NextGen:Pgh

CIVIC STAGE

Our democracy has a design flaw. The systems that let residents shape local decisions — public comment, evening meetings, formal hearings — were built for people who can attend a government meeting on a Tuesday night. For everyone else, time, transportation, childcare, lack of awareness, and lack of confidence quietly lock them out. The result isn't an access gap. It's a system working exactly as designed, for the few it was designed around.

Civic Stage rebuilds that system. It's a civic incubator that gives residents — especially young people — a direct, low-barrier way to shape what local government decides, in the long stretches between elections when most decisions are actually made. Through a digital civic portal placed in trusted public spaces, residents can weigh in on the issues moving through their government, register their views in real time, and enter video testimony directly into the formal public record — no meeting, no login, no barrier. It's available in multiple languages, fully accessible, and synced to the actual cycles of local governance.

What began as a pop-up has become permanent infrastructure. Developed over years of work with The Heinz Endowments, PNC, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and many others, Civic Stage now runs in lasting relationship with the institutions that govern our city — piloting at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and scaling through Youth Democracy Works into schools and libraries across the region.

Elections choose who decides. Civic Stage shapes what they decide.