Collision and Collaboration: Civic Exchange Celebrates First Year
“We didn't start with a space. We started with a group,” Derek Eder told a group of roughly 50 civic leaders and entrepreneurs gathered for Civic Exchange Chicago’s recent open house. “And that was very intentional,” the Civic Exchange co-founder told the group.
Reflecting on the city’s history of transforming commerce and trade through the livestock exchange, and then the financial stock exchange, fellow co-founder Jennifer Brandel shared that “Civic Exchange was built as a way to continue Chicago's legacy of being a crossroads and an exchange. We're all working together and we're trying to figure out how, by colliding, we can improve each other's lives and outcomes for businesses.”
Serving internally and externally
Eder and Brandel, also co-founders of their own companies—DataMade and Hearken, respectively—launched Civic Exchange Chicago in March 2019 to foster the types of collisions Brandel described at the open house. While each member organization finds value in the resources and workspace they share on the 18th floor of Two Illinois Center, they benefit most from their physical proximity and the opportunity to collaborate with one another.
Brandel was clear with the leaders at the open house, however, that the value of Civic Exchange Chicago should extend far beyond their offices. “We have a bigger vision here, which is: how do we serve the exterior ecosystem? What can we do for Chicago? We want to support aspiring, emerging founders, especially those that are underrepresented right now and need the access to people, places, resources, and legal that they might not otherwise have.”
Collisions and collaborations
After Eder and Brandel concluded, founders from each of Civic Exchange Chicago’s member organizations then shared with the group a few recent initiatives, highlighting the role that collaboration plays within Civic Exchange Chicago.
“Being in Civic Exchange has been an awesome opportunity to be connected—really, really connected—with some of the most brilliant minds,” said Tiana Epps-Johnson, Executive Director and co-founder of Center for Tech and Civic Life. “We've had incredible, real tangible things that have come out of being in this space.” In 2019, Epps-Johnson, her co-founders and team trained local election departments (representing over 80 million eligible voters) to run professional, secure, inclusive elections. In addition, CTCL works to connect people across the country with the information they need to develop lifelong civic habits, an effort which has recently led to the birth of a new partnership with another Civic Exchange Chicago organization, mRelief.
mRelief provides the first ever end-to-end enrollment system for food stamps in the United States, helping people in 44 states connect not only to food stamps, but also to other services and resources. Rose Afriyie, Executive Director and co-founder of mRelief, explained the thinking behind the burgeoning collaboration between mRelief and Center of Tech and Civic Life to inform and mobilize the voters mRelief already serves. “We have been thinking about how we can bridge the gap between people who are connecting to government services and also being informed about who the leaders are in government services,” said Afriyie, “How can we empower them to play an even greater role this historic important year?”
But this collaboration isn’t the only relationship mRelief has benefitted from over the past year. Afriyie shared that Madeleine Doubek, Executive Director of CHANGE Illinois, played a “tremendous role” connecting mRelief to the Illinois Attorney General during a time when injunctions were being filed to try to stop cuts for people entitled to the food needed for their survival. “We were able to connect with the Illinois Attorney General's office and shortly after, just a matter of days, they joined the injunction. It's really through organizations like Civic Exchange that we can, if our calls go unanswered on the front door, find another door to knock on.”
Bringing the collaboration full circle, Doubek later shared how she and CHANGE Illinois have directly benefited from the work of CTCL. “This year, we needed to update our website and one of the things that was very important to us was to create a very simple, easy to use lookup tool to connect citizens with their lawmakers and be able to communicate with them. We did that, and then found out that a lot of that information came from the Center for Tech and Civic Life!” When Doubek and her team had questions about the information, they were able to connect directly with the team at CTCL.
Journalists Collaborate Rather Than Compete
A recent collaboration between two of Civic Exchange Chicago’s news reporting organizations demonstrated the impact sharing physical space and common goals can have on member organizations. Jen Sabella, Director of Strategy and co-founder of Block Club Chicago, explained that when the nonprofit news organization wanted to cover recent events at a Chicago high school, it made perfect sense for Block Club to collaborate with Civic Exchange Chicago member Chalkbeat Chicago, a nonprofit news organization focused on public education. By sharing reporters and the information they collected, “We were the first out of the gate with it,” Sabella said. “And we both used our resources instead of doubling up, like all the newspapers do. We spread it around and tried to get a different perspective on the story.”
The Civic Exchange Community
Matt Gee, CEO of the data collaboration company BrightHive, also a Civic Exchange Chicago member, summarized the value that these collaborative efforts have brought him and his company. “We love being part of the Civic Exchange family. It's built into our business model that we believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—not just for data, but for community as well. And we have certainly experienced that being part of this community.”
Reflecting on the recent collaboration between Block Club Chicago and Chalkbeat Chicago, Sabella concluded by sharing a core value each of the founders of Civic Exchange Chicago organizations seem to have discovered in its first year: “It just makes so much more sense to collaborate.”
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