It’s hard to believe I’ve been with CCI for six months already. It was an unconventional onboarding. After initially meeting everyone via Zoom I wondered if I’d unknowingly walk past a board member or client on the street, not recognizing them masked. I set up the new office in the thick of the pandemic, so I went when the building was closed and I could be unmasked while moving things. I was equipped with a map of our suite location and where the new one would be in the building, but I wondered if I was mistakenly evicting someone from their office and relocating into the wrong one.
As a tactile learner, I had my fair share of struggles operating on a virtual platform. I have four school-age children who also didn’t thrive with virtual learning. I’d look over at my oldest daughter who was watching a movie on her phone during class, the twins were making faces at each other from across the room, and the youngest vacated her screen to go ride her bike outside. Meanwhile, I’m on a Zoom snapping my fingers as a warning for the children to comply or breaking eye contact through the camera to give them the “mom is serious” scowl.
I was on Zooms that were interrupted by tuba-playing teenagers, camera-bombing cats, and one with a mom whose newborn was insisting she feed him right now. Despite being socially distanced, we got to see each other in our rawest and most human form at times. It was in these moments I caught a break from feeling all alone, as many of us realized we were on the struggle bus together.
While unconventional and challenging, it was through these experiences that I learned about my role with CCI and developed the vision for what we are going to be. As a single parent navigating the logistical, technological, social, financial, and endless other challenges of the pandemic, I realized that my solutions were in people, not institutions. By design, institutions are bound with structure, and protocols can often miss the point. I saw people, or groups of people, organize to respond to the needs of our community, including my needs. This is why our mission is to empower problem solvers in our community. The coalition work we embark on includes individuals and institutions; but our intention is to build the capacity of the individual who, untethered by corporate structure and unbound by job description, has the ideas and solutions to the challenges we face. It is CCI’s mission to connect these civic entrepreneurs to the capital they need to have the capacity to resolve the challenges of their communities. We provide the physical space, training, networking, collaboration, financial, and other resources to grow individual ideas and efforts into scalable solutions.
My grandfather was a civil engineer and told me many times throughout my life that we were all engineers. As the right-brained anomaly of my family, I often saw myself as a rebuttal to his theory. Today, I see what he means. We are all capable of imagination and invention, and of producing something that impacts our world. Questions and answers come in different forms from art to apps, and lead to new ways of thinking and doing. At CCI, we have been recruiting our new cohort of fellows, and the engineer in us all is evident in the diversity of applicants - their backgrounds, race, national origin, culture, age, gender, occupation. The applicants include social workers and technologists, range from 18 to 70 in age, and vary from individuals to seed programs of local nonprofit organizations. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing news on our selected fellows. They have ideas on making our community more equitable and accessible, ending homelessness, improving heart health, open-sourcing data, and more. As I invest in them professionally, I hope you will consider supporting them as well. We are recruiting instructors and coaches, so please reach out about offering your support to these initiatives if you have the time to give. We also help our fellows overcome barriers like childcare and transportation, and we provide stipends to protect their time to do this work, so financial contributions are also essential.
The next six months promise increasing normalcy and resuming programs. We have new problems and old problems to tackle, and CCI is ready to invest in the efforts that make our area a better place to work and live. We thank you for your support, we are cheering you on, and look forward to our work together.
- Christie Taylor, CCI Executive Director
