Building democracies in K-8 schools is a promising approach to increasing young people and educators' civic knowledge, skills and dispositions. The Rendell Center for Civics and Civics Engagement leveraged strategies and concepts from the fields of civic education, student voice, and distributed leadership to build a youth-adult school governance system and schoolwide civic literacy curriculum at Edwin M. Stanton Elementary School in the School District of Philadelphia. Their yearlong effort to build schoolwide civic learning illustrates how civics can be an effective conduit for connecting curriculum and leadership practices: School improvement becomes both a collective endeavor and a means for teaching active citizenship.