“You don’t have to have magic unicorn powers. You work at it, and you get better. It’s like anything: You sit there and do it every day, and eventually you get good at it.”
– Kathleen Hanna

2018 was a rewarding and instructive year for CivicMakers. We worked with close to 20 state and local clients; expanded our service offerings to include change management; rolled out two new public trainings (human-centered community engagement and human-centered strategic planning); honed our internal culture; grew our team from 3 to 5 (welcome Jim and Leah!); continued to convene our community; and brought two CivicMakers babies into this world: MB and GG <3

Every day we have the privilege to collaborate with some of the most passionate folks in government to tackle big problems. Because what we do is part of a larger collective effort to transform local government and public service delivery, we would be remiss not to share what we’re learning along the way with you, our community, in order to grow the movement and learn from one another.

To wit, one of our biggest learnings from 2018 is how the many approaches and disciplines within the innovation field intersect to cultivate the culture change necessary to realize truly transformative initiatives in government. We captured this idea in what we call “The Culture Stack”:

You can read more about this model in our recent blog post, The Culture Stack — Cultivating a More Resilient & Responsive Government and please share your feedback! We’d love to learn from you 😊