Vital Interests: Hollie, thanks for joining us today on the Vital Interests forum. It is a pleasure to discuss your views on the state of American society.

With Sabeel Rahman you wrote Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis which came out in 2019. Here we are in 2021 - having experienced a rocky transition from the Trump administration and are several months into the Biden/Harris government. In order to get some background could you tell us what motivated you and Sabeel to write Civic Power? What impact did you hope the book would have?

Hollie Gilman: I'm delighted to be talking with you today. For me, at least, the book was an opportunity to really point out that Trump was a symptom, but not the root cause, of our democratic dysfunction. There is a fundamental problem of people feeling that their voices don’t matter in their systems of governance, which then leads to a pervasive lack of trust in our governing institutions.

Additionally, one of the things that we argue in the book is that our political inequalities mirror our economic inequalities - that they are inextricably linked. When you look at the rise of inequality in the United States, you have to also be thinking about how that relates to our political inequality and who has access to the political system and who feels like the system really works for them. That was a big impetus for writing the book. 

VI: Part of the Trump allure was his identity with a growing American populism - a notion for many people that their voices were not being heard but also a troubling belief that their core American values were not supported by the government. How do your ideas of civic power take into account populist feelings?

Hollie Gilman: It's a great question, and it's a complex one. I often think about what a progressive version of responding to those populist feelings might look like: where we could really reimagine what the role of the public sector can be, and how to have a public sector that puts equity, puts justice front and center, and can think big. We could think of the public sector as a place of bold experimentation, to think of the government as the innovator, and the true facilitator of societal progress. You see the government act in this role like creating the internet, in supporting new technological systems that underpin everything we do. In the past the public sector underwrote electrification, telecommunication, and transport and other critical infrastructure that society depends on. 

There was a moment in May of 2020, where trust in government shot up in the United States because there was a sense that the government could really come together and effectively confront the pandemic crisis. Then, not surprisingly, trust plummeted quickly thereafter. For me, the key question is how do we build a different vision of a public sector where government institutions look different - they're more adaptive and flexible and agile and participatory. That to me feels like the opportunity that presents itself today to restore a level of public sector trust. Ultimately, not the panacea, but this could be a tool in a toolkit as an antidote to the Trumpian brand of populism, which has an authoritarian, really anti-small “d” democratic tendencies.

For me, I think there's the opportunity to build civic power that really is identified with small “d” democracy- that thinks about how you tap into the power of people on the local level. That traditional idea of the demos, of the agora, where you try to create opportunities for governance that is the right scale for people in their communities. Then think about how you federate and scale that up to really tackle broader, more complex issues.

VI: A number of states call themselves a “commonwealth” which is an interesting term. For example, I live in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It conveys the idea that state and local government exists for the general good - that citizens work together to create the kind of community that serves the interest of all.

If you drill down into this notion of governance, you need what has been known as grassroots participation. Where do you see this local involvement - those on boards of education, people involved in zoning, activists in worker rights organizations? How should we understand grassroots these days?

Hollie Gilman: I really liked what you were saying about the Commonwealth. Thinking about a government that exists for all and that is truly inclusive, and what it looks like to build a government that exists for all in the 21st century. How do you really build a multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy in the US, which is something we haven't really seen. One of the things I wanted to mention is that I'm working on a project that is from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

They put out a report called Our Common Purpose.  One of the policy recommendations was to create civic infrastructure. I'm actually working on what it would look like if we tried to reinvest in civic infrastructure, and in some of those grassroots leaders in the community. To get to the question about what is the grassroots, grassroots can mean a lot of different things, and can maybe have a more expansive definition than sometimes you think about. Then I want to be very cognizant of the astro-turfing or the grass-tops phenomena which you're seeing, which are organizations that are actually headquartered in Washington and give the veneer of being really grounded in communities, but are actually not grounded in community.

That's not grassroots in my opinion. That is something important such as, advocacy, NGOs, it's civil society, something valuable, but not what I would call grassroots. When I think about grassroots, I think of things that are really authentically rooted in communities. Really, it's finding a way to give agency and voice to community members, and to amplify the leaders who are really grounded in their communities. I think those trusted intermediaries are really crucial in this time, as we've just talked about with the decline in institutional trust. Those grassroot leaders have a real role to play in thinking about how we build civic power and civic voice in our democratic system.

