CivicLab Training Opportunities
Is your team or organization looking to strengthen and build your collaborative capacity in 2023? CivicLab is hosting a series of labs to equip collaborative teams with the principles, tools, and frameworks needed to advance systems-level work.
The Stakeholder Engagement Process Lab
Mastering the principles and practices of community collaboration
The Stakeholder Engagement Process Lab teaches a relationship-based, systems- building approach to address complex social problems.
When it comes to community collaboration, the process is the product. The outcomes we experience are only as good as the underlying process itself. That’s because the most significant leverage point in any change effort is the quality of the engagement process the stakeholders use to redesign the way they relate to one another and work together.
This lab presents the fundamental principles, practices, tools, and frameworks for engaging cross-sector stakeholders in the process of collaboration to improve the human condition.
Systems-Building Lab
How to design, build and lead social systems that better serve all people
The Systems-Building Design Lab teaches collaborative community teams how to dissolve social problems by redesigning the underlying system and shaping the conditions that caused the problem in the first place.
A community issue is not any one thing, but a tangled knot of different kinds of interacting problems. What's required is not a single solution, but an ecosystem of interrelated approaches for managing, solving, and dissolving the various types of problems that exist. It's a systems thing, not a single thing.
This lab helps a diverse group of stakeholders see that they are part of something bigger than themselves. And it presents how they can redesign their collective work together to make it act more like a system, ultimately achieving a state of "systemness."
Partners & Other Work
Building Rural Community Systems 2024 RFP
Building Rural Community Systems 2024 RFP
Building Rural Community Systems 2024 RFP
The Building Rural Community Systems initiative is a national capacity-building effort to strengthen rural learning systems, with support from Ascendium Education Group and ECMC Foundation.
America's Housing Crisis
Building Rural Community Systems 2024 RFP
Building Rural Community Systems 2024 RFP
Learn more about KConnect and their work over a three year period to build a system that addresses the housing crisis in Kent County, Michigan.
Power of Networks
Building Rural Community Systems 2024 RFP
Building Rural Community Learning Systems
Discover the Power of Networks through Missouri College & Career Attainment Network's convening of stakeholders to address higher education affordability.
Building Rural Community Learning Systems
Building Rural Community Learning Systems
Building Rural Community Learning Systems
CivicLab partnered with five rural community and regional partnerships to strengthen their capacity to improve student outcomes in higher education and/or workforce development.
Building Collaborative Workplans
Building Rural Community Learning Systems
Building Collaborative Workplans
Project Attain! discusses what can be a challenging component of working in a cross-sector partnership- collaborative work planning.
CivicLab Fellows
CivicLab launched its Fellows program in 2023 to spotlight national leaders selected for their unique knowledge, skills, and abilities that can be applicable to civic collaboration at the community, regional, and state level. These individuals will further CivicLab’s mission, serving dozens of partnerships that are working to address complex social challenges.
Dr. George Towers
Dr. George Towers is announced as CivicLab's first Fellow. Dr. Towers is the Head of the Division of Liberal Arts and a professor of Geography at IUPUC. He has taught across the subfields of human geography as well as cartography and geographic information systems (GIS).
Tessa LeSage
Tessa LeSage is the Chief Impact Officer at Collaboratory and has served as the architect and director of the FutureMakers Coalition, the premier regional initiative in Southwest Florida, leading a network of 300+ individuals and 165 partner organizations with a shared goal of transforming the workforce in Southwest Florida.
