We the People

This project is funded through a generous grant from

Sign-up to Beta-test our project We the Wiki by clicking on the picture below.
(We’ll be opening it up to beta-testers in July)








“Village Square is unique in the country. So Tallahassee is producing a model for the land. I wanted to come and see why and how.” National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Jim Leach, who served 30 years in Congress as a Republican from Iowa

Read the press release for “We the People” HERE.
Learn how to get involved HERE.
Get the complete historical epic on The Village Square here.


Please help us raise the $50,000 community match commitment for this project by making a tax-deductible donation HERE. (You may also mail your contribution to: The Village Square, PO Box 10352, Tallahassee, FL 32302)



We need your help building the town hall for the 21st century.

We the people, a project of the Village Square through the Community Foundation of North Florida, is one of 24 projects nationwide that has been awarded a highly competitive Knight Community Information Challenge Grant.

We the People will (GRANT-SPEAK VERSION):


We the People will: (NORMAL HUMAN VERSION)

Your donation, membership or sponsorship of our fundraiser will help this project come to fruition.



Building a Marketplace of Ideas to Enrich Communities

“We the People” will seek to deepen and broaden engagement in community decision-making in a real world and online revitalization of the public square. It builds on our existing Village Square forum – in cooperation with a broad group of civic organizations across Tallahassee – to inform and connect us in constructive dialog.

The project will offer programming on local issues through formats such as “Dinner at the Square,” “Take-out Tuesday,” “Politics, Partisans & A Pint” and “Sunday Night Supper Club” (this link coming soon).

In addition to building the face-to-face personal interaction and relationships necessary to support informed decision-making, the project will leverage online tools to further connect neighbors. Citizens can work through local problems by cooperatively building a Wiki-like problem-solving matrix. Through the local Wiki, neighbors will deepen their involvement in a geography-based online community, helping solve local problems while fighting the increasing fragmentation of communities into feuding partisan camps.

Do-it-yourself online toolboxes will allow for user-organized events beyond formal programming offered in the project. Online broadcast of program content, in addition to television broadcast of select programs, will minimize transportation and financial barriers to participation as it reaches an exponentially larger local audience.

Through We the People, The Village Square will expand our nationally focused programming to local civic concerns. We will continue to offer our topics in an entertaining format with real-time fact checking and friendly enforcement of civility.

We the People will counter the demographic trends that show a shift away from nonpartisan social groups that have historically been the foundation of our shared civic life, to a citizenry that is becoming alarmingly self-segregated into like-minded ideological communities inside of their geographic communities. In this hyper-partisan environment many local decisions become nationalized, simply new fronts in the battle to control America. This is hardly the best way to build strong communities on a footing of sound local policy informed by reliable data.

This project will reverse these trends locally by intentionally building relationships across cultural, racial and generational divides in order to foster the connectedness that is vital to both community and democracy.

The project will seek to renew Tallahassee’s marketplace of ideas, where the best ideas rise from informed citizenship and where abundant information can be channeled into constructive results.

By making information on local issues accessible, engaging neighbors in both real world civic forums and in an online community, Tallahassee will create a model for the 21st century town square.

As we deal with future community issues, our city will have a vehicle to build factual, verifiable data on the issues that directly affect us. We The People will give ideological diversity a central place in the life of our community and restore its foundational role in making the kind of intelligent and information-rich decisions that create a better place to live.

The project will aim to strengthen the common base of knowledge that makes democratic decision-making work. Beginning here – building a model easily portable to new locations – we will pursue the central historical role of the local community as the building block of a healthy American democracy.

We The People is elegant in its simplicity given its transformational potential and inexpensive relative to what it accomplishes toward knitting together geographic community engaged in constructive deliberative democracy.

Ways you can help now:
Donate.
Become a member.
Attend our events (much more coming very soon)
See how to get involved.

Stay tuned for information on becoming our partner in this project.

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