CivicLex

CivicLex is a non-profit civic education organization building civic health through education, media, and relationship building. We envision a Lexington in which all residents are able to meaningfully participate in the decisions that shape where they live. We work every day to make sure that residents know their elected officials and have straightforward and easy access to comprehensible information about the decisions being made about their community.If you don't know much about CivicLex, we are a unique type of nonprofit solely focused on building a more participatory and engaged city here in Lexington. We're not an advocacy or partisan organization - our goal is to build stronger relationships between our neighbors and the local government that represents us.This type of mission takes time to build, but gathering momentum around our work. Last year, we realized that there are actually three paths to take that can help achieve our mission: Civic Education, Civic Transformation, and Relationship building. In 2021, we continued to strengthen our Civic Education programming, the origins of CivicLex. Our weekly newsletter kept over 3,000 Lexingtonians informed about what's going on in City Hall, and our issue based workshops helped community members dive deeper into critical issues like ARPA funding, redistricting, and local elections.While Civic Education is crucial to what we do, we also realized this year that it isn't the whole story- no matter how well educated residents are on the issues, some city processes are so opaque that information alone cannot make them accessible. This is why we have started to partner with LFUCG to help make government more accessible from the inside. Our Civic Artist in Residence Program has placed three artists in LFUCG, to try and bring creativity and connection to how their departments interact with the community. Our new public input research program is tackling a specific process - public comment - and using surveys, research, and community input to build a better, more meaningful public input process for residents and city staff.Most importantly, we have seen real change happen because of CivicLex's work. In 2021, we brought hundreds of people into direct contact with city processes and representatives they had never encountered before. While the most significant impact of this relationship-building is long-term, we know that it weaves together the fabric of our local democracy. This takes time, and we are in it for the long haul. The challenging and intentional work of shoring up democracy is essential.Learn more about our work atciviclex.org

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