Episode 1: What is Civic Innovation Panel -Transcript

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“Civic innovation is bringing a broader definition — not just the relationship between citizens and their government, but the relationship of citizens to each other.”-Judi Brown

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[00:00:00] George Koster: We are opening the archives from when I first launched the show as part of a class at City College of San Francisco's, KCSF, across a decade on air. Chronic crises we identified years ago only got worse, and the pandemic and continue to plague our communities today as they struggle to address these familiar crises such as underfunded governments, unhoused, citizens.

[00:00:28] George Koster: Drug overdoses and food scarcity. We're going back to when we first hosted a panel discussion with friend of the show, Judy Brown, on what is civic innovation. Civic innovation isn't a buzzword anymore. It is survival post pandemic with fewer state, federal and local dollars, higher prices, empty office buildings, and AI replacing workers.

[00:00:51] George Koster: Our pre pandemic government model is broken. This is George Costa from Voices of the Community. Welcome to today's show, which is focused on civic innovation. In today's show, our voices of the community are Krista Kanalakis, the Deputy Innovation Officer from the Office of the City of San Francisco's, mayor Edward Lee, Judy Brown, co-founder of Civic Makers, and Susan Stewart Clark, a director at Common Knowledge.

[00:01:16] George Koster: I'm gonna turn to each person and have them describe a little bit about their own background and their mission with the organizations they represent. So Krista, could you please provide our audience a background on yourself and the city of San Francisco's Office of Innovation?

[00:01:29] Krista Kanalakis: I'm Krista Kanalakis. I'm the Deputy Innovation Officer for Mayor Lee in the His Office of Civic Innovation.

[00:01:36] Krista Kanalakis: A little bit of background about myself. I was an entrepreneur actually before coming to work for government and never would've imagined enjoying working for government, but have found it to be very rewarding and an opportunity to bring those entrepreneurial skills into solving some of our city's biggest cha.

[00:01:52] Krista Kanalakis: Challenges. Mayor Lee created our office in 2012 when he appointed Jay NAF as the country's first municipal chief innovation officer, and he really saw our team as a startup within government. So what does that mean, exact. To be a startup within a giant 27,000 person organization like the city. So we kind of think our ourselves as a nimble small team working to imagine what a 21st century government should look like.

[00:02:24] Krista Kanalakis: You know, San Francisco is a city filled with entrepreneurs and artists and innovators, and we wanna channel some of that energy and passion into government and really shine light on the ways that our innovative community can help make our city government better.

[00:02:39] George Koster: Thank you and Susan Stewart Clark.

[00:02:41] Susan Stewart Clark: I'm Susan Stewart Clark, founder and director of Common Knowledge, an organization I founded to bring forth having a more innovative and inclusive democracy.

[00:02:50] Susan Stewart Clark: I decided to found this organization when I was a marketing executive here in San Francisco, and at that time I was in the board of the Legal Movement, voters of San Francisco. And also a library based literacy tutor at San Francisco Public Library. It was the first time the League of Women voters had put their nonpartisan information into Spanish and Chinese, and I was very excited to be on that team.

[00:03:11] Susan Stewart Clark: Mind you, this was two decades ago. What I found out is I needed my marketing skills. I had to go door knocking and relationship building in Chinatown in the mission because it wasn't just enough to provide the information. We had to create the market for the information. Part of my marketing background was being director of marketing for the California State Lottery, and I actually naively thought I was using my marketing skills to help education.

[00:03:36] Susan Stewart Clark: But while I was there, I had a experience similar to Krister and Mayor Lee, which is I was told to create a fleet and facile marketing organization within a state agency. So this notion of how can you have a more responsive and innovative organization within government has been another theme of my work.

[00:03:54] Susan Stewart Clark: And so common knowledge works with community groups. Grassroots, multilingual, multicultural, but also local government. And even though our work has been at the national, state and local level, the most exciting things happening in democracy right now are in our cities.

[00:04:08] George Koster: Thank you, Susan. And now I'm gonna turn to Judy.

