 Hello, everyone. My name is John Goodall. I'm a professor at the University of Virginia, and I'm pleased to present today my work in collaboration with Christy Taylor from the Center for Civic Innovation on a fellowship program in Charlottesville, Virginia. So this fellowship program and civic innovation its goals are to empower problem solvers in our community. So we partnered between the university and the Center for Civic Innovation, which is a nonprofit in Charlottesville to create this community-based innovation ecosystem. The goal is to really empower residents and businesses and local government and academia to work together to tackle problems in civic innovation and civic tech. And the ultimate goal of this work is to lead to more equitable and sustainable community within our region. We're going to talk today about this program and some of the work that we're doing in particular under the PIT UN to broaden this out and provide a playbook that could be used by other communities to replicate this program within other communities. This is Christy Taylor. I'm the Executive Director with the Center for Civic Innovation. And we developed this fellowship program, which is our main programming for our nonprofit, to cover a gap in our community that existed in empowering folks who had great ideas on solving community problems. And it's twofold. We develop people and we also incubate projects to an extent. Folks from the community apply to this program and they receive support for a physical space to conduct their work, training on topics like design process, business education, data, literacy, intervention practices, and problem solving skills so that they can scale their ideas. We also work to bridge the gap between ideas and the sustainability of them. So we work with a lot of community partners to be able to embed these projects with nonprofits, with government. Sometimes it's with academia. And it's about a six-month program for the individuals. And then we stick with projects for a year, sometimes longer. So this is a collaboration between UVA and particular entities at UVA. So I'm a part of the Engineering School and the Link Lab at the UVA Engineering School. We also have a new School of Data Science that's also partnering. But it stretches way beyond the university. We are collaborating with our local community college. As well as the city of Charlottesville and nonprofit groups like Code for Seville and others within our local community. We've gotten some press for the work that we've done. So Christy was in a local news interview talking about the Civic Innovation Fellows Program. And you can read actually about our fellows program with this URL here. And we are getting a lot of attention locally about the work that we're doing. So a social media post about the fellows had nearly a thousand likes. As a highlight of 2020 outcomes, we started with five projects. We had some new nonprofit entities develop out of it. And Alina pictured here is an example of a community member who out of this ended up getting a board position, a leadership position with our organization and has helped shape the fellowship that we are conducting this year. And a few examples of this year's outcomes include tripling the size of the cohort. We have 19 fellows working on 13 projects. It's a very diverse group in age and background. And their skills and in the types of projects that they are bringing to the fellowship. And I'll let John speak about this some, but our big goal here is to develop a manual with all of our assessments, our recruiting materials, our surveys, our curriculum and lesson plan that can be replicated at other cities and regions throughout the country. Yeah, as Christy said, that's a goal of the project is to create this playbook that can be replicated. And that was really enabled by this funding that we received from the Public Interest Technology University Network. So we're really grateful for that funding that's allowing us to take what we're learning here through our studies and building out a fellows program locally and to hopefully create a blueprint that other communities can use to roll this out with less kind of learning on the fly, but more kind of proven techniques that we've tested in the field. Website lists our fellowship projects in full and please go and visit those and also follow us on social media as we give real-time updates there. But this is a sampling. One of the projects is the spotting credit building project. So it's taking low-income individuals and it's developing sort of like a bank where money for food vouchers is issued like credit and they can build their credit by using these credit cards and it's sponsored by our local credit union and they improve their credit and that leads to better outcomes in housing and transportation and things like that. That seems to be the gateway and getting out of poverty quite often is improving your credit. So this is a super techie cool project. It could be revolutionary. We're excited about this and this is something that has tremendous interest in our community and about a dozen institutional and nonprofit partners working on this project. And we also have young people working on integrating technology into places like libraries and schools to make sure that they are accessible to everyone in our community. And then the final example I'll bring up is this idea that's been done other places but it's exploring the feasibility of it here and integrating data and technology into this pilot study of having transitional housing in place. So converting our public housing resources into home ownership opportunities so that people don't have to move away from communities that they are invested in. And this is a big equity related project and just an example again of diversity of our fellows and our projects. So you can, this is the list of the full projects that you can see here that we for the 2021 cohort of a wide variety of ideas is Christy just highlighted a couple examples from very innovative technology to really student led projects to community led projects. So there's a real deep collaboration here between the university and the community which is really our goal. And our goal too is really to have this led by the community rather than the university and I think that it's been successful in that through Christy's hard work through the Center for Civic Innovation and the university kind of backing that up in ways that we can in terms of mentoring and even being fellows in some cases as well. So please check this out. We really appreciate your attention for this presentation and be happy to have you follow us on social media or reach out if you have any questions.