about

Registration for invited participants is now open for Knight Foundation’s first Civic Innovation in Action Studio. By attending, you will help us develop a set of investment-worthy experiments that will be piloted in communities.

Knight is a national foundation with deep local roots. We work in 26 communities with the belief that informed and engaged communities are essential to a health democracy. The Studio is designed to help explore our evolving Community and National Initiatives strategy, which nurtures, advances and promotes civic innovations that accelerate talent, opportunity and robust engagement to create successful communities.

Our portfolio supports that success through investments that attract, retain and harness talent, expand opportunity by increasing entrepreneurship and economic mobility, and build places that bring people from diverse social and economic backgrounds together and accelerate the growth of ideas.

In the Studio, we’ll organize you and about 75 participants – a mix of researchers, designers and urban practitioners – around the following frontier questions:

1) Harnessing Talent:

What are the programs, platforms and policies needed to harness talent and expand opportunity in an economy with a workforce that is increasingly fluid and independent?

2) Advancing Opportunity:

How can the design and programming of places accelerate economic opportunity?

3) Robust Engagement:

How can robust acts of citizenship be made “general”?

The goal of the Studio is to identify potential change levers and conceptualize experiments for each question based on insights from research and experience transfer by participants. The Studio will primarily consist of a series of working sessions facilitated by design teams.


1) Harnessing Talent:

What are the programs, platforms and policies needed to harness talent and expand opportunity in an economy with a workforce that is increasingly fluid and independent?

Self-employment as a share of total jobs has more than doubled since 1970. Today there is more than one self-employed person for every five wage and salary workers. We want to understand the role cities can play in harnessing talent and expanding opportunity during this economic transition.


2) Advancing Opportunity:

How can the design and programming of places accelerate economic opportunity? What are the best levers (policies, practices, projects) to make place an accelerator of economic opportunity in a one- to three-year time frame?

Research shows that communities that are residentially segregated by income are particularly likely to have low rates of upward economic mobility. Given this, we want to invest in a set of experiments that can test ways to make place an accelerator of economic opportunity in the near term.


3) Robust Engagement:

How can robust acts of citizenship be made “general”? How can these acts be the default, rather than the exception?

Given our belief that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged, we want to invest in practices, tools and systems that catalyze acts of citizenship and make them pervasive in our communities.


schedule

The Studio begins with an evening reception on May 12 and concludes by 3 p.m. on May 14.


View the schedule

participants

Harnessing Talent

Stonly Baptiste

Urban.Us

Benjamin de la Pena

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

David Blake

Degreed

Bryan Boyer

Makeshift Society

Javiel Lopez

ADP

Ben Broehm

ManpowerGroup

Térèse Coudreaut Curiel

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Alberto Escarlate

Collaborative Fund

Matt Haggman

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Virginia Hamilton

U.S. Department of Labor

Corinne Hill

Chattanooga Public Library

Shaila Ittycheria

Enstitute

Steven Johnson

PBS/Riverhead Books

Les Krieger

Assessment Technologies Group

Paul Levy

Center City District

Pamela Lewis

The New Economy Initiative

Dana Mauriello

Etsy

Cheryl Myers

Charlotte Center City Partners

Maryanna Rogers

The Tech Museum of Innovation

Tom Root

Maker Works

Sarah Rosen Wartell

Urban Institute

Whitney Smith

The Joyce Foundation

Julia Taylor

Greater Milwaukee Committee

Mihailo Temali

Neighborhood Development Center

Stefaan Verhulst

The Gov Lab @ NYU

Katherine von Jan

Salesforce

Kim Walesh

City of San Jose


Advancing Opportunity

Nancy Biberman

WHEDco

Omar Blaik

U3 Advisors

Brian Collier

Foundation For The Carolinas

Joe Cortright

Impresa, Inc.

Teddy Cruz

University of California, San Diego / Civic Innovation Lab, City of San Diego

Deborah Cullinan

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Manny Diaz

Lydecker Diaz

Andrés Duany

Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company

John Elkington

Elkington Real Estate Group

Randall Fogelman

Eastern Market Corporation

Hunter Franks

League of Creative Interventionists

Colvin W. Grannum

Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation

Toni Griffin

J. Max Bond Center, City College of New York

Josh Kirschenbaum

PolicyLink

Deborah Marton

New York Restoration Project

Alex Morrison

Macon Bibb County Urban Development Authority

Gil Penalosa

8-80 Cities

Jeff Risom

Gehl Studio - A Gehl Architects Company

Lizzi Ross

Dialog Projects

Carol Coletta

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Jorge Martinez

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Jonathan Sage-Martinson

Central Corridor Funders Collaborative

Katie Swenson

Enterprise Community Partners

Egon Terplan

SPUR

Harriet Tregoning

U.S. Housing and Urban Development

Molly Turner

Airbnb

Claire Weisz

WXY architecture + urban design

Darryl Young

The Summit Foundation


registration

Location & Lodging:

Conrad Miami, 1395 Brickell Ave., Miami, FL 33131

Registration:

Cost:

Knight Foundation will cover all event and reasonable travel costs for your participation.

Questions:

For logistics, please contact
Shreya Parekh at [email protected]. For content and programming, please contact Bridget Marquis at [email protected].