[00:04:11] Judy Brown: I'm Judy Brown. I came to San Francisco about four years ago to attend Presidio graduate school, which has been a pioneer in the green MBA concept. However, given my public management background, working for nonprofits, doing some strategic planning, consulting with local governments, it made sense for me to be part of their third cohort of the Masters in public administration In.

[00:04:35] Judy Brown: Sustainable management. So luckily what that provided me was not only the skills around public management, human resource management that you would get with a typical MPA, but I was learning alongside some private sector colleagues and was able to sort of witness some of the differences between both my degree program.

[00:04:59] Judy Brown: And the ways in which we were implementing products, services from a business aspect or a civic engagement aspect. So I became really interested in blending those in different ways. And during my time at Presidio, I met my co-founder of Civic Makers Lawrence Esca, who was with change.org at the time. Uh, he spoke in my civic leadership class and a few years later we came together to create civic makers out of a need that we identified for.

[00:05:32] Judy Brown: Opportunities and connection and collaboration among players in the civic tech space that we were seeing from nonprofits to social businesses, to technologies who were looking to work on public good projects. So we have hosted over 20 events for more than 2000 civic innovators, and we have now kind of morphed into a civic innovation studio where we're connecting talent, tools and knowledge for more impactful projects by building community.

[00:06:02] Judy Brown: Providing innovation consulting services for civic-minded agencies, organizations, and companies, and building tools to help accelerate the ability of communities to rapidly deploy collaborative solutions.

[00:06:14] George Koster: Thank you, Judy. We're now gonna turn to each participant and ask them from their perspective, what is civic innovation?

[00:06:21] George Koster: Why do we need civic innovation and what are the benefits of civic innovation? So Krista, would you like to start?

[00:06:27] Krista Kanalakis: So, I think innovation has come to mean many things to many different people, but for us, the way we think about it in the mayor's office of civic innovation is that it's not always about technology and building the next greatest app.

[00:06:40] Krista Kanalakis: It's really more about how can we solve old problems in new ways. And how can we foster a culture of innovation across city government? And if you think about all of the challenges that city faces, city government has everything from a zoo to an airport to a transportation department. And so we realize that these are really big challenges and that we know that the best idea is for.

[00:07:06] Krista Kanalakis: Solving some of the city's challenges may not come from within City Hall. We are lucky to be in San Francisco where we have a lot of innovators who are civically minded and passionate. So what we really think about is from within the city, build sort of an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, civic entrepreneurs, both inside and outside of government.

[00:07:26] Krista Kanalakis: So outside of government, we have. Robust, thriving entrepreneurial community. How can we as a city government, shed light on some of the challenges that government is facing? So those technology entrepreneurs out there can really think about government as a space and the civ and the city as a space to apply their smart.

[00:07:46] Krista Kanalakis: Their technical skills. And then on the other side, from within city government, we have this rich resource in our city employees who are deep experts in their policy areas and are really passionate about making the city better. So how can we also support our internal staff to become entrepreneurial and really use the modern best practices that are being applied in the private sector and in technology today?

[00:08:12] George Koster: Thank you, Krista, Susan Stewart Clark.

[00:08:15] Susan Stewart Clark: I really like what Krista said about solving old problems in new ways, and we talk a lot about disruption in innovation, and in my work disruption is asking new questions. So for instance. In our work with grassroots community members, instead of saying, why don't you vote, which is a question that kind of shuts people's energy down.

[00:08:35] Susan Stewart Clark: We ask, what do you care about in your community? And that leads to, we think, the second engine of innovation, which is what we call bridging innovation. And it's exactly what Krista was talking about, bringing new players together. And civic innovation to me is as much about the roles and how we change our roles.

[00:08:53] Susan Stewart Clark: And instead of. The government being the sole problem solver, which is downright impossible. With the scope and the complexity of the problems we face, how can we help governments be conveners? Of course, one of the challenges with that is government culture isn't always set up to encourage risk taking innovation, how to have a learning community.

[00:09:13] Susan Stewart Clark: So part of what our work at Common Knowledge is, is how do we create this space for those collaborations? And given my background originally as a communications professional. Step one in all of this is civic participation. How can we get that broad cross section of folks, not just the entrepreneurs, not just the professionals, but the grassroots community members who have insights about the problems and also assets and capacities to contribute.

