Center for Civic Innovation

CCI is a community-based innovation ecosystem where residents, businesses, local governments, and academia tackle our region’s challenges. We support civic innovation that leads to a more equitable and sustainable community.

We seek to achieve our mission through the activities below: Community Engagement: We empower citizens to solve problems for their communities, and prepare institutions to respond in a way that ensures meaningful and equitable participation. We leverage technology and data to make citizen engagement an inclusive, fair, and effective process, then maintain the long-term vision to see coalition-based work through to resolutions. Many programs out of government and academia struggle with accessibility and outreach to the community, so we connect those with lived experience to the institutional problem-solving process. Participation is often a privilege; therefore, we work to meet the needs of stakeholders who have barriers such as inflexible work schedules, technology, transportation, childcare, language, accessibility, and other obstacles, to include the expertise of lived experience and historical knowledge. Cultivate the knowledge, skills, and resources for the people in our communities: Our Fellowship program cultivates the mindsets, leadership skills, design practice, and data fluency of civic innovators, so they may develop their ideas into implementable solutions. Some programs include financial support, physical space, and mentors. Convene key partners to close the innovation gap: Data collaboratives connect government, academia, nonprofits, private sector, and citizens to the information, ideas, and solutions needed to scale. Throughout history, we’ve seen remarkable advancements in science, medicine, and technology that have been the catalysts for profound change. We believe that empowering civic innovation through a coordinated effort will lead to breakthroughs in how our society works. CCI serves as the conduit, coordinator, and physical space for coalition work. Create data and analytics tools: We enable data-informed decision-making by supporting open data, internal innovation, and cultivating data-driven organizations. For example, our Budget Visualization Tool provides transparency for citizens into the local government budgeting process and priorities, and supports public engagement and planning.