VI: How are these local leaders identified? How are they created? Is it through education? Is it through agency work? Where's the spring from which they flow?

Hollie Gilman: That's a great question. If we can figure out the spring, how do we get the well pumping?

One of the things I'm thinking about, John, is the sort of mutual aid networks that were really impactful during COVID. You might think about that as just traditional grassroots work, but in many cases it's an interesting model. The question is, is that grassroots and if so, why yes, and why not? For example, I was working with a leader in Philadelphia who was employed by the city government doing Parks and Rec work, but she really knows the community. In the early days of COVID, she was going door to door, bringing food to people.

That's not her job, but I think in a moment of crisis, people put many hats on. Some people emerged as leaders in their communities. There's a really interesting question here, after the murder of George Floyd, after COVID, how do we think about grassroots leaders? How do we identify them? Can they be people who were working in government, but also wear other hats? Can they be people who never thought of themselves as leaders before, but in this moment of crisis stepped up in a new way?

If someone did, how do we also build a broader community and infrastructure for that kind of organizing, so that they feel like they can grow and that their voice matters. Because I think, to your first question, a lot of it was I think networks of mentorship. I think that's a lot of how grassroots organizing has traditionally worked. People find mentors, they're part of an organization, they spend time in the field, and they're kind of with that apprenticeship model.

It's a little bit less institutionalized perhaps than other fields, and so maybe there is an opportunity right now to really think about what worked in terms of supporting grassroots leaders in these dual crises that we saw in the last year, and then how do we amplify those voices and continue to have people feel like they can be leaders in their community and that their voice matters.

VI: During the COVID crisis there was an important cadre of community employees who were public health workers who were part of what was considered a well-functioning public health network. They did amazingly effective work during the AIDS/HIV epidemic. Public health workers know their communities and local health issues.

The problem during COVID was that public health workers were either ignored by state and federal agencies or they were attacked for the work they were doing to stem the spread of the virus or to provide access to vaccines. If local community workers are going to have agency, to be part of a civic infrastructure, then how do you ensure their respect and ability to function effectively?

Hollie Gilman: Yes. I think that's extraordinarily dangerous and toxic. To go to the first point I was raising about why we really need a new narrative around the public sector and thinking about people who are working to try to do good in communities and to really provide public health for all, for example. It is really problematic when you have the combination of lack of trust, disinformation, and leadership.

Michael Lewis has a new book out, The Premonition, and he talks about how Trump was a “comorbidity” in the crisis. That makes a lot of sense in this context. You had the president who people would have looked to for trust and to potentially rally around and who could have said, "Support your local health workers. These are trusted intermediaries, these are people who have experience and knowledge," and were actually mission driven, but there was none of that. When you have that kind of toxic leadership, plus you have disinformation and a pervasive lack of trust in institutions and governance, you quickly see how this thing spirals out of control such that even the people who were really the experts who could have been deployed were not effectively trusted at that moment.

VI: A very basic way that people get involved in their communities is because they have kids so they are on school committees or attend meetings. Another casualty of our very-divided times is that school committee meetings are forums for often bitter fights about what can and cannot be taught - in some districts science includes creationism and skepticism about climate change and in social studies classes discussions on racial inequities are limited.

When uncompromising partisanship divides local institutions like public schools, how does that impact the whole idea of this civic infrastructure that you're trying to build? How do you navigate this divide at the community level?

Hollie Gilman: The topic of partisanship is exactly what we are grappling with in our working group on creating a national trust on civic infrastructure. The core questions are where are the places where we have common interests, and where can we bridge people, and how do we do it in a thoughtful way? It is complex.  It is  tough when you have a portion of the population, I'm thinking specifically of the insurrectionists we saw on January 6 in Washington who don't want to have a conversation. We have to be really honest about our history of systemic racism in this country, and have a much broader process around truth and reconciliation of what that role looks like.

At the same time, there is this broader project of how to imagine the common spaces and the common places that we hold in our communities. You think about libraries, rec centers, you think about parks, which became even more important during the COVID crisis. How do we think about what works to make those spaces areas where the community can come together? I believe there is a portion of the population that, on a local level, wants to come together and solve problems and envision how we have shared spaces and shared interests. 

