BCIITY PAST EVENTS
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BCIITY PAST EVENTS *
Welcome to BCIITY, where community meets innovation!
Our past events have been a vibrant showcase of creativity, collaboration, and cutting-edge ideas. From insightful workshops and engaging events to groundbreaking community-centered innovations and lively networking sessions, BCIITY has been the hub for grassroots leadership, community development and social impact. Dive into our event archives to relive the moments that have shaped our dynamic community. Whether you are looking for inspiration or simply want to see what makes BCIITY special, our past events are a testament to the passion and ingenuity that drives us forward. Check them out and be part of our journey!
AudaCITY Event Series
The AudaCITY event, held in Spring 2023 at Baltimore Unity Hall, gathered over 125 participants, including elders and youth from across Baltimore. Commissioned by BCIITY and brought to life by Urban Earth Synapses, the event aimed to foster a transformational experience where community members could envision a brighter future for themselves, their neighborhoods, and the City.
It was a 3-part series that combined creative and engaging elements such as DJs, food, interactive stations, and performances by guest Afrofuture artists. Participants, ranging from grassroots organizers to executive directors from parents to children, engaged in activities designed to stimulate non-colonized imaginations and elevate community priorities. Key highlights included intergenerational discussions, improv theater, and exercises that encouraged participants to express their thoughts on various social issues. The children's station, which allowed young attendees to contribute their artistic visions, was particularly well-received. Overall, the AudaCITY event successfully inspired attendees to think bigger and collaborate towards innovative community solutions.
Community Data Ownership Series
The AudaCITY event series kicked off our 18-month long community engagement and partnership process around the idea of Data Sovereignty. That event allowed us to presence ourselves to a new possible future before diving into how we could get there and get there TOGETHER.
The next part of our process was to get our neighbors on the same page around data and ownership. We explored questions like: What do we mean by data? How is our data currently being collected everyday? What would owning and leveraging our data allow us to do? How do we bring the community along in this process together? This was also a 3-part series and was the basis for our thinking around potential business models for leveraging nuanced and real-time community data and community ownership.
Community Data Co-op Design
The next step in the process was bringing back to our neighbors the potential business models to explore based on the data from:
1.) Our 6-year history of community-led grassroots development work with over 70 grassroots organizations (GROs) and social enterprises in which we disseminated over $3 million dollars over 5 years.
2.) Both the AudaCITY event series and the Community Data Ownership series.
3.) Tons of stakeholder interviews with GROs, philanthropic foundations, institutions, and local intermediaries.
By this point we had already hired and hit the ground running with a values-aligned technical consulting firm (McPherson Enterprise), regenerative business model development consulting firm (Interform), and Cooperative Business expert (Sassy Facilitates) to help get us to a point where we could share a clear potential path forward.
We hosted several business model sprints and the “Community Cooperative Design Workshop”. The objective of these events was to design, validate, and refine value propositions for key stakeholder groups (including potential customers). The core premise was to build a community-driven, data co-operative enterprise that leveraged real-time, verified stakeholder inputted data to make sense of the behaviors of Baltimore’s youth development ecosystem. This would allow multiple key stakeholders within the ecosystem to create community-aligned and data backed interventions and solutions that create sustainable and transformative impact.
Watch the video highlights below:
Cooperatives & Liberation
February 22, 2:00 PM 3:30 PM
Join B-CIITY's Candace Chance in conversation with Zebras Unite's Kate "Sassy" Sassoon, moderated by Zebras Unite co-founder Astrid Scholz as BCIITY talks about why they’re forming a data cooperative in Baltimore City and how it’s linked to Black Liberation.