Through an Embassy Policy Specialist Fellowship in Georgia working with the East West Management Institute’s G-PAC program and the Caucasus Research Resource Centers, I helped develop and analyze the results of a nationally representative survey on civic engagement in Georgia that compared citizens’ knowledge of, engagement with and attitudes toward the formal NGO sector with more informal forms of civic and social engagement. The survey found that despite serious obstacles of low levels of understanding of what an NGO is or does, a mismatch between the issues that concern citizens and the issues that NGOs address, and low levels of trust in NGOs as institutions, many Georgians informally engage in altruistic behaviors, have positive impressions of community activists and show willingness to participate in the formal civil society sector when NGOs take up issues that resonate with their own concerns.
Leslie Hough, of Yale University, was a 2011-2012 Embassy Policy Specialist (EPS) [8] fellow.
