Many of us already contribute to civic life. We pay taxes, vote, and volunteer in our communities. We often take these things for granted, or sometimes we gripe about them or scoff at their effectiveness, but these are the glue that holds our democracy together. We like to think of them as civic superpowers, and there are so many more.
Whatever you do in business, government, or at the grassroots to support your local community or the larger state or national communities, you are strutting your superpower stuff.
In case you’re ready to exercise – or maybe discover – another of your civic superpowers, we’ve tried to make it easy for you by gathering
together some of the many tools and resources from around the net and present them here for you to
- Dive deeper into research of one or more of the topics covered here
- Find interesting work as a volunteer or paid employee of one these organization
- Get inspired to do what previously you had only imagined
Know of another cool tool or resource? Tell us about it please! Sharing knowledge is one of the most fundamental civic superpowers in a democracy.
Make your voice heard in government
How to Contact Your Elected Officials. USA.gov shows you how to contact elected officials from the President on down to your state and local political representatives. It includes helpful links as wells.
GovTrack.us enables you to track and learn about legislation proposed in Congress. It can also connect you with your US senators and representative so you can tell them how you feel about the bills that interest you.
VOTE411 was launched by the League of Women Voters Education Fund (LWVEF) in October 2006. It is a one-stop-shop for election-related information, including responses from state and local candidates to specific questions.
Project VoteSmart provides free, factual, unbiased information on candidates and elected officials to all Americans. Especially helpful are voting records of office holders and their responses to specific issue-related questions.
Manage stress
Managing Election and Political Stress. This page can help you understand the sources of stress related to politics and elections, and offers useful advice and links for managing your stress. (Thank you to Samantha for the recommendation.)
What can you do to make sure your vote counts and your voice is heard? Or to make sure that we foster a voting process that makes it easy and encourages everyone who is eligible to cast their vote? The following tools and resources offer a variety of ways to do something – just find the one or two that suit you and click.
Get information and express your expectations
Contact your state’s Secretary of State to find out what they are doing to make the elections safe, secure, and well-run. In most states, the Secretary of State is responsible for managing elections.
Find your state election office with this helpful search tool from USA.gov.
Find your local election office using this look-up page on the US Federal Voting Assistance Program website.
Find your polling place. Vote.org provides links to each state’s (and DC’s) polling center locations.
Get personalized voting information on your registration and your state’s voting deadlines, how to register and vote absentee, check your registration status, find out what’s on your ballot, and more. Enter your address and VOTE411 will connect you with your state’s tools and resources.
See what you can do on the VoteSaveAmerica website – vote by mail, be a poll worker, or volunteer.
Make it safer and easier to vote
Be a nonpartisan poll monitor. Volunteer to be a nonpartisan poll monitor with Election Protection, a project led by Common Cause and coordinated by a coalition of more than 100 local, state, and national organizations.
Demand safer, more secure elections. Tell your governor to do what’s necessary to ensure safe, secure elections via this page provided by FairVote.
Vote by mail in your state. This tool from Represent Us will tell you whether you can vote by mail in your state and, if you can, how to get your ballot. If you are not eligible to vote by mail, it offers steps you can take to help expand vote by mail in your state.
Best practices and strategies for vote at home. The National Vote At Home Institute has loads of resources including best practices and a strategy for expanding vote by mail in time for the 2020 general election in November.
Giving employees time off to vote. Led by a broad range of businesses, Time to Vote is a movement committed to ensuring that hourly employees and those without paid time off do not have to choose between voting and earning a paycheck.
Voting rights for all Americans. Though overtly motivated by partisan concerns to elect Democratic champions of voting rights, iVote is committed to securing voting rights for all Americans. Editor’s note: Until the Republican Party begins to act on its concern over voter fraud by offering proposals to make efforts to expand the vote more secure – rather than using unfounded claims of fraud to dismiss such efforts outright or otherwise hindering them, we cannot fault iVote for their partisan sentiments.
Election Integrity
MIT Election Performance Index. Originally developed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, this tool shows whether your state has made improvements to its election process and how its performance compares to other states and to its own performance in different election years. It also offers a detailed look at specific performance indicators for each state. This is a very simple tool to navigate.
Gerrymandering Threat Index. From RepresentUS, this page enables you to learn about the risks of gerrymandering in your state.
For voters
I Side With. Take a quiz on where you stand on different issues and this site’s very cool AI will analyze your responses to determine which presidential candidate you side with.
Atlas of Redistricting. FiveThirtyEight has created an interactive map that provides the ability to look at each state and what different ways of drawing district lines would look like. If we reject partisan gerrymandering, what takes its place – ensuring competitive elections, minority representation, simplified (more “fair”) borders?
