Welcome To The Community Public Square
CivicSolve began as an idea in Austin, Texas in 2011. The idea, create an organization with a focus on facilitating and supporting civic engagement and community building. Eventually I settled on “ Better Communities Through Civic Empowerment”. I decided on this because while there are plenty of resources for political participation and political campaigning, I noticed a troubling absence of people working outside of partisan, religious and/or issue targeted agenda, who cared about bringing people together. So I thought, why not me, why not CivicSolve?
We became an official LLC in 2015 and have had the pleasure of working with groups across the country on various issues like building civic capacity for people with disabilities, empowering disenfranchised voices in Texas or sharing civic engagement basics with teen parents in Washington, D.C. Still, I knew there was untapped potential in our work.
After months of deliberation about next steps and a simple yet powerful question from our intern, “So, what do you want to do with the blog?” I decided that while the blogging I do is fine, the only way that CivicSolve will be able to really bring people together is by creating a blog that connects us to issues facing our respective nation or the world as a whole, but from a very local perspective. This blog will seek out perspectives of people from around the world and many walks of life.
If you are reading this, I thank you for taking the time out of your part of what is becoming an almost unbearably busy world for all of us, and joining this most ambitious of conversations. In this conversation, we will not attack that which we don’t like or understand, we will speak to that which we wish to grow or make more prominent. In this conversation, every conflict is not seen as a reason to take up arms, but an opportunity for better understanding. Not submission or assimilation, but understanding. In this conversation we will connect through our collective experience as citizens of our country/city and humans on this world.
Welcome to the Community Public Square, the floor is open.
Cornell Woolridge is the founder and President of CivicSolve, LLC. He's been an active proponent of increasing access and lowering the barrier to civic engagement for even longer with his increasing involvement in numerous political campaigns, as well as down right boots on the ground protesting. He currently resides in Austin, Texas with his Wife Candace and their dog Jack; where he is continuing to expand CivicSolve's future projects and provide his own personal insight along the way.