[00:09:38] Susan Stewart Clark: So that's really how we approach civic innovation. And as we get deeper into the conversation, we can tell you about what we've learned about partnering with the community and the amazing role that they can play in addressing our most vexing issues.

[00:09:50] Eric: Judy,

[00:09:51] Judy Brown: build off of what you were both saying, Krista, about innovation not being just about technology.

[00:09:56] Judy Brown: We look at it as also new types of dialogue and facilitation. Similar to what you're saying, Susan, and there's more traditional definition of civic, which is the relationship between citizens in their government, but we're seeing that civic innovation is bringing a broader definition that is not just the relationship.

[00:10:16] Judy Brown: Between citizens and their government, but relationship of citizens to each other. And this is where we really think that civic innovation work can help create a broader engagement piece. Similar to what Susan is saying, and the way that I think about it is public-private collaboration and breaking up of silos and being able to.

[00:10:37] Judy Brown: Apply some private sector tools to the public sector and vice versa.

[00:10:42] George Koster: I wanna turn to the panel of experts and ask each of them to provide examples of civic innovation projects and programs. And I'm gonna start with Judy on this one.

[00:10:51] Judy Brown: Some examples of civic innovation. Broadly would be the open data movement.

[00:10:58] Judy Brown: As governments have opened their data, we've seen a real response from the community. Technologists are looking to build solutions around some of that data that has become available, and what it's doing is putting data directly into the hands. Of residents. An example of which would be crime mapping. So Oakland crime spotting is an interactive map of crimes in Oakland and a tool for understanding crime.

[00:11:21] Judy Brown: Another example that we happen to be really excited about is participatory budgeting processes. In 2016, just in February, San Jose held a citywide budget engagement where 300 re residents came to respond to a $64 million budget around city maintenance and beautification, which gave residents this kind of purchasing power and encourage collaboration, both among the 300 residents who are present, but also some city officials.

[00:11:55] Judy Brown: So another example that we've seen is code for America's Brigade Network and Civic Hacking, which has shown us interest from the community to build solutions, share skills, and civic makers has actually worked actively with the code for San Francisco Brigade to help build our platform.

[00:12:13] George Koster: I'm gonna now turn to Susan Stewart Clark

[00:12:16] Susan Stewart Clark: since I started.

[00:12:17] Susan Stewart Clark: The work of common knowledge with the focus on civic participation and how could we encourage more grassroots folks to, to get involved. The power of technology to make information more accessible is very important. And Judy referenced some participatory activities. Dialogue, helping people see the data and then also have dialogue so they can make their own meaning of the data.

[00:12:40] Susan Stewart Clark: We're very interested in civic tech and civic innovation. Being an interactive dialogue instead of just a souped up outreach, push it out kind of tool. And I'm on the board of something called the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. We're a network of over 30,000 people across the country who are committed to different ways of civic participation and community engagement.

[00:13:02] Susan Stewart Clark: And we have been doing numerous studies, webinars, and so forth and cdd.org on how to do the best of combining online platforms with in-person engagement. So for us. The tech tools have been something we've been working with for five plus years, but I wanna build on what Judy had to say about the Code for America volunteer brigades, because back to this point that Krista has and the city has, how do you create a learning community instead of just, I have to do it right and be kind of bulletproof in my approach.

[00:13:36] Susan Stewart Clark: And I like the Code for America brigades, the Oakland one, the San Francisco one, because they're very accessible. Open Oakland had one where it was, let's all try and. Rebuild the city's website together and community members, whether they were tech folks or not, were invited in and made welcome. And at the end of a day long of effort, city employees saw that the community wanted to help, and that kind of enhanced their morale too.

[00:13:59] Susan Stewart Clark: The San Francisco brigade is really exciting in terms of how they're bringing formerly homeless people in to not only cater to the work. Help co-design apps for other homeless people. So we see some really exciting bridging. Remember, I'm all about the bridging innovation, so we see these examples. I think the next step is understanding how for people working on.

[00:14:23] Susan Stewart Clark: What in the biz we call Wicked problems, the ones that are just really complicated system level problems. There's a practice called Collective Impact where you get a lot of professionals lined up the public sector, the service agencies, certain private sector partners, and they're using data dashboards.

