The Response Lab

Simon is the founding Executive Director of CIV:LAB, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to scaling solutions for cities globally.  In partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, Simon leads The Grid, an Urbantech NYC Initiative of 130 organizations collaborating to innovate cities.

He was previously Managing Partner at Global Futures Group, spearheading products and programs driving cities including Smart Cities New York. During the Obama Administration, Simon was a Strategic Advisor to the Department of Commerce and the International Trade Administration. He was on the founding team for the Urban Future Lab and helped raise over $165 million for startups, creating hundreds of tech jobs for New York.

Simon teaches at NYU's Center for Global Affairs Masters Program and at Imperial Business School London. He holds an MS in Global Affairs from NYU and a BS Honours in Economics and Philosophy from the University of Sussex.

The project we propose is the Response Lab, an initiative of CIV:LAB and NYCEDC, whose goal is to identify community-level COVID-19 related problems and deploy internally-created tech solutions to address them, helping New York City people, businesses, and agencies recover from the pandemic. 

Underserved communities in NYC have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19: people who live in poorer neighborhoods die from the virus at nearly double the rate of those living in wealthy neighborhoods, while greater wealth is associated with lower per capita cases. The soaring rate of unemployment associated with the virus, 18.3% as of June 2020, underlines the interplay between the pandemic and socioeconomic inequality.

Our work will elevate the NYC communities hardest hit by the pandemic. By uniting partners across sectors and deeply engaging the community, our model and solutions will be scalable and transferable to other urban areas that have been hit by COVID-19.

Cities lack the social infrastructure to respond to crises collectively, effectively, and creatively. The COVID-19 pandemic exposes NYC most dramatically (18,618 deaths and 214,570 cases), as it wreaks havoc across the globe (535,759 deaths and 11,500,302 cases). Beyond the casualties, it overwhelmed the medical systems of some countries, disrupted supply chains, and dealt one of the worst blows the global economy has ever received. Our systems lack the social infrastructure to leverage community resources to creatively and positively support basic human needs such as food, education, housing, and vibrant public space in urban areas. 

I found that there are many great organizations and skilled workers looking for opportunities to apply their skills to support their communities but without any way of doing so, a deficiency worsened by the lack of knowledge about the neighborhood level problems caused by COVID-19, especially in the medium and long term. 

The Response Lab authentically engages with diverse communities to identify issues that need attention, and strategically collaborate with a wide array of organizations to address these problems, both by connecting communities to immediately available resources and creating solutions to longer term issues.

The Response Lab is a joint initiative of CIV:LAB and the NYCEDC to identify community-level COVID-19 related problems and deploy internally-created tech solutions to address them and help New York City people/communities, businesses, and agencies recover from the COVID-19 crisis. We will improve access (to health, mobility, and other resources) and support underserved communities in New York using simple and unconventional tools. 

The Response Lab is uniquely positioned in the urban innovation ecosystem of New York City, where it has the ability to act as both a convener and a creator of solutions. Built on the foundations of the Grid, CIV:LAB and NYCEDC’s urban tech collaborative of 130 organizations that work in urban innovation across sectors and stakeholder-types, it is able to connect actors with complementary resources and missions with community-based partners working on COVID-19 response projects. Its approach centers on identifying pressing problems at the community level, through relationships with community-based organizations and Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), then forming project teams with relevant partners. It has the in-house capacity to create the tech-based platforms and tools that these projects envision, as well as the ability to conceptualize and facilitate the projects’ community engagement strategies.

The Response Lab exists to work with and for the most underserved communities in New York, neighborhoods often home to minority and/or low-income New Yorkers who experience the worst effects of COVID-19, both personally and economically. 

Response Lab pilot projects currently operating build on community-level engagement and insights. The Red Hook Neighborhood Initiative project (partners: Red Hook Initiative, DRAW Brooklyn, Cornell Tech) created a digital phone bank to identify neighborhood residents experiencing COVID-19 symptoms and to connect them with local healthcare resources. Case tracking through geotagging creates a better understanding of the spread of the virus and a foundation for long-term management of pandemic consequences. This initiative has seen success in Red Hook, with 8,306 calls, 590 individuals giving consent for their symptoms to be recorded, and 146 of whom required medical or mental health follow-up and were connected with resources. 

