Adding one’s voice to community conversations. Advocacy on behalf of others. Participation in public life. Encouraging other people to participate in public life. Joining in common work that promotes the well being of everyone.
--Project 540

Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern. Civic engagement can take many forms, from individual volunteerism to organizational involvement to electoral participation. It can include efforts to directly address an issue, work with others in a community to solve a problem or interact with the institutions of representative democracy. Civic Engagement encompasses a range of activities such as working in a soup kitchen, serving on a neighborhood association, writing a letter to an elected official or voting.
--Pew Charitable Trusts

Civic Engagement means an institutional commitment to public purposes and responsibilities intended to strengthen a democratic way of life in the rapidly changing Information Age of the 21st century.
--Task Force on Civic Engagement, University of Minnesota

By civic engagement we mean exercising personal agency in a public domain; and we assume that becoming civically engaged is a developmental process characterized by growing facility with ideas, situations, skills and awareness.
--New Student Politics Curriculum Guide

The American Democracy Project definitions and links to resources