[00:14:40] Susan Stewart Clark: To try and have, you know, aligned effort towards shared goals. And for me, the next frontier of civic innovation is who's doing that in a way that really brings the grassroots in. And we have projects that are along those lines.

[00:14:54] George Koster: And then Krista from a city of San Francisco's point of view.

[00:14:56] Krista Kanalakis: So I think building on everything that Susan and Judy are saying is we want to.

[00:15:01] Krista Kanalakis: Be a government that is open and inventive and responsive. But in order to do that, we need to create these pathways in, I think sometimes a lot of people see government as this black box, and you don't know who to talk to. There's 27,000 people, but who are they and what do they work on, and how do you actually get things done in government?

[00:15:20] Krista Kanalakis: And so with the work that both of Susan and Judy are doing, are sort of. Creating these inroads into people within government. One of the programs that we're really proud of is our startup and residence program, where we are shining light on some of the department's big technology challenges. So we went around and spoke with all of our.

[00:15:41] Krista Kanalakis: Big agencies and ask, what are problems that you're working on that you think can be solved by technology? And we help them to sort of really frame what that challenge would look like. And we put out an open call. So we put out a worldwide open call for startups all over the world. And this program is a way for those startups to come in and sit side by side with a city employee to really understand what are the pain points of the city employee, how can we build something that is really responding?

[00:16:09] Krista Kanalakis: To their need. You know, sometimes we see these large kind of procurement, our RFP request for proposal documents that don't always help you understand what really is the problem. And so the way this program is really bringing the technology experts with the policy experts to help. Build solutions that are really meaningful.

[00:16:29] Krista Kanalakis: So to sort of break down some of those barriers that we see.

[00:16:31] George Koster: Thank you, Krista. I'm gonna turn to our guests today and ask each of them to kinda walk us through a civic innovation program or programs and projects and the impact these programs and projects have on our civic engagement. I'm gonna turn back to Krista from the city of San F.

[00:16:46] Krista Kanalakis: The startup in residence program that I mentioned is one great example of a way that government is really increasing civic engagement, but what does that actually look like? So I'd love to tell a story of the first year of our startup program where we were speaking with the airport, San Francisco Airport, and they were really searching to find a solution to help.

[00:17:07] Krista Kanalakis: The blind and visually impaired navigate around the airport. If you can imagine if you were a blind traveler getting dropped off at the curb and trying to find your way to your gate, I think for all of us that process is, can be extremely difficult, and so they really wanted to make that experience better for low vision travel.

[00:17:26] Krista Kanalakis: But they hadn't yet found a way of doing that, and so they came to us. We work with them to scope out what technology might look like, but we really put out an open call and we found there was a company actually based in Austria, who had done a lot of indoor navigation for a train station in Europe, and so they found this problem interesting.

[00:17:48] Krista Kanalakis: They came and they worked side by side with the airport startup within a few weeks had developed a pretty simple prototype, and they said, okay, well we know we think this looks pretty good, but maybe we should test it. And so we have this wonderful local organization, lighthouse for the Blind, who. We asked to do some user testing on this app and they immediately said, Nope, this really doesn't make sense for us.

[00:18:14] Krista Kanalakis: And indoors the startup, you know, their eyes were really opened. You know, they had made a lot of assumptions about what this app should look like, but the, when Lighthouse came in, they were testing it and they really helped to shape what that end smartphone app looked like. And in that story, by the end of the four month program.

[00:18:34] Krista Kanalakis: The startup Lighthouse for the blind and the airport were really able to build something that was meaningful. And for the first time, one of the participants who worked with the startup at the end of the program was able to walk through the airport independently and get to her destination. And so we love that example because it's really, how can we really nudge the technology sector to think about challenges?

[00:19:01] Krista Kanalakis: That they might not have any kind of insight or exposure to, you know, blind and visually impaired travelers. They weren't on their roadmap, you know, they didn't even think of them as a user group, but through this program, they were able to see this is an important user that city government really needs to address, and that every airport in the world and every indoor space could benefit from.

[00:19:22] Krista Kanalakis: So we are really proud of that outcome.

