President’s Message 2026

To our MACCE friends and all civic educators:

Welcome to our new and updated version of our website! Thanks to members of our Board of Directors, namely Zach Tsetsos, Sean McKeon, and Rachel Barnes as well as our new Program Manager, Christine Roy, we have a this new platform on Squarespace. This will allow us to maintain our website in a timely manner. This will encourage our teachers, our students, our alumni, our friends and our volunteers to interact with us by sharing their stories, their events and their ideas - all of which will make our organization a better vehicle in promoting civic education in Massachusetts and beyond.

As a nonprofit we cannot succeed in our goals and objectives without the monetary contributions that allow for our programs and events to happen. Most of you who will navigate our website will be familiar with our work from at least one of our programs. This new platform will allow for online donations. Our work depends on the generosity of our friends and neighbors.

If you read our mission statement on the home page, you’ll see that it is broad: we want to include everyone in strengthening our democracy. I won’t sugar coat our present situation. Our nation is in crisis. The number one issue is INFORMATION — credible information.

Our three programs provide nonpartisan understanding about what our government is about - this is CIVIC LEARNING. Through the We the People program students begin to learn at grades 3 and 4 what democracy means, what rules are, what a constitution is meant to do. We the People targets three grades levels: upper elementary, middle school, and high school. At each level, we provide grade-appropriate foundational opportunities for students to understand what their government was intended to provide: its principles, its values, and its protections as well as its expectations and responsibilities of its citizens.

Civic learning isn’t enough! To guarantee that a government based upon the consent of the people will last, the people must also know how to access government - CIVIC ENGAGEMENT. Through the Project Citizen program, students learn how government works and - more importantly - how to work with government to resolve the issues that confront our communities and our nation. At both the middle school and high school levels, Project Citizen offers different texts to help the teacher and students understand how to interact with government. In 2018, the Massachusetts state legislature mandated that 8th grade and high school students needed to complete school projects for this very purpose. Project Citizen is the perfect format to accomplish this in a nonpartisan, educational, and non confrontational way.

Most of the focus is on the students. However, we live in an age where too many adults have not had the opportunity to learn about their government nor learn how to access their government. We have nearly 160 million people who are voting, but significantly less than half that number know much about what their government is about. Perhaps they’ve had a course in high school or college. Yet do they know the difference between a democracy and fascism, know what a constitution represents, know why the Declaration of Independence is important?

For that reason, we started the nonpartisan Citizen Lyceum program in 2015 and we’re now doing more work and trying to encourage others to do the same. The intention is very simple: explain the origins of our government through the eyes of our Founders. Why did they want the type of government they established? We explain the Founders’ intentions, their background where appropriate, their views, the disagreements and the outcomes they achieved. We discuss where we have come from, our tribulations and our ability to overcome. Our adults today need nonpartisan INFORMATION they can rely on.

We have a lot of work to do. We need your help. Your financial generosity will allow us to do more work, hire more people to expand on our mission. And, yes, we would like to expand our network of volunteers as well! We are looking to create a network we would call Friends of MACCE. We would like to determine how the role or roles of this partnership with MACCE might evolve.

If you have the time, the resolve and the interest in becoming a volunteer, let us know. The more of us there are, the more we can do and the more we can do to preserve our republic.

As I’m sure you have all read or heard at some point how Benjamin Franklin, at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked by a woman, “What kind of government have you given us?”

He replied, “A republic, ma’am, if you can keep it.”

I think we are at that point. …If we can keep it.

Thank you for your support and commitment to preserve our republic!!

Roger L. Desrosiers
President
Massachusetts Center for Civic Education