The Response Lab is also working with partners Public Sentiment and NYU CUSP to build a database of problems emerging in the neighborhood of Brownsville to better direct response resources. The data collection effort in Brownsville is designed in collaboration with a working group of neighborhood residents who direct the scope, focus and approach of the project.

This project addresses immediate needs in light of COVID-19 and builds the foundation for long-lasting transformational change, beginning with New Yorkers, especially those underserved both socially and economically. It will establish, by working directly with local communities, an understanding of what needs exist and the work necessary to provide sustainable opportunities, services, and resources in the short, medium and long terms. Response Lab elevates issues by building awareness and driving action to solve them with local stakeholders. ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because and only when, they are created by everybody.’ –Jane Jacobs. 

In Red Hook, home to the largest public housing neighborhood in Brooklyn, I created a community-based screening tool to identify medically-fragile people during the pandemic. Working with a local council member, a resident, and Cornell Tech we built a tool to support thousands of residents with COVID-19 symptoms. We leveraged campaign tactics to create a phone bank surveying the internet-underserved, such as seniors, who account for a large proportion of the at-risk group. In parallel, Columbia professors translated the survey into 5+ languages, while Cornell Tech created a symptoms engine that analyzed survey results via a risk score algorithm. High-risk individuals are recommended to local medical, mental health, and social work for follow up appropriate to their circumstances. 

The Response Lab was organically built out of necessity to collaboratively respond to the tangible needs of communities for access to resources and assistance during the pandemic, and to promulgate the many quick-response innovations developed. As a convener with an existing platform for collaboration, I found myself acting as the connective tissue between organizations and individuals with different resources and needs, and facilitating the creation of projects that revolved around innovative COVID-19 response. 

My career began in renewable energy economics. I quickly realized that to have the most impact in the space, my skills and passion were best directed towards innovating and helping innovators with new solutions combating climate change. After building one the US’s first cleantech incubators, I realized that cleantech startups share the same customers as urban tech more broadly (mobility, housing, energy, agriculture, waste, water, etc.), and that the needs of cities are challenging but crucial, as cities are growing globally and face a myriad of challenges. While building innovation ecosystems, it was also evident that the stakeholders that support innovation are siloed and lack the mechanisms to optimize collaboration opportunities. 

The two things that I am most passionate about are creating platforms for multi-stakeholder resources and urban innovation This was the essence of the Grid, the project with the NYCEDC bringing together 130 stakeholders ranging from universities to Fortune 100 companies, startups to community based organizations. We identify urban problems, solve them, and scale the solutions locally and globally. The Response Lab is an iteration of ‘The Grid’, whose social infrastructure and partnerships put me in the position to build and scale immediately. 

We are the only organization in the world that is set up to solve problems by leveraging the resources of multi-stakeholders for urban innovation. Applying this model to urban innovation is unique and has a proven track record of creating partnerships, building solutions, generating jobs, and supporting New Yorkers at a local level. As an ecosystem convener, I, with CIV:LAB, work at the intersection of many urban innovation subsectors and stakeholders, and am able to build platforms for promoting understanding and establishing clear communication among them. 

I developed the multi-stakeholder model while studying at NYU Center for Global Affairs and working at the Urban Future Lab (UFL) cleantech incubator. In addition to scaling over 30 companies that reduce carbon emissions through innovation while at the UFL, we created 170 tax paying jobs and raised over $165m in venture capital and grant money. The infrastructure we built with the City of New York has continued to operate and is now being adapted to respond to current issues. This required building strong partnerships, nurturing relationships over time, and understanding the value propositions, goals, and resources of each of the 130 member institutions—ranging from City Hall to City University. 

As one of the creators of Smart Cities New York, North America’s largest smart cities conference, I am a proven builder and leader in the community with a deep understanding of innovation ecosystems and what drives them.

It’s hard to get buy-in whenever you want to do something new. My model, of collaboration supporting urban innovation, is no different. A unified approach to improve the quality of life in cities seems a relatively easy concept—but securing the support of communities, subsectors in the industry, and stakeholders is a new and complex process.  