Finally,  we need to make room for constructive dialogue. This requires room for conflict, but there also need to be parameters, so if people are going to be made to feel unsafe, for example, that is a really problematic thing. It is an extraordinarily hard needle to thread so I'm fully cognizant that this is really challenging work.

So, essentially, is there a way that we can have a process of truth and reconciliation, be honest about racism in our country, and also try to think about the places where people can come together around shared interests or shared spaces, and not agree about everything necessarily but have some norms of safety and respect, and then within that, think about if and how we can problem-solve together. And how to tap into this local level energy to meet the democratic challenges of the moment. 

VI: The basis of all democratic governance is compromise. Without the interaction of one faction against another and then cooperation for the common good that hopefully results in effective policies, there is actually no governance, just the kind of political gridlock we now experience.

Let's look at some of the tools available for local governance. One of the ways that individuals, local entities, local interest groups can petition for policies they support is something called a ballot initiative. It's a tool by which citizens can initiate legislation and get laws and regulations passed at the city and state level. It's done by people going around and getting a required number of signatures on a petition. It's a very grassroots, person-to-person, neighborhood-to-neighborhood process. Once a petition is on the ballot and gets enough votes it becomes a binding order that gets an up-and-down vote and then it becomes part of community statute and law. Is this the type of process that is effective and should be expanded to create more local control? Hollie Gilman: On ballot initiatives, the details really vary a lot. There are huge differences depending on the localities. One resource I recommend is ballotpedia.org. They have a really good database of the places where this process is possible. I think right now we have 26 states (plus D.C.) and some 9000 cities that have initiatives or veto referendums.

They work really differently in different places. There's a mixed understanding in our country also of how they're used, of how people organize around them, if and when they come into conflict with what other voters might want or what the party might want. Recent progressive initiatives around raising the minimum wage, re-enfranchising felons, and fair districting have received a lot of well-deserved attention, and contribute to this idea that ballot measures are this righteous grassroots tool for circumventing politicians and, more to the point, the special interests that often dictate policy. But there are still so many cases where the process is exploited by those same interests and groups that sometimes have no connection to the state or locality where the initiative is happening. 

In terms of voting rights and economic equity, ballot initiatives are definitely an important tool to have in the toolbox. However they are just one tool, and not the one that I have spent the most of my time researching. Most of my research looks at ways that we can build participatory mechanisms into policymaking. Looking at the suite of practices from participatory budgeting to citizen assemblies and people's assembly — which, you saw a lot of rise and interest in thinking about how to more equitably spend budgets in municipalities in the last year — there are ways to more deeply empower people over these budgetary decisions. Undoubtedly, ballot initiatives are one tool, but there are also a lot of other tools that are out there in communities for giving people power.

VI: You work on a lot of technological solutions to community issues.  What are accessible technologies that you see available for groups and people to use to increase their civic engagement?

Hollie Gilman: That's a great question. There is a real mix, but it's often, how do you mix online and in-person opportunities. Looking at something like participatory budgeting, which started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989, after a 20-year military dictatorship to really regain trust, legitimacy, all the things we've been talking about in our country today. You're seeing it as a really powerful democratic innovation. In Paris, they are putting sizable portions of their city budget into the hands of people to allocate.

In the US, it started in 2009 with one alderman putting a portion of his discretionary funds open for public discussion. You've seen the process spread across the country. It's an interesting example of how you can make a process more inclusive. It's open to young people, recently incarcerated people, people who are non-citizens, and it allows people to come out in their community and self-identify the areas that need funding in big neighborhood assemblies through dialogue, deliberation, contestation, all the things we've been talking about. They work hand-in-glove with people inside the government to come up with viable proposals that are then put back to the community to vote upon.

In the vote stage of the participatory budgeting process, you've seen a variety of methods deployed, from SMS-based voting to straight online voting. You've also seen, in the US, voting hotspots. People going out into communities, setting up mobile places to vote. It requires  more creativity about which are the tools and technologies that in a low-tech and high-tech way can engage people. What you've seen in the US is that it's been really effective and empowering for traditionally marginalized communities and Black and Brown communities. It is an opportunity to think about other mechanisms that can really give people a greater say in decision-making.