[00:19:25] George Koster: And Susan.

[00:19:26] Susan Stewart Clark: Well, George, I really like that you called this program Civic Innovation, which to me is the next generation of civic tech. And my dialogue buddies asked me, what is this civic tech? And I explained to them, it's in the civic arena, bringing the best of technology, and I think Krista's story.

[00:19:40] Susan Stewart Clark: Points to what is some of the best of technology, which is good ux, good user-centered design, and that's where common knowledge has spent a lot of time understanding how community members do or don't interact with government, not just on service delivery, but on making decisions and participating so that their perspectives can get woven into more sustainable, inclusive, and representative policy.

[00:20:03] Susan Stewart Clark: So a story I have started here in San Francisco when I was a library based literacy tutor with the San Francisco Public Library had the opportunity to work with people who were not voting, and many people may not realize the number one variable that will predict if you're a voter or not is did you grow up in a family that voted?

[00:20:20] Susan Stewart Clark: So if you didn't, then we need to do some fairly thoughtful intervention. And if you do a survey among people, why aren't you voting? People in a survey will tell you, I'm too busy or I don't like politics. But here's where the more thoughtful user discussion and dialogue came into play. So these library based literacy students were co-creators of the Key to Community Project, and we found out from them, yeah, they were busy.

[00:20:46] Susan Stewart Clark: Yeah, they didn't like politics, but two other things were going on. One was there was a fair amount of performance anxiety. The information about voting came at a reading level and in a technical jargon that didn't make sense to them. So they couldn't really make a connection between their lives and what was on the ballot.

[00:21:02] Susan Stewart Clark: And the second is if they hadn't voted before, they had some hazy, not so friendly notion of what going to vote would be like. Pretty much like a trip to the DMV. You're gonna stand in line, take a long test, it's not gonna be pleasant. So. These community members had the user insight to say, let's create something where we can say the issues we care about, make our own meaning about them.

[00:21:26] Susan Stewart Clark: So they did dialogues on the issues they chose, which created an appetite for a peer-led fun, hands-on voting workshop, which created the appetite for a nonpartisan, easy to read voter guide. Called the Easy Voter Guide, which has been published for every statewide election since this project started in the mid nineties.

[00:21:45] Susan Stewart Clark: So for me, we know that we need to do good problem definition. We want good technical people. We want good policy people. But I think the beauty of civic innovation is the more we can get right into those. User insights in the community and let the community co-create it with you. I get so excited about the story.

[00:22:03] Susan Stewart Clark: I neglected to say that we had so many partners around the state, but right here, San Francisco City College, community colleges, adult schools, library based literacy programs, we were able to test the model and people who participated in the dialogue, the workshop or the easy voter guide, just two of those three.

[00:22:20] Susan Stewart Clark: Voted a rate is 72% versus 36% for people who did not participate in the program. So the community members had the insight to double voting, turnout.

[00:22:29] George Koster: Thank you, Susan and Judy.

[00:22:31] Judy Brown: Yes, definitely agree with what Kristen and Susan have been saying around the nuances between civic innovation and. Tech, particularly the sort of civic tech mantra of designing with not for and the application of human-centered design for products and services that are intended to serve a diverse constituency.

[00:22:54] Judy Brown: So I wanna talk about a couple different tools. Civic makers has worked with or had the opportunity to work alongside to innovate on this civic engagement piece of civic innovation. So one of those is Neighbor Land, which is a platform that is innovating on the public commenting process. And basically what they are providing is a way for residents to.

[00:23:18] Judy Brown: Put projects up that they want to see completed or to provide input on different projects that are already happening. So last week I had the opportunity to participate in one of the in-person convenings called the Dog Patch Public Realm Plan, which was created in partnership with SF Planning.

[00:23:37] Judy Brown: S-F-M-T-A Rec and Parks department, so many different agencies. And the goals were to guide funding, reflect priorities of the residents, create better agency coordination and connections, and come away with an implementation plan that was co-designed with residents. Um, and then part of what the platform provides is a way for, like Susan was saying, that blend of the in person and online.