My largest project, and the City contract that funds it, was put on pause in response to the pandemic. However, my directive from City Hall remained, and remained essential: to leverage our network of innovators to help in any way possible. By reaching out to communities and identifying the problems New York faces, we took initiative and adapted our model by deploying task forces to solve problems, ultimately securing PPE, providing medical consultations and building tools within communities.

 Loss of income is a significant setback for a small non-profit, but we were able to build a portfolio of nine projects activating powerful local organizations and working with communities. While the financial support has been put on pause and my small team has sacrificed income, our model for collaboration and new localism has been validated by our ability to create solutions with communities for communities. 

In 2015, I and a couple colleagues set out to build a smart cities show that would serve New Yorkers and provide a platform for the best thinking from around the world about cities and urban innovation. At the time, these concepts weren’t getting the attention they deserved in the US.

Planned for the Brooklyn Navy Yard and with no early sponsors, I hosted a series of Smart City Town Halls, creating an inclusive process that generated interest and built a show by and for New Yorkers. We ultimately held 10 town halls in Brooklyn and Manhattan with over 500 New Yorkers and conceptualized a conference with community leaders from the Mayor’s Office, numerous academic institutions, the private sector, nonprofits, startups, and, most importantly, citizens and local neighborhood residents.  

This grassroots approach in a typically top-down space inspired Microsoft to provide a $250,000 sponsorship and launched the conference. There have since been three iterations of the conference with approximately 3,000 attendees, 300 cities and 30 countries annually. In the years following, Smart City Town Halls occurred on Capitol Hill and at Imperial University in London. This gained Smart Cities New York the fitting motto ‘Powered by People.’

As COVID-19 suddenly invaded our lives, the NYC Response Lab set out to identify community-level COVID-19 related problems and deploy internally-created tech solutions to address them and help New York City’s people, businesses, and agencies recover from the crisis. The Response Lab is very much an ecosystem approach, and there are many layers to its ability to create multiple dimensions of innovation, not least the multi-stakeholder partnership model which is unique in itself, especially as a tool for pandemic response. 

The Response Lab is a home and resource for those currently pursuing innovation but it also curates new solutions and products. The Response Lab is not a think tank, do tank, incubator/accelerator or consortium. The Response Lab is made up of problem identifiers, solution creators, stakeholder conveners, and resource optimizers

The Response Lab will improve access—to health, mobility, and other resources—and respond in underserved communities in New York using simple and unconventional tools. This innovative approach, churning out innovation, is grassroots, not top-down; has a framework that demands iteration and rebuilding; and thinks long, not just short.     

The Response Lab will build, house and support a range of innovative solutions such as a PPE marketplace, symptoms tracker tool, education platforms to support youth, solution matching with local small businesses (an initiative with Small Business Services) and more.

The Response Lab identifies community-level COVID-19 related problems among NYC’s most underserved neighborhoods and engages community and industry partners to collaboratively create and deploy tech solutions that prioritise New Yorkers’ needs and involve them in the creation and deployment process. This will ensure that resources and platforms created are usable, effective, and scalable to other neighborhoods and communities.

Community engagement through neighborhood associations, community-based organizations and Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) is integral to our process. This allows us to establish robust communication between the Response Lab and the communities we serve, to understand how best to engage with community members, and to catalogue and prioritize the problems they face. These bridges will help establish models of community engagement and involvement in urban projects that other stakeholders can adapt to pursue developmental work in communities. 

We will engage a diverse set of stakeholders to execute projects, based on specific project needs. This supports specialized solution-creation for the unique problems New York communities are facing, while longer-term outcomes are a sustainable set of resources for underserved New Yorkers that can serve as the foundation for more robust day-to-day service provision in a post-COVID world, alongside a collection of mechanisms and services that can aid future disaster response. This will also build infrastructure for collaboration between stakeholders that are working towards shared goals.

Another key part of project execution is participatory, on-the-ground research and data collection within communities in order to understand the scale and variety of issues they face. Immediate outputs include community-level data that might not have been collected in the past, as well as a data-driven method of determining Response Lab project foci. A longer-term outcome will be the construction of a data bank that would enable actors at the city level to attain a more granular understanding of what New Yorkers prioritize in terms of needs in the times of crisis, as well as the scale of problems they face. This will help the city and its urban tech ecosystem anticipate and preemptively be prepared to solve such problems in the future.

