In his seminal work on civic life in America, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that the reinvigoration of civic life in America “would be eased by a palpable national crisis, like war or depression, but for better or worse, America at the dawn of the new century faces no such galvanizing crisis.” Those crises arrived with 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. Many believed that September 11 would spark the nation into a sense of community that had deteriorated over the last three decades. There was wide speculation and hope that a “9/11 effect” would play a substantial role in shaping the attitudes and behaviors of Americans and youth in particular.

There does seem to have been a 9/11 effect on youth, evidenced by significant increases in political engagement and volunteering in the years after this pivotal event. In areas of national and community life on which our nation has focused -calls to service, creation of more volunteer and national service opportunities, uses of online technologies to encourage people to find local service opportunities and to make charitable contributions, and voter mobilization and get-out-the-vote drives -there have been clear signs of civic renewal. However, we have not seen the deeper civic transformation for which many had hoped.

This challenge remains. How can we translate the historic events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and build upon increases in volunteer service and political engagement to foster a deeper, more lasting civic renewal? Why are youth volunteering and political engagement showing promising increases, but other key indicators – trust in other people and in key institutions, membership in civic groups, religious participation, connecting to others through family and friends, and civic knowledge -all significantly on the decline? Are volunteering and voting simply the first stages of a budding civic renewal? Are these trends blips on the screen that will return to normal or begin to decline as we move further away from these tragic events? Will it take other galvanizing events to trigger greater or deeper renewal? Are there things that we can do at the community, state and national levels that will reverse these trends and strengthen civic life more broadly?

This is a dialogue that our nation urgently needs to undertake, as too often we lack a structure to translate short-term goodwill from 9-11, Katrina or other defining national events into longer-term civic engagement. Our engagement after such events is too often a fleeting firework, and almost never (except through the Second World War), a sustained fire of civic engagement.