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Immigrant communities often participate in civic life through institutions rooted in their history and cultural traditions.  This article explains why forms of immigrant civic engagement are frequently overlooked and how recognizing them can strengthen community participation and community change.

Last week, I attended the Points of Light annual conference in Washington, D.C., where many of the sessions focused on social connection, volunteerism, and the conditions that help people participate. These are important conversations, especially at a time when social isolation, loneliness, and distrust are shaping so much of life in the United States.

But as I listened, a question kept turning over in my mind: To what end?

Reducing isolation matters. Building relationships matters. Encouraging people to volunteer matters. But these are not ends in themselves. At their best, social connection and volunteerism help people develop the relationships, confidence, skills, and collective capacity needed to influence the conditions affecting their lives. They become pathways to civic engagement, power building, and, ultimately, more equitable communities.

One thing I heard less about was how connection, service, and civic responsibility show up differently across cultures. That absence brought me back to studies Community Science conducted early in our history on civic engagement in immigrant communities. Those studies challenged a common assumption: that communities are disengaged if they aren’t participating through the institutions and practices mainstream organizations and leaders recognize.

This article asks a simple question: What if immigrant communities aren’t the ones who are disengaged? What if the greater challenge is that many of our institutions have a limited ability to recognize civic engagement when it takes forms different from their own? Drawing on Community Science’s research, I explore how civic participation often occurs through institutions and networks that are invisible to mainstream organizations, why that matters for community change, and what practitioners can do differently when they begin by looking for assets rather than deficits.

A Common Statement

“There aren’t really any leaders,” she explained. “The community isn’t organized.”

The comment stayed with me because it simply was not true.

Over the years, I have heard variations of that same observation from nonprofit leaders, foundation staff, community organizers, and public agency officials across the country. The assumption is the same: if people aren’t participating through familiar institutions and processes, they must not be participating at all.

Yet communities don’t become communities by accident. A community is more than a collection of individuals living in the same place. It’s a network of relationships built through shared experiences, histories, identities, and responsibilities. Communities develop leaders, institutions, systems of support, and ways of solving problems. They create formal and informal structures that help people navigate daily life and respond to challenges.

Immigrant communities are no different. The issue isn’t that these structures do not exist. The issue is that they don’t look like the structures many decisionmakers expect to see.

And that may be one of the greatest opportunities — and challenges — facing civic engagement today.

The Limits of Our Civic Imagination

When thinking about civic participation, certain images often come to mind: people attending public meetings, serving on boards and commissions, joining neighborhood associations, contacting elected officials, or voting in elections.

These activities matter of course. They’re important expressions of democratic participation. They are not, however, the only ones.

Across the country, immigrant communities participate in civic life every day through forms of engagement rooted in their own histories, cultures, traditions, and experiences. When we fail to recognize those forms of participation, we overlook some of the strongest community assets that exist. We also make it harder to build meaningful connections between immigrant communities and the institutions that shape public life.

This matters for more than symbolic reasons. When immigrant contributions go unseen, narratives that immigrants take more than they give can persist. Public institutions struggle to build trust with communities whose leadership structures and social networks they don’t understand. Schools, nonprofit leaders, volunteer service organizations, community organizers, and other groups that seek and depend on community participation struggle to engage people when they’re looking in the wrong places.

Recognizing immigrant civic infrastructure is about more than inclusion. It’s a practical strategy for strengthening the relationships, trust, and participation that allow diverse communities to act together.

The Many Faces of Civic Participation

For generations, civic engagement has been described as the glue that holds democracy together. People come together around common concerns, help one another, solve problems, and organize around shared goals. Yet how people do those things varies greatly across cultures.

For many Chinese immigrants, community responsibility traditionally begins with family and clan. Supporting parents, helping children succeed, assisting relatives, and bringing honor to the family are often understood as personal responsibilities as well as contributions to the broader community and society.

For many Indian immigrants, civic responsibility may include helping people in need and participating in organizations connected through language, faith, and regional culture.

Among Vietnamese refugees who rebuilt their lives after war and displacement, community institutions often became places for preserving culture, supporting one another, and helping newcomers navigate life in the United States.

Among Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants, networks of mutual aid and hometown associations frequently connect families across borders while supporting both local communities in the U.S. and development efforts in their places of origin.

These examples may look different from traditional U.S. civic institutions, but they share something fundamental: people working together to support one another and improve the well-being of their communities.

The specific forms may differ. The underlying purpose is the same. That is civic engagement.

The Invisible Civic Infrastructure

One reason immigrant civic participation is often overlooked is because much of it occurs through institutions unfamiliar to mainstream organizations and public agencies. People who have lived in the United States for generations generally know how to find the PTA, Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce, neighborhood association, or local nonprofit. They may be less familiar with a hometown association, rotating credit association, language and cultural program, ethnic business network, or faith-based community organization.

As a result, communities are often described as “hard to reach” when they are actually highly connected through networks that outsiders simply do not see.

