In the November 2024 elections, 70% of U.S. elected offices went uncontested—a sobering sign of a democracy in crisis. Systemic barriers, disillusionment, and a lack of support leave entire communities underrepresented in decision-making, and current assaults on democratic norms and processes, including attempts at shameless gerrymandering, are only worsening our political crisis.  

We clearly need to reclaim our democracy, and that doesn’t just mean running for office. It means reshaping who gets to lead, how campaigns are supported, and what public service looks like. Civic participation takes many forms—from knocking on doors to crafting policy to simply showing up for someone who dares to lead. And when more people feel empowered to take part, our systems begin to shift.

At the 2025 Bioneers Conference, Civic (Re)Solve hosted a conversation with four visionary organizers and changemakers helping to reshape what civic engagement looks like in America today. Moderated by New Mexico House Majority Leader Reena Szczepanski, the panel featured:

• Caitlin Lewis, Executive Director of Work for America
• Anathea Chino, Co-founder and Executive Director of Advance Native Political Leadership
• Chloe Maxmin, Co-Founder of Dirtroad Organizing
• Elizabeth Rosen, Communications Director for Future Caucus

Together, they offered a grounded, honest look at how public service really works and why it matters more than ever.

Here are seven key takeaways from their powerful exchange:

1. Lived experience is a qualification, not a liability.

“Your lived experience is experience.” – Anathea Chino

For many, running for office feels out of reach—not because they lack leadership, but because they’ve been told their story disqualifies them. Anathea Chino, co-founder of Advance Native Political Leadership, is working to rewrite that script. She’s spent two decades building pathways for Indigenous candidates to lead as their full selves.

“I often say that my existence is an act of resistance—political resistance,” Chino told the audience.

That ethos is deeply personal. Chino didn’t grow up in a political dynasty or follow a traditional policy track. She studied fashion in college, spent summers with her grandmother at Acoma Pueblo, and navigated the culture shock of splitting her youth between rural New Mexico and College Station, Texas, where her mother was earning a PhD.

“I was mostly just assimilating,” she said. “And had a very complex relationship with my identity.”

It wasn’t until she found herself organizing Native voters in the 2004 presidential campaign—without resources, infrastructure, or funding—that she realized how invisibly and systemically Indigenous communities were being excluded from political systems.

Through her work with Advance and other organizations, Chino is helping Native leaders step into public service as their full selves. She teaches that political power doesn’t require a spotless résumé or policy degree. It requires vision, accountability, and a deep connection to community.

2. You don’t have to run for office to build power.

“Anyone who’s running for office needs people around them who can support them—even if it’s just making them food or driving them to doors.” – Chloe Maxmin

Campaigns are never solo endeavors. And in rural America, where infrastructure is thin and divisions can run deep, simply showing up for a candidate or a cause can be transformative.

Chloe Maxmin knows this better than most. She grew up in a small town in rural Maine, surrounded by people whose values didn’t always align with her own. But what she saw was not polarization—it was potential. In 2018, she ran for state House in a district with a 16-point Republican advantage and won. In 2020, she took on the highest-ranking Republican in the Maine Senate and won again. The reason? Relationship-building. Long conversations. Knocking on doors—not to debate, but to listen.

“Everything about engaging rural communities just looks different,” she told the audience. “You don’t have any volunteers, there’s no organizing infrastructure… You go up to a house, and if someone asks: Are you a Democrat? And you say yes, they shut the door in your face.”

Maxmin’s organizing philosophy centers on care: not just strategic outreach, but deep emotional and relational investment. Through Dirtroad Organizing, the group she co-founded with campaign manager and longtime friend Canyon Woodward, she now trains others to build campaigns rooted in trust, especially in conservative or “unwinnable” districts.

But her message isn’t just for candidates. It’s for everyone. Campaigns, she emphasized, don’t survive on charisma or policy platforms alone. They run on snacks, rides, hugs, childcare, encouragement, spreadsheets, and shared vision.

“They don’t always know what kind of help they need,” she added. “So just showing up and being supportive is so, so huge.”

If we want more representative leadership, Maxmin argued, we have to make it more possible. That means building a culture of support around candidates—especially first-timers, working-class folks, and those from historically excluded communities. You don’t have to run to be part of the movement. Sometimes, driving someone to knock on their last door of the night is the movement.

3. Civic engagement starts with listening.

“If you don’t know how to act on your passion, then chances are you don’t know enough about the issue yet.” – Elizabeth Rosen

Elizabeth Rosen has worn many hats: archaeologist-in-training, foreign policy advocate, ski instructor, pizza delivery driver—and now, communications director for Future Caucus, the largest nonpartisan network of Millennial and Gen Z legislators in the U.S. Her path into public service wasn’t a straight line, and that’s exactly what informs her approach to civic life: start where you are, and let curiosity guide you.

At the panel, Rosen pushed back against the idea that passion alone is enough to create change. While the desire to help is powerful, acting without understanding the full landscape can do more harm than good. Instead, she urged emerging changemakers to slow down, study the systems, and listen first.

“This is a really big, daunting question—how do I make change? Break it into smaller steps,” she advised. “Read up. Learn who the players are. Figure out what’s been tried before.”

Her advice applies across the board, whether you’re preparing to run for office or just trying to make a difference in your community. What city council district are you in? Who represents you at the state level? What organizations are already doing the work you care about, and how could you support them before starting something new?

That grounded, inquisitive approach is at the heart of Rosen’s work with young lawmakers across the country. Many of them arrive in office full of drive and vision but quickly realize how complex the political process can be. Future Caucus exists to provide connection, mentorship, and space for growth—tools that are just as important outside elected office as within it.

