Future of Citizenship, Infrastructure Innovation, and Flourishing Neighborhoods
It's been a busy week with three back-to-back convenings in DC and New York on infrastructure, citizenship, and neighborhoods. While it has been a bit of a gauntlet, the ability to carry learnings from so many different sectors has been an excellent reminder of why CivicLex’s multi-faceted approach to strengthening civic health holds so much promise.
Everything kicked off in DC with the Infrastructure Innovation Summit, hosted by the Knight Foundation and the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. The highlight was hearing from former US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx about the importance of deeply considering how infrastructure will impact communities. As CivicLex begins a new public engagement partnership with TSW for Leington's 2024 Urban Growth Plan, I'm thinking deeply about how we can help existing communities shape how Lexington plans for millions and millions in infrastructure investment. A big thanks to Lilly Weinberg for making it possible for me to be there!
After that, it was off to the Future of Citizenship convening hosted by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), the National Civic League and the Kettering Foundation. I was thrilled to share the plenary stage with Carolyn Lukensmeyer, Matt Leighninger, Nik Walker, and Angela Romans to discuss the Civic Leagues' new Healthy Democracy Ecosystem Map. I'm so excited about the potential of this ecosystem analysis to connect practitioners, bring increased discoverability to local work, and help build state and regional coalitions to grow the field. As a local practitioner who often has difficulty finding peer organizations, I can't say how influential this could be. As we look to create more state-wide momentum here in Kentucky around civic health work, I'm excited to carry back many lessons and new relationships from this convening.
The last stop was New York for a convening centered around Flourishing Neighborhoods, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a cross-sector team including Seth Kaplan, Mallory Baches AICP, LEED-AP, CNU-A, and more. After two convenings with broad national scopes, it was nice to spend some time in conversation with other local practitioners about the importance of the hyperlocal level. It really brought it home for me how important it is to be a local practitioner in all of these spaces. The perspective of folks doing the work on the ground is essential to understanding how all of these complex issues play out on the ground, but that is so often missing in national convenings.
This last convening also reminded me how lucky I am to have access to these spaces. I talked with so many other attendees about the inherent inequity of how long it takes to build the social capital to access these types of spaces.
It really highlights how much of a responsibility it is to carry all these lessons back home and put them to work here in Kentucky.