Description and Rationale

The climate crisis is a crisis of human institutions. Our moment demands urgent reengagement, across political and social divides, with the structures of democracy. Collective action on climate, at scale, will be impossible without a renaissance—and entirely new models—of civic literacy and organizing.

To meet this demand and catalyze such a renaissance, we propose to launch The Liberty Hyde Bailey Center in Bailey’s former home complex (consisting of a three-story house, two-story converted carriage house, office, remnant greenhouse, and gardens). We seek not only to reunite literary art with architecture and restore the voice of Bailey’s thought for our moment, but also to inspire bold new work at these intersections through programming, gatherings, exhibitions, and residencies both in the historic home complex and in and alongside local communities across New York, upstate and downstate.

In close collaboration with Cornell University, where Bailey made his name in the movement to transform and organize land-grant universities into a system of “people’s colleges” with locally trusted extension agencies touching every corner of rural America, we seek to catalyze a movement of “the people” to reawaken these institutions to the wide mandate of their public mission. This means touching not just the farm as an economic unit, but the whole farmer, and every person who grows or eats food, as a democratic citizen and agent for change. We will leverage the resources of the university to empower individuals and platform organizations seeking to effect local and regional progress on climate and democracy in a wide range of areas, including civic and information literacy, community renewal efforts, cross-party issues-based dialogues, ecological education, traveling exhibitions, interfaith celebrations, local theater and music productions, multicultural and bilingual rural fairs, and more.

The Bailey Center will be a gathering place for innovative work across the borderlines of the civic and the scholarly—a human space to gather on human terms. It will be a nexus from which will extend resources and programming developed alongside people in communities spread across the state and world. It will identify itself in an emerging network of people and organizations working at the intersections of climate and democracy, forging key partnerships with groups like The Berry Center and The Land Institute, and deepening such work by cultivating spaces for collaboration across the rural-urban divide.

Collaborating also across disciplinary lines with scholars and community leaders from the arts and humanities, the natural and biological sciences, the social sciences, and engineering and law, the Bailey Center will function as a participatory, publicly engaged research and education center, a significant art-making and publishing effort, a place to convene and from which to disseminate, and a new model for public engagement through the arts and humanities.

This is work with a lineage. Wendell Berry places Bailey at the start of the New Agrarian tradition, but also as one voice in a much longer agrarian “series,” one that draws on a deep well of working ecological knowledge that can be found in all major world religions and suffuses traditions of Indigenous thought and action across the planet. Adapting these legacies to the needs of the present is the work of every generation, and Bailey is particularly well adapted to ours for the way his work responded to an era—the Gilded Age through to the Progressive Era—that bears striking resemblance to our current moment of severe economic disparity and political polarization. On the foundation of his work and of the broader series of critical-agrarian voices through time—which we see as a broad coalition of voices necessarily transgressing such identitarian boundaries as those of race, class, gender, and nationality—we will convene the visionaries of our moment to build the future we know we need.

After securing the property, our first charge will be to launch a platform for convening our constituency, surfacing critical issues and leadership, and transcending the polarizing divides currently eroding civil society. We propose to do this through a five-year Rural-Urban Dialogue Initiative. Working in close partnership with Cornell Cooperative Extension and key leaders in the New York State Legislature, both of which have already been engaged in our planning, and a range of public and private partners across downstate and upstate New York, we will host a series of structured dialogues that intentionally bring together leaders and community members from rural and urban areas to identify and explore shared concerns and determine productive areas for common effort. This work will not take place in hotel ballrooms among highly educated academics all speaking the same language. It will take place in small places all across the state: in the open barn, in the village library, in the recently renovated community theater, in the Bailey house itself—human places, where people can be human. It will leverage the best community-grounded and tested methods of engaging people in productive dialogue across lines of difference to begin creating communities of civic action and identifying both the efforts already underway and the most critical work that should be undertaken by the Bailey Center. As we undertake this unique effort, we will develop it as a model for land-grant universities and state governments across the nation and world.

As Savannah Barrett, co-founder of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange, recently argued in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the currents that shaped the present moment of American political polarization and democratic backsliding have been in motion since philanthropy’s abandonment of rural investment following the 2008 financial crash—yet philanthropy also has a unique opportunity right now to shift that narrative, rebuilding civic bonds and institutional trust. Growing from the fertile foundation of Bailey’s work at the intersections of rural and urban and of ecology and society, the Bailey Center will be the kind of place we need—a human space with local and regional roots, to gather on human terms about shared concerns, and from which to disseminate new models for civic engagement and ecological healing. We need each other. From the resources of the past and a recognition of our shared future, we can build a better day.

In this way, the Bailey Center will provide the platform for generating a new vision for the 21st century, co-created by rural, urban, and suburban leaders across and beyond New York State while coordinating with national partners to catalyze countless and diverse similar efforts across the country, each responsive to its unique context. The only safe political bet for the climate is democracy, and democracy begins at the local level, between people responsive to their place. The Bailey Center will be a place for people, for gathering and radiating into the world, for the hard work of long-haul trust and dialogue, and for imagining and enacting better futures. That is how we meet our moment: with a large bet on a long future.