These institutions frequently function as information hubs, leadership development spaces, support networks, cultural centers, and problem solving organizations. They help people find jobs, navigate schools, access healthcare, support elders, mentor youth, preserve traditions, and respond to crises. In many ways, they perform the same functions civic institutions have performed throughout the history of the United States.

The difference is that many civic leaders, public agencies, foundations, nonprofits, and even scholars of civic engagement do not recognize them as civic institutions, even though they share the same purpose.

A Different Question

What if the problem is not that immigrant communities are disengaged?

What if the problem is that many of our institutions have a limited understanding of what civic engagement looks like?

Too often, engagement efforts begin with the assumption that communities lack leadership, social capital, or organizational capacity. Practitioners ask how to get people involved. But the truth is, communities are already involved.

More useful questions are: Where is civic engagement already happening? What can we learn from it? And how do we build bridges among civic institutions rooted in different cultural traditions, including mainstream institutions?

When institutions begin with those questions, the work changes. Instead of trying to create relationships, they discover existing ones. Instead of questioning if leaders exist, they find them. Instead of building new networks from scratch, they connect with networks that already carry trust and legitimacy. Instead of approaching communities through a deficit lens, they begin to recognize community assets.

This shift may seem subtle, but it has profound implications for how we pursue community change.

Why Recognition Matters

Recognizing immigrant civic infrastructure is a practical strategy for building stronger communities. When public institutions understand how communities organize themselves, they become better equipped to engage residents in decisionmaking, identify trusted messengers, support leadership development, and learn from community knowledge that might otherwise remain invisible.

Recognition also creates opportunities for connection. People are more likely to participate when they feel seen, respected, and valued. Communities are more likely to collaborate when relationships are built on understanding rather than assumptions. Institutions are more likely to earn trust when they demonstrate a willingness to learn from communities rather than simply act upon them.

Over time, these connections contribute to something larger: stronger relationships across groups that may differ in language, culture, history, or lived experience. That matters because the challenges facing communities today — housing, education, economic mobility, public health, climate resilience, and social cohesion — cannot be solved by any one institution or community acting alone. They require collective action, and that depends on people’s ability to recognize one another as partners, not strangers.

Why This Matters for Community Change

In previous issues of Change Agents, we have discussed sense of community, place-based change, shifting power to people who have historically been excluded from decisionmaking, and the role of intermediaries in building community capacity. Each of those efforts depends on understanding how communities actually function.

If we fail to recognize the civic infrastructure that already exists within immigrant communities, we miss opportunities to build relationships, cultivate leadership, strengthen participation, and shift power. If we recognize those assets, however, we gain something much more valuable. We gain partners.

The challenge before us is on us. We need to expand our understanding of what civic engagement looks like and where it happens. When we do, communities that once appeared disconnected reveal themselves to be rich in relationships, leadership, and civic capacity. The opportunity is to build bridges among these communities, connect them to broader civic institutions, and create the conditions for collective action around the issues that affect us all.

In an increasingly diverse society, the future of civic engagement may depend less on creating new forms of participation and more on learning to recognize and connect the forms that already exist.

How to Identify Civic Infrastructure in Immigrant Communities

1. Map trust before mapping organizations. Ask people where they go for information, advice, support, and problem solving. Trusted individuals and institutions often reveal more about civic infrastructure than organizational directories.
2. Look for where people gather, not just where they vote. Faith communities, cultural organizations, business networks, sports leagues, mutual aid groups, and language programs often function as civic institutions even when they aren’t recognized as such.
3. Follow information flows. Pay attention to community newspapers, radio programs, social media channels, messaging groups, and informal communication networks. These often reveal who influences community decisions and mobilizes collective action.
4. Look for evidence of collective action. Ask how people help one another, respond to crises, welcome newcomers, solve local problems, or advocate for community needs. Civic engagement is often easier to identify through actions than through organizational labels.
5. Focus on bridges, not comparisons. The goal is to understand how immigrant institutions function and identify opportunities to build connections across communities and institutions, not to determine whether they resemble mainstream civic organizations.

Interesting Reads

Basch, L. (1987). The Vincentians and Grenadians: The role of voluntary associations in immigrant adaptation to New York City. In N. Foner (Ed). New immigrants in New York. New York: Columbia University Press.

Gerstle, G., & Mellenkopf, J. (2001). E. pluribus unum? Contemporary and historical perspectives on immigrant political incorporation. New York: Russell Sage

Hamilton, N., & Chinchilla, N.S. (2001). Seeking community in a global city: Guatemalans and Salvadorans in Los Angeles. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Min, P.G. (2000). The structure and social functions of Korean immigrant churches in the United States. In M. Zhou & J. Gatewood (Eds). Contemporary Asian the U.S. (pp.372–391). New York: New York University Press.

Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Putnam, R. (2007). E pluribus unum: Diversity and community in the twenty-first century. Scandinavian Political Studies, 30, 137–174.

Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. (1999). Civic Engagement in American Democracy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.