I saw this a lot during COVID, a lot of local city governments who told me for years they were not able to do online engagement, or public confrontation, or public town halls.  Suddenly, they were able to. For example, there were a lot of state laws on the books that got suspended for COVID that suddenly enabled online participation. I think that's a really interesting phenomenon. It's worth studying: who was able to participate when engagement became digital during COVID, who was in the new crop of usual suspects that came out and then were more tech savvy or more digitally savvy. Questions apply especially when we think about engaging younger generations who are on gaming platforms, on TikTok, on Instagram.

Small “d” democracy is something that mixes in-person and online opportunities. Also, just the kind of user service that people expect from the private sector. One aspect of the trust in government happens when people are repeatedly frustrated with their interactions with their government. In my opinion, you have so much good will and so many really smart, talented, dedicated people across all levels of the bureaucracy in the US, but you have a lot of really antiquated systems.

So how do you modernize the systems and how do you also elevate the people inside the bureaucracy so that they can be more entrepreneurial and more agile and have managers who are responsive to them being more entrepreneurial and agile, and also develop a suite of policy tools that can be deployed to give constituents what they need in real time. When you look at the benefits that were provided during COVID relief, there were people happy to get direct cash transfers that were invaluable to their well-being, but there were also sizable challenges in getting people that money in a fashion that they could use.

In the Obama administration, after problems with healthcare.gov, there was a recognition fhere and in the creation of the United States Digital Service, the creation of 18F, the creation of in-house government tech shops, to try to think about how we can really reimagine the user experience for people on the ground.This had a lot of success, especially with veterans.

The VA has done a lot of really great work in terms of user delivery. There's a lot of need there. There is a place where the public sector is playing catch up with the private sector. That is another opportunity just being realistic of how people live their lives, consume their information and consume their services. I think that's just part of it -really just understanding that it can't all be done in-person. Nor do I think it can all or should be all done online.

To also just add, there are real challenges around access and digital literacy in our country, and that was clear in the COVID crisis and the move to online education, where some communities were just left without the hardware, software, internet access, or the tech literacy. These issues are all part of the broader systems of racism and oppression in our country, so it’s important to be really sensitive about equity concerns when you're introducing digital tools. And that means not just knowing who is excluded from digital tools, but also doing the work to include them in other ways and change that exclusionary, oppressive system. 

VI: President Biden's infrastructure program certainly has a focus on extending digital access with nation-wide broadband and a clear recognition that digital literacy is an equity issue. Do you see more civic access to new technologies coming about through public-private partnerships? As you mentioned the private sector has the technological and entrepreneurial capabilities.

Hollie Gilman: It's a yes-and, right? There is definitely a role for multi-sector partnerships, public-private partnerships. There's a lot of talent in universities and other kinds of anchor institutions - think tanks for example. also offer the opportunity for public-private partnerships. There is also  opportunity, and we talk about this in the book, in the concept of civic fellowships.

There are more creative ways that we can tell people interested in working in these fields, “you can do a stint in local government, you can do a stint at a tech startup, you can do a step in a grassroots organization, and you would have mentors and a system in place around you that can really move people from one opportunity to the next and create a cohort of leaders.” Because ultimately, one of the challenges and opportunities is to really embed this kind of flexibility and experience in the civil service.

The challenge becomes when you have fellowships and people jump in and out of government. They're having great ideas, but you're not necessarily building that long-term capacity. One model that implements fellowships in an effective and sustainable way is focusing on training city leaders, like the Bloomberg/Harvard City Leadership Initiative. They're really trying to provide long-term capacity and knowledge to city managers, to mayors.

We need to steep some of this thinking, and also this kind of skill sets, into people inside all levels of government. Because otherwise, you really run the risk that you're just going to be dependent on contract after contract with external providers and you're not going to have any kind of in-house capacity. It all comes full circle when you have to make the public sector a meaningful, exciting, impactful place to work. These are all like different parts of this broader ecosystem, which for me, is how do you really reimagine what a 21st-century public sector can do for democracy?

VI: President Biden has often talked about people getting involved in volunteering for public service. The Peace Corps was set up by President Kennedy and Teach For America has been operating for many years. Can you see a Youth Corps that gets young adults involved in civil service work through internships, training, and familiarity with what a civil servant career could be?