VOTE411. Vote 411 offers ballot information for local, state, and federal elections. Confirm that you’re registered, find your local polling place, see who/what is on the ballot.
Vote.org. Find everything you need to make sure you’re ready to vote: confirm/complete your registration, get your absentee ballot, request election reminders, and if you’re too young to vote, pledge to register to vote and get a reminder when you turn 18.
For election administrators
Voting Technology Project (VTP) Toolkit. From MIT and Caltech, this site offers election administrators a variety of tools to help plan and conduct elections.
ElectionTools.org. This site offers communication and administrative tools for election officials.
For Vetted Solutions
Project Drawdown is a world-class research organization that reviews, analyses, and identifies the most viable global climate solutions and shares these findings with the world. Want to see how possible it is to solve the many facets of the climate change crisis? This is a great place to start.
For Business Leaders and Investors
Ceres, a sustainability non-profit, offers a variety of reports, tools, and other resources to educate and inspire investors and corporate leaders to take action on sustainability issues, including climate change.
Climate Progress Dashboard was designed for investors by Schroders, a global asset and wealth management company based in Luxembourg. It analyzes the political, business, technology, and entrenched industries sectors to compare a range of factors in terms of likely degrees of warming. Schroders believes its clients need to understand the risks and opportunities of climate change and the pace of the transition to a decarbonized world.
Aqueduct from World Resources Institute offers two sets of mapping tools: One that that helps companies, investors, governments, and other users understand where and how water risks and opportunities are emerging in the US and around the world. The other measures river flood impacts by urban damage, affected GDP, and affected population at the country, state, and river basin scale.
For Innovators and Entrepreneurs
Conservation X Labs applies technology, entrepreneurship, and open innovation to source, develop, and scale critical solutions to the underlying drivers of climate change and other threats to life on earth. The organization was co-founded by Alex Dehgan, a conservation biologist and former science adviser and chief scientist at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), who worries that the loss of plant and animal species are lost opportunities to discover potentially life-saving medical treatments. By offering prizes to spur innovation and through its own programs, the organization expects to test and bring to market a wide range of creative technology-based solutions to problems brought on by climate change.
For Local, State, and National Governments
Institute for Sustainable Communities is a Vermont-based not-for-profit that helps local communities to build resilience to climate-related disruptions. It has active programs in all 50 states.
For Citizen Scientists
eBird and iNaturalist are just two projects that use crowdsourced observations to gather data on birds and other species that is shared with science researchers. The research contributes to our knowledge of species populations and migration patterns and any changes occurring to them.
iMatter was founded in 2007 as Kids vs. Global Warming and continues today as a youth-focused activist organization. Its activities now include community awareness projects, speaking engagements, federal lawsuits, and worldwide marches.
In Your Community
The Climate Reality Project mobilizes at the grassroots level to make urgent action on climate change a necessity at every level of society. The project empowers everyday people to become activists, equipped with the tools, training, and network to fight for solutions and drive change planet-wide. It has established 100 active chapters in the US and mobilized more than 19,000 Climate Reality Leaders in over 150 countries.
In Climate research needs to change to help communities plan for the future, climate scientist Robert Kopp describes an iterative, community-driven model for addressing the impacts of climate change that has its roots in the land-grant universities of the 19th century.
At Home
Solar-Estimate offers a free resource that helps homeowners learn about home solar panels and provides an easy-to-use calculator that determines a general estimate of the savings you would get from having solar panels. Note that to get this estimate, you will need to enter your contact information so that up to four companies can contact you with actual estimates.
Everyday Enviro is a weekly podcast hosted by Danielle Vogel, founder of the first and possibly only grocery store created to make progress on climate change. She talks with friends, colleagues, and former colleagues about eating, drinking, and shopping and offers her listeners simple ways they can minimize their carbon footprint.
Purchasing a hybrid or electric vehicle greatly reduces CO2 emissions and for one car company, this is its primary reason for being. Car and Driver magazine reviewed the top 25 hybrid and electric vehicles in 2018 and lists the base price of each vehicle.
Charity Navigator offers this list of highly rated action and advocacy organizations that support environmental protection and conservation issues. It’s nicely organized and presents budget, program, and historical information on each so you can decide which organization is most worthy of your investment of time and/or money.
Carbon Footprint Calculator. Curious what your carbon footprint is? This easy-to-use carbon footprint calculator from the US Environmental Protection Agency can tell you in just a few minutes.
Learn More
How will climate change affect where you live?
