The Civics Unplugged Team

Our History

In 2019, we saw what others missed: a generation of young people ready not just to engage with civic life, but to transform it. What began as a fellowship program ignited into a global movement of civic innovators creating breakthrough solutions to society's most pressing challenges.

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launch year!

The first cohort of the Civic Innovators Fellowship launches with 150 founding fellows from all over the country. These entrepreneurial risk-takers form the backbone of the Civics Unplugged community to this day. One of them, Zoe Jenkins, will be joining the Civics Unplugged team upon graduation! Legacy media also starts to take notice.

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Civics Unplugged goes world wide

The Civic Innovators Fellowship welcomes international students for the first time and the response is overwhelming (in a good way!). Our international community now represents 73 different countries and is vital to providing the diverse perspectives necessary for a curious community.

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Fellows are building

Civics Unplugged community members launch everything from a consulting wing (Unplugged Strategies) to a first of its kind DAO (Dream DAO). By this point, Civics Unplugged has awarded over $100,000 in grants to seed innovative projects all around the world.

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D.C. is the place to be!

The first cohort of the Civic Innovation Academy at Georgetown launches with 75 fellows working with the Departments of State, Education, Treasury, and Transportation to develop innovative solutions to our country’s most pressing issues. Another Academy takes place in Austin, Texas where fellows explore solutions to the housing crisis through 3D printed homes.

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CU meets UCLA

In addition to holding the Georgetown program, The Civic Innovation Academy goes to UCLA for its inaugural West Coast program. A total of 50 budding innovators on the UCLA campus work with the Ellison Institute of Technology to research climate and cancer solutions.

What does the future hold?

With 4,000 fellows in the community, two virtual Fellowships, two in-person Academies, and a budding civic revival under way, Civics Unplugged is just getting started. We have game-changing plans for a new initiative that will unleash the power of the Civics Unplugged community to work on real solutions to our most pressing societal problems. Stay tuned to learn much more about this new project in the coming months!

Our Why

The rapid decline of some systems--political, educational, legacy media–combined with the rapid acceleration of others–technology, social media–has happened so fast that we’re like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot left wondering what happened and how we got here so fast. It has left a generation of young people disillusioned, distrustful, and searching for purpose. We are combating these disturbing trends by fostering a new era of resilience and trust in order to build a more abundant future for everyone—A world where young leaders are equipped to solve society’s most pressing problems.

Our Values

The heart of our values – the Four C’s – are a revolution in how we build an abundant future for all. Beyond just steps in a process, they're the fundamental forces that transform passionate young people into unstoppable civic innovators.

curiosity

The Abundance Mindset

The scarcity mindset begins with "I know enough." The abundance mindset begins with "What else is possible?" Our fellows reject the limitations of conventional thinking and instead ask the questions that unlock unprecedented solutions. This radical curiosity is how we discover pathways to abundance where others see only dead ends.

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Our Team

In a world of hierarchies and bottlenecks, we've built something revolutionary: an abundance ecosystem where every person multiplies rather than divides our collective power.

This isn't a traditional organization—it's an abundance generator where technical visionaries, industry pioneers, and civic innovators converge to fully realize the previously impossible. Here, every connection forms another node in our network of transformation, every conversation plants seeds of unprecedented solutions, and every collaboration launches ripples of abundance that grow into waves of change.