Hollie Gilman: Absolutely. I really do believe that there needs to be more opportunities for this work to familiarize people with their local community, with grassroots leaders, with the role of government. Part of it is that these opportunities provide a hands-on civic education as well. That's one of the things that I've always admired about things like participatory budgeting. You're learning a lot about government through the process and while we obviously need a robust civics education revamp in the US, we also need hands-on learning opportunities. In my dream, if I could wave a wand there would be some meaningful public service that everyone could do in the US for some duration of time.

VI: Fill in the gap year with something more meaningful than taking a European vacation or learning to scuba dive.

Hollie Gilman: Right, and also just another point on that —government sponsored volunteer programs could be a great intergenerational opportunity. Public service doesn't have to be limited to your gap year, it could be people transitioning, it could be people early in their retirement looking for a way to have impact in their community but not sure where to plug into. The staggering numbers of women who dropped out of the workforce during COVID. Many may want on-ramps to get back into the workforce. There's a lot of different ways that we need to think about. There's a whole intergenerational component I'm very concerned about as well.

We're also seeing communities that have needs but there is not necessarily a generation of young people being there to assist. There are a lot of different ways in which a program like this — if it was targeted around different parts of the population, and in different times of their life, and if you had a lot of flexibility with how you could do it — could be very meaningful for rebuilding that small “d” democracy and civic power that we've been talking about throughout this whole conversation.

VI: Speaking of civic engagement I am going to quote from your book: “Building a truly inclusive democracy will require deep investment in building bottom-up membership-driven civil society organizations and radically more participatory and democratic policymaking institutions that these organizations can engage and influence.” Can you go into that?  What would be an example of a membership-driven civic society organization that you see exists or should be created that has these characteristics?

Hollie Gilman: Absolutely. There are many. I'll give a few examples that are just illustrative but there's so many that are not comprehensive at all. The Partnership for Working Families is a very interesting membership-driven organization that has affiliate chapters in metropolitan regions across the country and they build really diverse community and labor alliances. They've been doing really impactful work, especially in the last year.

That's one example that I would talk about because they have a powerful network of affiliates, they build strong alliances, organizations, and activists, and they're really committed to bringing diversity and inclusion to think about how you make a more fair and equitable economy, but that's also really innovative. They're really focused on building quality jobs, strengthening healthy communities. They've been thinking a lot about how to build green cities, healthier communities. That's just one example.

Another example that we highlight in the book that has done really impactful work during COVID would be the Domestic Workers Alliance. They started a COVID Relief Fund for domestic workers early in COVID. They have been instrumental in a lot of that legislation that has happened recently to try to support paid workers and to really have more benefits for workers. They're doing really tremendous work, grounded and rooted in what their members need, and building power for domestic workers around this country.

VI: Are they fulfilling a role that labor unions used to play in this country?

Hollie Gilman: It's a complicated question. Another example of a membership based organization is coworker.org, which is a platform for non-union workers to organize. They were also really impactful during the last year, elevating hazard pay for all sorts of essential workers, organizing Instacart Amazon employees in the early days of COVID, advocating for protective gear and coming together. These are examples of new models of thinking for people who are not in unions right now, asking can they yield power? For me, it's a yes-and.

Unions have a really important role to play as well, but we also have to recognize that not everyone is going to be able to be in a union for a variety of reasons. I would say yes and - thinking about how do we increase membership and capacity of more traditional unions and then how do we also offer opportunities for people working in a non-union environment.

VI: The domestic policy agenda of the Biden/Harris administration articulates that they intend to address systemic inequality and the harm that it has caused American society. All of their public policies are going to be grounded in the principle of equity. - the term used instead of equality. Is this founded on the notion that everybody should get a fair share, fair access to opportunity - that the important part of what the government can do for society is create a level playing field?

Hollie Gilman: Part of the opportunity right now is to imagine how do you build a more equitable policy agenda so that we're recognizing the systemic racism that has disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities in the US. From there, you can build new policies that are more equitable, and then also can, as you know, lift everyone up and create opportunities for all in this moment. 

VI: There is opposition already building to the Biden/Harris agenda. Control of public policy has long been in the hands of big business, moneyed interests, and established institutions. We know the power of lobbyists. Every administration that comes into office says they are going to drain the swamp of vested interests, but nobody ever does. How does the civic society world get their voice and their policies put forward against these powerful interests?