“There’s certainly no instant gratification in this work,” she said. “But information is very, very powerful.”

4. Reimagining public service means revaluing public servants.

“The hardest working people I’ve ever been in the trenches with are the folks in government.” – Caitlin Lewis

Caitlin Lewis has worked in just about every corner of the civic ecosystem, from New York City Hall to the USDA to the nonprofit sector. Today, she leads Work for America, a nonprofit working to make public service a more desirable, accessible, and stable career path. At the panel, she was clear: We can’t fix democracy without rebuilding the public workforce, and that starts with how we value the people who keep our government running.

Popular narratives about “bureaucracy” tend to flatten public servants into caricatures: slow, inefficient, faceless. Lewis sees something entirely different.

“I’ve worked in startups. Now I’m at a nonprofit. The hardest working people I’ve ever been in the trenches with are the folks in government,” she said. “They’re dynamic, quick-witted, fast-moving. And they’re doing billion-dollar work with zero discretionary capital.”

She recalled managing multi-billion-dollar infrastructure projects while working for the City of New York, where the only tools available were grit, soft power, and the ability to organize across departments. No flashy tech platforms, no corporate marketing budgets—just people solving problems with whatever they had.

And yet, these roles are undervalued in almost every way. From 911 operators to transit planners to health department staff, vacancies are widespread, burnout is high, and wages often don’t match the responsibility or impact. Her organization has tracked the fallout: unanswered emergency calls, failing water systems, and backlogged food assistance.

“When you don’t have the right people in the right roles in government,” she warned, “the basics start to fall apart.”

To change that, Work for America is working to shift public perception and public policy around government work. They’ve launched programs like Civic Match, which connects displaced federal workers to state and local roles, helping them stay in public service even after being pushed out by political shifts.

For Lewis, reimagining government isn’t just about electing new leaders. It’s about rebuilding a culture that respects, supports, and invests in the public servants who already show up every day for their communities.

5. Joy and belonging are forms of resistance.

“Joy is an act of resistance.” – Anathea Chino

In political work—especially for communities historically excluded from power—joy isn’t a luxury. It’s a survival strategy. Too often, civic life demands seriousness and stoicism. But as Chino reminded the audience, healing, laughter, and cultural connection are just as vital to movement-building as strategy and structure.

At a recent leadership training, she recalled the space being filled not just with hard conversations—but with deep, echoing laughter. That kind of joy, she said, isn’t incidental. It’s intentional. It builds resilience, fosters belonging, and affirms a different model of leadership—one rooted in relationship rather than hierarchy.

“There’s something so warm in creating circles of exquisite belonging,” she reflected, quoting poet and keynote speaker Joy Harjo.

Creating those circles isn’t stepping away from the work—it is the work. It’s how communities stay grounded in hope, even while confronting systems built to exhaust them.

6. Common ground can’t be forced, but it can be found.

“We don’t ask people to live in the middle. We just ask them to meet there once in a while.” – Elizabeth Rosen

Polarization may dominate headlines, but cooperation still happens, especially at the state level. Elizabeth Rosen shared how young lawmakers in Future Caucus are building unlikely coalitions by starting from connection, not division.

“If you set the tone for a relationship on something shared, something positive—if you give lawmakers the chance to see each other as whole people, not just adversaries—it lays the groundwork for something more productive.”

She shared a story that encapsulated that ethos. In Arkansas, two state representatives—Ashley Hudson, a Democrat, and Aaron Pilkington, a Republican—began talking at a Future Caucus event. While their views on abortion rights couldn’t be more different, they discovered they shared deep concerns about maternal health access in their state. Instead of focusing on their divisions, they found a narrow but meaningful overlap—and used it to co-sponsor legislation.

Together, they pushed forward policies like making remote prenatal visits eligible for Medicaid reimbursement, expanding support for pregnant students, and broadening access to postnatal care. It wasn’t flashy. It didn’t solve every problem. But it made life better for some people in their state, and that mattered.

“They’re not trying to make everyone happy,” Rosen said. “They’re trying to serve their constituents by finding the point on the Venn diagram where they agree.”

7. The next generation is stepping up.

“There’s this narrative of apathy among young people, and the numbers do not bear that story out.” – Elizabeth Rosen

For years, young people have been cast as politically disengaged—more likely to protest than to vote, more likely to criticize than to serve. But the panelists challenged that assumption head-on, offering not just anecdotes but hard data to prove that a generational shift in civic engagement is already underway.

Elizabeth Rosen pointed to Future Caucus’ recent On the Rise report, which tracked a 79% increase in Millennials running for Congress between 2020 and 2024. Beyond federal races, young people are stepping into leadership at the state and local level, where policy change often happens faster and closer to home.

These aren’t performative bids for influence. They’re responses to real-world urgency: the climate crisis, racial injustice, collapsing public infrastructure, and rising authoritarianism. For many Gen Z and Millennial leaders, public service isn’t just a career path, it’s a survival strategy.

Caitlin Lewis shared a similar trend in the civil service space. Through her organization’s Civic Match program, she’s helped connect thousands of displaced federal workers with roles in local and state government. One striking stat: nearly 88% of program participants said they were “very likely or almost certain” to stay in public service, despite having been pushed out during administration transitions.

“These are folks who were serving for the greater good—not for one politician or party,” Lewis said. “And they want to keep doing that work.”

Taken together, these trends reveal something powerful: young leaders are entering the arena. What they need isn’t convincing. They need support—mentorship, infrastructure, fair compensation, and space to lead in new ways.

The narrative isn’t apathy. It’s momentum.