significantly strengthen how it develops strategy, measures impact, and learns collectively in the face of ongoing democratic backsliding. Their paper argues that many democracy organizations rely on vague Theories of Change and narrow output metrics that fail to capture whether their work is actually shifting the systemic conditions that produce democratic decline. The authors offer concrete frameworks — including evaluative thinking, systems change models, and participatory Theory of Change development — as practical tools organizations can adopt individually and in coordination with peers and funders. The paper speaks directly to NCDD's mission by urging the broader civic field to treat collaborative learning and adaptive strategy not as organizational luxuries, but as essential infrastructure for sustaining democracy.

​National Civic League is partnering with Local Policy Lab and Spread the Vote to expand its democracy work, alongside programs like Civic Genius and the Center for Democracy Innovation. Local Policy Lab contributes a model for embedding resident voice into city governance as durable civic infrastructure, while Spread the Vote strengthens voter access and participation—together creating a continuum from ballot access to sustained civic engagement. This integration positions the League to scale inclusive, locally driven democracy solutions nationwide, advancing trust, equity, and institutionalized community participation.

The National Civic League has launched CyberSim and Take9—a new initiative with Craig Newmark Philanthropies and Aspen Digital to strengthen civic digital resilience. Using immersive cybersecurity simulations adapted from the National Democratic Institute’s role-playing models, the program helps local governments and civic leaders understand cascading impacts, clarify roles, and build cross-sector coordination. With 44% of officials facing daily cyberattacks, breach costs averaging $6.53 million, and federal funding shrinking, communities increasingly shoulder the security burden themselves. The 2026 rollout includes in-person simulations, train-the-trainer expansion, and conference programming. By linking technical cybersecurity to public trust and democratic participation, this work advances NCDD’s mission and underscores how digital resilience is now essential civic infrastructure.