Civic prosperity describes the conditions that enable people and communities to translate civic learning and participation into economic security, social mobility, and shared well-being. It moves beyond narrow measures of engagement or workforce readiness to ask a more consequential question: how civic learning actually helps people and communities thrive.
Project Pericles advances civic prosperity by connecting higher education’s civic mission to outcomes that extend from the classroom into community life and beyond. This includes students’ ability to exercise voice, navigate institutions, collaborate across differences, and contribute to community problem-solving in ways that strengthen both democratic life and economic opportunity.
Public confidence in higher education has declined sharply over the past decade, with fewer than half of Americans now expressing strong trust in colleges and universities. At the same time, economic mobility has stagnated even as educational attainment has increased, particularly for students from low-income and marginalized communities. Civic participation remains highly stratified by income and education, reinforcing unequal access to political voice, public resources, and opportunity.
Despite significant investment in civic engagement, workforce development, and social mobility, these efforts are often funded, measured, and evaluated in isolation, and the field lacks shared ways to understand how these efforts intersect or compound over time. Meanwhile, colleges and universities face growing pressure to demonstrate their public value in a context of widening inequality and democratic strain.
Civic prosperity responds to this moment by offering a unifying frame. It asks whether civic learning equips students and communities to build opportunity and sustain democratic life over time, well beyond participation alone. It provides a lens for more aligned, effective investment across education, democracy, and community development.
Civic prosperity is visible in how students, faculty, and leaders learn, how institutions partner with communities, and how civic capacity is built over time at individual, institutional, and societal levels.
At Periclean institutions, faculty-designed courses partner students with local organizations to address community policy or planning challenges. Students graduate with both disciplinary knowledge and experience navigating public systems, working across sectors, and translating civic work into career-relevant skills.
Campuses support students in collaborating with municipalities, libraries, and community groups to improve voter access, public communication, and civic data use. These efforts strengthen local institutions while giving students hands-on experience in sustaining democratic processes.
Community-engaged learning initiatives focused on housing, public health, and education help students build networks, confidence, and civic identity. In many cases, these experiences directly shape post-graduate pathways into public service, nonprofit leadership, community-rooted entrepreneurship, and civic-mindedness across professions.
Long-term partnerships grounded in reciprocal learning enable institutions and communities to address complex challenges together over multiple years. Civic prosperity prioritizes continuity, trust, and shared ownership rather than one-off projects or short-term impact.
A central part of this work is a Civic Prosperity Index, a developing framework that brings together indicators of civic learning, agency, and participation alongside measures of economic and social mobility. The Index is designed as a capacity-building and field-building tool, not a ranking system, meant to help institutions, communities, and funders better understand where and how civic learning is creating durable public and economic value, where gaps remain, and where further investment or redesign is needed. It is meant to incentivize investments in civic endeavors at the individual and institutional levels and to help the field understand where civic learning is producing lasting public and economic value and where additional investment or redesign is needed.
Through this initiative, which builds on the notion of civic prosperity, Project Pericles aims to reach several institutions and tens of thousands of students, demonstrating how humanities-based civic learning cultivates the skills and imagination needed for democratic life.
Our February 2026 newsletter highlights an AAC&U Session: Toward Civic Prosperity: How College Presidents Are Reclaiming Higher Ed’s Public Promise, featuring Periclean Presidents Connie Book (Elon University), Ron Cole (Allegheny College), Marc Conner (Skidmore College), and Sue Rivera (Macalester College). The session surfaced both possibilities and constraints and underscored a clear takeaway: civic prosperity is a leadership and design challenge that requires intentional strategy, institutional alignment, and sustained community relationships.
Published for Braver Angels Civic Scholars Council’s call for papers on courageous citizenship at America’s 250th anniversary, this essay argues that democratic renewal depends on civic prosperity: the identity, trust, and capacity that let ordinary people bear the everyday costs of citizenship. Drawing on Periclean campus examples, from a welding classroom to a community college voter registration drive, Pericles Executive Director Sanda Balaban makes the case for a framework to assess whether colleges are building the conditions that make courageous citizenship widespread rather than exceptional.
We welcome conversation and potential collaboration around the ideas and frameworks shaping this work.
Contact Executive Director Sanda Balaban at sanda@projectpericles.org or by filling out this form.
