It’s only when you engage humans as part of your mission that you can truly move the needle of change.
That’s the philosophy behind the Points of Light Civic Accelerator, the first startup accelerator program focused on civic ventures — for-profit and nonprofit startups that include people as part of the solution to critical social problems.
“Our underlying assumption is that across all of our entrepreneurs, the thread that binds them together is that they are all civic — they’re all engaging people either as a direct input or a direct output as part of their mission,” said Megan Christenson, Director of the Points of Light Civic Accelerator (CivicX).
CivicX is a 10-week entrepreneur “boot camp” and investment fund dedicated to boosting early-stage ventures that solving critical social challenges.
The mission is two-fold. First, the program aims to equip, mobilize, and empower selected social entrepreneurs and changemakers to build and scale their social innovations. Secondly and 
more broadly, the objective is to promote innovation across varying social sectors through civic engagement.
Twice a year, CivicX sets forth a different call to action for social entrepreneurs. Those who’ve applied to this year’s spring cohort are tasked with creating greater, more accessible pathways to economic opportunity in communities across the U.S. They’ve been asked — How might we accelerate the financial well-being and economic mobility of underserved populations?
Ventures in Fall 2016’s program were tasked with increasing educational outcomes and workforce success for opportunity youth in Detroit and the Great Lakes region. The cohort before that worked to address digital and financial inclusion.
“We realize there’s never going to be a single silver bullet solution to community and economic development or increasing education outcomes for at risk youth,” Christenson said. “However, we believe that by convening a cohort of entrepreneurs whose solutions address a facet of the issue, that together they will represent a comprehensive, holistic solution to what is otherwise an intractable problem.”
One venture doing just that, and keeping people at the forefront, is Neighborly. Neighborly is a technology platform that allows citizens to easily invest in their communities through municipal bonds.
When the Neighborly team came to the accelerator in 2013, they were on a mission to figure out a way to help fund shovel-ready civic projects — things like parks, public wifi, road repairs — that were approved, permitted, and ready to go but stalled because of budget restraints.
“They had a very strong social mission and worked tirelessly to find a business model that supports that mission,” Christenson said.
Neighborly democratizes access to the municipal bond market by removing red tape and middlemen, like traditional brokers, which can make it expensive to enter. The online platform is live in California and recently scaled to Cambridge, Mass.
“They’re really an incredible example of recognizing the power of community and using technology to connect people to social outcomes,” Christenson said.
Another of the accelerator’s many success stories is HeartMob. HeartMob is a product of the larger nonprofit Hollaback, which supports victims and witnesses of street harassment. The HeartMob product helps people quickly report and document online harassment that they either see or experience and then receive real-time community support.
“This is another really wonderful example of a civic technology that engages and equips people to act on a social issue they care about,” Christenson said. “It equips as many people as possible to be supportive bystanders in an era where the internet really changes how we interact socially.”
Christenson stressed the important role she expects technology will continue to play in the civic engagement sector moving forward. Civic engagement, she said, is bipartisan at its core and is the extent to which people leverage their time, talent, voice, money, or purchasing power for the organizations they care about.
“In terms of where the civic engagement sector is moving under that definition, technology is only going to increase our ability to become more engaged,” Christenson said.
The civic engagement tool belt continues to fill with apps, products, services, and technology that allow people to more easily involve themselves civically.
“I think that because of on-demand capabilities and transparency that technology affords us, that you will see more individuals, families, and companies seeking ways to support the areas they care about in more ways and with more intention,” she said.
To paraphrase what Points of Light founder President George H. W. Bush once said, “Life without service, or a life without a component of civic engagement, is not well-spent,” Christenson added.
Microsoft is proud to support the Points of Light Civic Accelerator nationwide. Join us and boost your own civic venture. Applications to the CivicX spring accelerator were due March 2. Miss the deadline? Keep your eyes open for an announcement regarding the fall accelerator. Learn more at www.cvcx.org.
