Center for Civic Innovation

Highly Engaged Employees

Breaking down the silos and having the real talk: The first step for the Center for Civic Innovation was to build a community around civic issues in Atlanta. In 2014, local social impact work was broken into silos, uncoordinated, and in many ways, competitive among organizations that should be partners. In September of 2014, we opened up a physical... space in the heart of South Downtown Atlanta with the intention to build a home for conversations, experimentation, and action. Our first campaign was called #Atlanta2018, which served as a visioning exercise for the public to think about where Atlanta would be in 4 years, with the understanding that wed definitely have new leadership, increased infrastructure, and increased risk of division in opportunity. Almost every week in 2014 and 2015, we held a conversation, training, or roundtable to bring together diverse voices from across Atlanta. This included serving as a safe space for reflection after the Ferguson shooting and trainings on what the words social enterprise meant. The conversations we held sent a resounding message: Atlanta can and must do better. There is so much opportunity for better services and programs to serve people. The social sector in Atlanta lacked an entrepreneurial spirit and value system, meaning most social impact work in Atlanta was being done through a traditional charitable or government-led model. Like most cities across the country and especially in the South, the social impact work driven by leaders in Atlanta was not seen as investable. In 2015, we partnered with the Atlanta Community Food Bank to invest in farmers and food producers as civic entrepreneurs, meaning leaders with products, services, and programs that directly solve against a citywide challenge. We wanted to prove that the success of a civic entrepreneur is not only measured through their increase in revenue, but more importantly, their value can be measured by how well they solve the problem. For food entrepreneurs, that value came from the reduction of food ...Read More