Climate Effects on Cities in 2080 interactive map is an application developed by the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science. It includes analysis of 540 urban areas in the US and Canada and maps the expected climate-related impacts for the year 2080 under two scenarios: 1) should there be no change in current policies (captured by the climate model called RCP 8.5) and 2) should relatively realistic mitigation efforts be adopted (captured in the climate model called RCP 4.5).
Climate Hazards in 2050 from Climate Central gives you a look at which hazards will affect individual cities the most in the year 2050. It compares two scenarios: 1) one with no change in current policies (model RCP 8.5), and 2) one that cuts emissions to zero by 2070 (the low-emissions climate model called RCP 2.6).
Climate Central’s Urban Warming is an interactive tool that allows you to see how much dozens of cities have warmed since 1970. It allows you to compare warming in a particular city against state-wide warming and the average warming across the US.
Monitor the scope and impacts of climate change
Climate Change Dashboard from NOAA offers a nifty if somewhat technical overview of different aspects of climate change and current projections. The interactive dashboard provides analyses of such effects as sea level rise, glacier melt, and the warming effect of heat-trapping gases. More detail on each item is a click away.
NASA’s Global Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet monitors key indicators of climate change and explains NASA’s role in providing data that is essential to climate change research.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations organization established in 1988 for assessing the science related to climate change.
Examine Your Budget Priorities
The Debt Fixer is an intuitive interactive tool that challenges you to establish a federal budget that reduces the debt. This is a great tool to examine and balance your priorities for the nation – the trade offs are not always so obvious and the decisions can be hard. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which created the tool, has set up this special link for visitors to The American Leader. At some point, we will share and then regularly update the results.
How old will you be when Social Security’s funds run out? Enter the year you were born to find out what’s in store for you, then design your own fix for social security. Another free tool from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Trade-Offs: Your Money, Your Choices is a tool from the National Priorities Project that gives you clear, pre-defined spending options that you can select as trade-offs in realigning federal budget priorities to what you think they ought to be. It’s not quite so intuitive to use and navigate to an endpoint, but it does a nice job of challenging us to think about some tough choices.
Your Federal Income Tax Receipt is another interactive tool from the National Priorities Projects that shows how your federal tax dollars were spent. It links to the Trade-Offs tool (above) to enable you to “reallocate your tax dollars”.
Charity Navigator offers this list of action and advocacy organizations that support environmental protection and conservation issues. It’s nicely organized and presents budget, program, and historical information on each so you can decide which organization is most worthy of your investment of time and/or money.
Accountability During Crises
COVID Money Tracker, launched by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, says it “will track every significant financial action taken to address the current crisis and then follow the dollars over time to provide valuable information on how much has been disbursed (or paid back) and to whom.”
Stimulus.org was the first effort by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to track stimulus spending by the government during a economic crisis. It now exists for historical purposes and is no longer being updated.
Learn More About the Debt
The Comprehensive Solutions on the Peterson Foundation website introduces the Solutions Initiative, which in 2015 brought together recommendations from five policy organizations across the political spectrum. The Solutions Initiative III summarizes these recommendations and offers charts that make it easy to compare them to each other and to current federal policy.
“Federal Government Growth Before the New Deal” offers the perspective of Professor Randall G. Holcombe, who teaches economics at the University of Florida. In his essay, Prof. Holcombe explains that by 1913, the federal government had evolved to be a protector of the nation’s economic well-being. Published on the website of the Foundation for Economic Education.
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It is the book by Peter G. Peterson that eventually led to the establishment of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. It was published in 2004.
General Information
The Commonwealth Fund publishes a wealth of healthcare research, as does The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). The Pew Research Center conducts survey research on a range of topics, including Americans’ attitudes about healthcare.
Government and Politics
Business influence. Open Secrets publishes details on spending by the healthcare industry on lobbying, federal campaigns, and political parties in the US.
COVID spending. The US government has approved trillions of dollars in spending on the healthcare system to address the COVID-19 crisis. Find out more with the Committee for a Responsible Budget’s COVID Money Tracker.
Where your taxes go. See how much of your federal taxes go to healthcare with the National Priorities Project Tax Receipt.
Making Healthcare More Affordable
Price transparency. ClearHealthCosts has been collecting cost data on medical services since 2010 so that patients can find the most affordable care available in the city where they live. Founded by Jeanne Pinder, a former NY Times journalist.
Financial aid. Advocatia helps hospitals connect low-income patients with financial aid programs that can help reduce their costs of care. Started by Ryan Brebner, who founded the company with his sister to make better use of available aid programs.