Hollie Gilman: It's a good question. There is an opportunity for people to organize and to put pressure on elected officials and develop, what we call in the book, “hooks and levers.” Those are “hooks” that bring people into the governing process and “levers” that give them opportunities to exercise power. So, in this case, how do you build power outside of government so that you're putting pressure onto people in power and there's some accountability mechanism regarding lobbying? There Is the opportunity to deepen those hooks and levers so that elected officials feel more accountable to their constituents rather than to other interests.

This is, of course, a lofty goal and an aspirational one, but I think it is part of the vision of building the small “d” democracy. That is an opportunity in every administration, but especially this administration, that seems to be really attuned to what people have voiced and to the challenges of inequality, and the real possibility for building a more inclusive multi-racial, multi-ethnic society. I'm feeling optimistic about it.

VI: Part of this is also bringing people from civic society and local politics into national office. It's been impressive to see Congress made up of many more women, more minorities, more ethnic groups representing their communities. This has to be part of the positive agenda that you look forward to - bringing this cadre of people who have been working locally on community issues into state and national government offices.

Hollie Gilman: Yes, absolutely. You've seen also across the federal government, this administration making a point of having more diverse people in political appointees. You're seeing it across the government and I agree with you — it’s part of building a pipeline, through programs like federal civic fellowships. Here, the questions are: How do you empower catalytic leaders who maybe otherwise don't think of themselves as leaders? How do you create all of these opportunities and on-ramps for them, so that people can run for office or serve or do a stint across all levels of government, and then, if and when the time comes where they don't want to be doing that, take them back to the community, take the insights, take that experience and build capacity in their parks, their library, their community centers. That is the platonic ideal here of the civic fellowship model.

VI: American politics involves money and one of the reasons that the established interests have the control they do is because of access to enormous amounts of money which they can put toward political campaigns. Can comparable funding be found for grassroots candidates and causes? Are social media and new technologies proving to be ways to find revenue streams needed to play in the political realm in the United States?

Hollie Gilman: You've also seen philanthropy really step up. When you look at the work of the Ford Foundation, they raised money from their bonds during the pandemic to fund civil society. There are innovative foundations all across the United States, trying to think about where they can lend support. Bringing this full circle, there is a role for anchor institutions, for universities to lend talent and for companies to impart their expertise.

There's an initiative in San Francisco called Civic Bridge where tech companies volunteer their staff to work in city government on local problems. During COVID, it was impactful because they were already prepared for remote work and so they could pivot quickly. You also mentioned public-private partnerships: Those are other ways you could build capacity, add resources, add talent into an ecosystem, a civic ecosystem.

VI: Hollie, we're coming to the end of our time and like to end on a positive note. There is surely a wave of civic power activism that is growing and appears sustainable. It is embracing technology to create innovative ways to encourage and facilitate civic involvement. These days we often get overwhelmed by what we perceive as negative forces in our society but you have provided us with insights on the positive movements that we can participate in and support.

Hollie Gilman: It's been my pleasure and thank you for such thoughtful comments and engagement.

Hollie Russon Gilman is a Political Reform program fellow at New America and the Huo Foundation Fellow at Columbia World Projects. Her work focuses on topics at the intersection of civic engagement, digital technology, and governance. Her research looks at building a more equitable, inclusive, and genuine multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy. This includes exploring participatory innovation, civic infrastructure, cities, and the opportunities and challenges of digital technologies to enhance governance and generate more equitable public policy. Her first book is Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America as part of the Harvard Kennedy School's series on governance innovation in the 21st century. Most recently, Dr. Gilman also co-authored a book with Sabeel Rahman, Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis with Cambridge University Press. Hollie served in the Obama White House as the Open Government and Innovation Advisor in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. She holds a PhD and MA from Harvard's Department of Government as well as an A.B. from the University of Chicago with highest honors in political science. She has published in numerous academic and popular audience publications including The International Studies Review; PS: Journal of Political Science and Politics, and the Journal of Public Deliberation. Her popular writings have appeared in several news outlets including Axios, The Boston Globe, Foreign Affairs, NextCity, Slate, Stanford Social Innovation Review, TechCrunch, Vox, and The Washington Post