[00:24:03] Judy Brown: Interactions so that you're taking what is happening when people are meeting in person and brainstorming together and putting that somewhere where it can be shared with a broader array of residents who may not have been able to make it to that particular event. Another interesting model that I wanted to discuss is Full Circle Funds.

[00:24:23] Judy Brown: Founders' Pledge, and this is sort of a full Circle fund, is in the nonprofit space and Founders' Pledge is a program they have where they. Are working with startup founders to pledge 1% of their equity back into the community. So they're integrating the social impact piece at the beginning, which many startups sort of add on as an afterthought.

[00:24:44] Judy Brown: And the engagement piece of it is that they're connecting. Startup founders who are working in the mid-market area, working among many people who are experiencing homelessness and developing solutions where they can be investing directly in their community to help solve some of those. There's so many more.

[00:25:04] Judy Brown: Examples, but I'll stop there.

[00:25:05] George Koster: Thank you, Judy. So I wanted to turn back to everyone and just ask for your insight into recommended actions or solutions for civic engagement. What would you like to see community members do to act? With that, I'm gonna turn over to Judy.

[00:25:18] Judy Brown: So we definitely need more technologists moving into government jobs, and luckily there are some exciting opportunities to do so.

[00:25:27] Judy Brown: One of which is the creation of the United States Digital Service under. President Obama, they are focused on design and technology for better service delivery of all types of different agencies, from veterans and health insurance to student loans, electronic health records and tools to combat human trafficking.

[00:25:47] Judy Brown: And the point of the US DS was to bring some of the speed and agility of Silicon Valley to the federal government. There's also 18 F, which was built in the spirit of America's. Top tech startups. There's actually an office in City Hall in San Francisco, and with some of the transformations that are happening in local governments, as Krista has been describing through civic innovation, these public sector jobs should be.

[00:26:17] Judy Brown: More attractive to millennials and technologists, and we really need them in that space to push this movement forward.

[00:26:26] George Koster: Thank you very much, Jenny. I'm gonna turn to Susan Stewart Clark.

[00:26:29] Susan Stewart Clark: What I love about the civic innovation Movement is it has a place for people like me who aren't technologists, but really care about how can we dig in together and work on our toughest problems.

[00:26:39] Susan Stewart Clark: And one of my favorite places to go is the Code for America, San Francisco Brigade, which is a volunteer group that is open to. All kinds of smart technologists and other people like myself interested in the problems, and they meet every Wednesday night at the Code for America offices on ninth Street. I highly recommend you check it out.

[00:26:57] Susan Stewart Clark: The great thing about the data behind the civic innovation movement is it gives us a common reference point, a common ground. Oftentimes we're arguing about assumptions, but when we combine the human insights we've been talking about in this show, with the concrete data, you can really anchor a whole group around a common understanding and make a lot of progress.

[00:27:17] Susan Stewart Clark: And that's why groups like the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, other resources. So if you're not a technologist, but you wanna have decent conversations, you can go to those groups, ncdd.org. But I get really excited. About the possibilities here at the local level. We may be a little frustrated with democracy at the national level, but if you start hanging out with some of these civic innovation projects, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

[00:27:44] George Koster: Krista, can you tell us our listening audience a little bit about how as members of our community, they can get civically engaged with the Office of Innovation?

[00:27:52] Krista Kanalakis: So echoing both Judy and Susan, I would encourage everyone to first consider a career in public service. It's something that has been extremely rewarding for me, and I think there are growing opportunities to work in local government for me.

[00:28:08] Krista Kanalakis: Cities are small enough to act, but big enough to matter. And so working in city government is a really cool, exciting and challenging place to kind of apply your skills. Also, the brigade is a really wonderful meeting place and I'm always encouraging my city co. To be there and sort of be, make themselves available to some of the community members that show up.

[00:28:33] Krista Kanalakis: Thirdly, our office will soon be launching open office hours, so we wanna talk the talk, and if we're an open government, we want to be truly open and make space for people to come and meet our team. And so I would encourage everyone to check out our website, innovate sf.com, or we'll be posting those hours online.

[00:28:53] George Koster: Krista, is there anything else that you would like people in San Francisco to do? Are there events to show up at or things that they could share with others? Go to your website on studies. Plans?