Our project serves various populations of New Yorkers, with the potential to impact all New Yorkers. The Red Hook community we serve is home to nearly 40,000 residents and the Brownsville community, where we are working on a ‘needs’ study, is home to over 60,000 residents. We are working with Small Business Services on supporting thousands of businesses across the five boroughs that serve 11 million people daily. 

The range of impact varies across the projects of the innovators who are part of the Response Lab. The Frontline Suits initiative, for example, worked with the Response Lab to source suits for medical staff at Elmhurst Hospital, the hardest hit in NYC. The couple hundred suits we helped source allowed medical professionals to perform their work safely while saving thousands of lives. 

In five years following COVID-19’s lasting impact and barring no more pandemics, we hope that the medium and long term work that the Response Lab performs will impact all New Yorkers in some way. The Response Lab will become a vital initiative, here to support the City of New York, and other cities around the world, as they respond to and recover from medical and other potential crises.

All Response Lab projects have a short term focus on equitable support and socioeconomic response and relief and a medium-long term focus on community resilience. In the next year I would like to bring on new Response Lab projects looking at mental health, mobility access, housing and any other issues exacerbated by the pandemic. And I will work to simultaneously scale current projects to new neighborhoods and cities, especially as a potential second wave approaches. 

Over the next five years, in addition to solving problems related to the long-term implications of COVID-19, I would like to improve the infrastructure to respond to future crises at a neighborhood level and help New York prepare to fully utilize its great institutions and communities. New York has a history of crises—9/11, the financial crisis, Hurricane Sandy, the city hardest hit by COVID-19—but does not have organized networks ready to respond to crises at varied levels of communities. 

Overtime, through Response Lab and other channels, I will continue to unify, strengthen and properly deploy the skills and resources that make up the urban innovation ecosystem to support communities.respond appropriately. Ultimately, I want to work with other cities around the world to set up their own Response Labs, creating a global network that further improves the potential to scale solutions globally—global infrastructure that we lacked during COVID-19.

Inclusive innovation is hard work, and requires financial support to build the social infrastructure necessary to engage in it meaningfully. We must establish trust in order to collect community level data, and much of the work to do so requires funding.

Rightfully, people don’t just hand over information and data to strangers. One of the largest obstacles I consistently face is securing the capital to support community research. This includes completing surveys of local residents and both compensating community members for collecting responses and compensating respondents. 

In order to gain trust with communities more effectively, it's also important to work with Community Based Organizations (CBOs). These organizations already have a network and infrastructure to engage local residents in a meaningful way, and they are made up of members of the community. To truly collect and analyze data at this level, many stakeholders need to be involved, and they also need the resources and models to stay afloat.

Finding philanthropic capital for these non-profit efforts is challenging, but so is identifying financing to pilot and scale the solutions themselves. We may develop a solution for one neighborhood, but without the proper sources of project financing it will be difficult to deploy in other neighborhoods. The Response Lab can create as many needed solutions as possible, but it won’t be successful without capital underwriting and expertise.

To ensure an ethical and inclusive process and address barriers of trust, we work directly with local community leaders and Community Based Organizations (CBOs), like current partners The Red Hook Initiative and United for Brownsville. I and my non-profit, CIV:LAB, have nearly a decade of experience working in New York with CBOs, who already have strong histories and local networks of leaders. 

Through Response Lab projects, I also address a structural problem: the lack of agile strategies for engaging communities with ecosystems of urban innovators and entrepreneurs. All of our projects—present and future—include the community as an integral component of their design, intending for project execution to be inclusive and iterative as we grow and learn. Through developing robust, tested models for community engagement that can be scaled and adapted to other cities, the Response Lab will help elevate humanity starting at the neighborhood level. 

To ensure project capital, we will work with partners such as Perl Street, a New York startup matching project capital and debt for urban based projects. For projects that show clear impact without a profitable business model, we will partner with foundations and work with local stakeholders and partners to identify alternative funding streams. There are a wide variety of funding sources for the types of projects that the Response Lab will build, but they need to be positioned correctly to access them. The Response Lab not only positions them appropriately, but strengthens their value by bundling them with other solutions supporting COVID-19 recovery. 

