Civic Trust & Democracy Innovation

Community-Centered Design Research

Research that helps leaders understand how people actually experience public systems, where trust and legitimacy are breaking down, and what communities need from the institutions that serve them.

This might include:

  • Community listening & discovery — interviews, ethnographic research, listening sessions, and participatory research that surface lived experiences, needs, frustrations, and aspirations

  • Journey & systems mapping — making visible how people navigate services, institutions, policies, and systems—and where experiences create friction, exclusion, or distrust

  • Insight synthesis & opportunity framing — translating community perspectives into actionable insights, design opportunities, and priorities for organizational or systems change

What you’ll leave with:

  • A deeper understanding of how communities experience your organization, policy, or system

  • Clearer visibility into gaps between institutional intent and lived experience

  • Community-informed opportunities for redesign, innovation, and trust-building

Public Policy Co-Design Labs

Collaborative design engagements that bring policymakers, practitioners, and the people affected by policy together to develop more responsive and workable solutions.

This might include:

  • Policy problem framing — bringing diverse perspectives together to clarify the problem, surface assumptions, and identify the people and systems most affected

  • Participatory policy design — facilitating structured co-design sessions where residents, practitioners, advocates, and policymakers develop and test potential policy approaches

  • Policy prototyping & refinement — translating ideas into tangible policy concepts, service models, implementation approaches, and experiments that can be evaluated and improved

What you’ll leave with:

  • A shared understanding of the problem and the people most affected by it

  • Co-designed policy concepts grounded in lived experience and implementation realities

  • Prototypes, priorities, and actionable recommendations for moving from policy ideas to practice

Democracy Futuring & Foresight Workshops

Immersive workshops that help leaders and communities imagine how democracy and civic life could work differently—and explore what it would take to build those futures.

This might include:

  • Democratic foresight exploration — using strategic foresight and participatory methods to examine how civic life, institutions, participation, and public trust could evolve

  • Experiential future immersion — creating immersive exercises and artifact builds that allow participants to step into possible futures rather than simply discuss them

  • World & scenario building— developing and examining alternative futures to identify the institutional, organizational, cultural, and policy changes required to move toward them

What you’ll leave with:

  • A shared vision of possible and preferable democratic futures

  • A deeper understanding of the choices, tensions, and tradeoffs involved in getting there

  • Concrete opportunities for experimentation, institutional change, and civic innovation