[00:29:04] Krista Kanalakis: Yeah, our website is a good resource. I would say our Twitter account is also really active and a great way to keep in touch with us, and that is at SF MOCI.

[00:29:16] Krista Kanalakis: And so I'd encourage anyone to reach out to us on there and learn more about. What they can do to make our city better.

[00:29:23] George Koster: Thank you, Krista. Susan, how can people get engaged in common knowledge?

[00:29:28] Susan Stewart Clark: We're really excited about all the different ways that people can get involved in civic innovation. One of the things we didn't touch on yet is something called creative placemaking, and there's all kinds of events and happenings all around San Francisco where people are just coming together to add new vitality to neighborhoods.

[00:29:44] Susan Stewart Clark: So whether you are an artist. Or an educator or some other kind of community member, please participate in the civic innovation. And at our organization, common Knowledge. The website is ck group.org, and we try and stay on top of these different kinds of opportunities and how the field is involving so that we really can have that more inclusive and innovative democracy.

[00:30:08] George Koster: Thank you, Susan. And now we're gonna turn to Judy. Talk a little about civic makers and all of the ways that they reach out to our civic. Being.

[00:30:16] Judy Brown: So, as I mentioned earlier, we grew out of convening different types of civic innovators around various issues, and we continue to do that. So you can go to civic makers.com and sign up for our newsletters, read about some of our past and upcoming events.

[00:30:34] Judy Brown: We're also on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter would be at civic makers.

[00:30:39] Eric: Before we close, let's recognize today's voices. Chris Kano, Laki Deputy Innovation Officer and former Mayor Lee's Office of Civic Innovation showed us how embedding a startup team inside City Hall can reimagine how government operates.

[00:30:54] Eric: Susan Stewart Clark, founder and director of Common Knowledge proved that real civic participation starts by going door to door and building trust in multilingual communities. And Judy Brown, co-founder of Civic Makers demonstrated that connecting talent. Tools and knowledge across nonprofits, government and tech accelerates real solutions.

[00:31:15] Eric: We produce this archive highlight series to give you context to show that crises we face today aren't new and neither are the solutions. If you want to go deeper, visit voices of the community.com and click on the archive series where you'll find full bios for every guest, links to every original episode and resources from every organizations doing this work on the ground.

[00:31:39] Eric: You can hear more from Judy in episode 50 and from Susan in episode 62 of our COVID-19 special series. And if this show gave you something, put a value on it, your donation directly funds the next series. Go to voices of the community.com and click on the donate button to support our work.

[00:31:58] George Koster: These shows are only possible because of our dedicated team, associate producer Eric Estrada, for his co-hosting and technical wizardry and designer Casey Nance of Citron Studios for making the show look exceptional.

[00:32:11] George Koster: A special thanks to Dr. Cecil Hale for supporting Voices of the community at KCSF and to broadcast partners, K-S-F-P-L-P-F-M 1 0 2 0.5 FM in San Francisco, and K-P-C-A-L-P-F-M 1 0 3 0.3 fm, and Petaluma, and of course to KCSF. That you could stream and tune in for amplifying these voices. I'm George Koster in San Francisco, and join us for our next episode as we continue lifting the voices that shape and strengthen our communities.

[00:32:42] George Koster: Thank you for listening, supporting, and sharing. Until then, remember, your voice matters.

Thanks to our CoProduction Partner

KCSF Radio is the student-operated radio station of City College of San Francisco (CCSF), functioning as a core component of the Broadcast Electronic Media Arts Department. Was broadcasting at 90.9 FM and is now streaming only online via platforms like TuneIn, KCSF serves as both a training ground for aspiring media professionals and a vibrant community radio voice. The station emphasizes being "Your Community, Your Radio," offering commercial-free, student-driven content in music, news, sports, and public affairs.

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We are fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which allows us to offer you tax deductions for your contributions. Please consider making a donation to help us provide future shows just like this one. If you want to send us a check, please make checks payable to Intersection for the Arts and write [Voices of the Community] in the memo line of your check. This ensures that you’ll receive an acknowledgement letter for tax purposes, and your donation will be available for our project.