At the moment, the Response Lab is partnering with several organizations—private sector, startup and community-based, city offices and academic institutions—to develop and execute its projects. Our founding partner is the New York Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), and we are currently developing projects in collaboration with Cornell Tech, the New York Academy of Sciences, Lowe’s Innovation Labs, the Red Hook Initiative (RHI),Public Sentiment, Company, NYU CUSP, Harvard Data Analytics, the Data Science Institute at Columbia, Queens Public Library, the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT),NYC Mayor’s Office of the CTO, The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and NYC Small Business Services (SBS).

Government organizations such as the NYCEDC, SBS, NYCHA, and DOT have been sourcing problems to solve and helping with the deployment of solutions. Academic institutions have been leading the charge on solutions (Cornell Tech) and research (NYU and Columbia). The innovation community (Company, New Lab and Urban-X), private sector (Lowe’s Innovation Labs and Airtable) and startups (Citisense and Cinch) have been building solutions. And, of course, most critical are the CBOs (United for Brownsville and RHI) and nonprofits (Public Sentiment) on the ground working with residents and neighborhoods. 

‘The Grid’ urban innovation initiative that I publicly launched in 2019 with the NYCEDC has 130 members, from the public sector, private sector, nonprofits/NGOs, community based organizations, startups, VCs, and incubators/accelerators, that are all at the disposal of the Response Lab. 

Ultimately our customers are the citizens of New York. We will deliver services, resources, and products that increase their quality of life through the various projects that the Lab houses. Our projects and products improve access to health, food, mobility and education. In a short amount of time, we have seen our projects save lives, equip medical professionals and educate young people. Those we serve—our “customers”—need our support out of necessity, out of the sheer fact that we must provide the best health care options, basic human services, and education to ensure that we combat the long term implications of COVID-19.  

Depending on the project, services will be delivered digitally, over the phone, through deliveries, or in person. We may, for example, provide health care to residents with COVID-19 symptoms over the phone and also supply street furniture to improve our public spaces for small businesses and restaurants. 

The Response Lab is a project of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit CIV:LAB. The Response Lab’s administrative expenses will rely primarily on philanthropic funds raised through grants, as well as corporate sponsorships. The neutrality that the nonprofit entity offers to the organizations that make up the innovation ecosystem is essential. Projects that emerge from the Response Lab could have private financing for funding R&D or for the project finances to scale the solutions.

My team has sustained the Response Lab for four months without any support. My hope is that our ongoing work will be recognized by the City and that they will reactivate our currently paused contract, to continue our work supporting New Yorkers with a focus on resources and innovation in response to COVID-19. 

We are incredibly nimble but our sustainability requires a team that includes full-time product developers and coders for in-house innovations and building customized and scalable technologies for our partner communities. The administration necessary to sustain this ecosystem will become significant, and will require salary support to attract and retain mission-critical, competitive staff.

The nature of our completely virtual lab allows us to create a scalable civic model that is more sustainable than traditional incubator models that require real estate. The high potential impact this model delivers has been proven by our work within CIV:LAB and our partnership with NYCEDC. Policymakers aspire to align technology, government, and community impact. Response Lab is a proven model, offering actionable policy for pandemic response in NYC, and every major city globally.  

I will continue to write grants and solicit foundations and philanthropists to build a powerful brand producing sustainable impact for our cities. I am just looking for the match to light that fire.

While the Response Lab is a new project by CIV:LAB and the NYCEDC, it is a natural extension of our existing core strengths. My 501(c)(3) nonprofit CIV:LAB is a curated network for civic innovation, connecting diverse local innovators from government, academia, business, and neighborhoods both within their cities and around the world. Given the outsize impact that COVID-19 has on cities, our urban focus positions us well to respond. 

CIV:LAB won a grant on August 23, 2018 from NYCEDC for $275,000 for its platform to connect urban innovation stakeholders in New York. , As of March 2020, this contract is on pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is undetermined if it will ever be completed.  

In 2019, we gained in-kind contributions from the New York Academy of Sciences, Queens Library, and Google as well as a small sponsorship from Verizon. In 2020, we gained Lowe’s Corporation as a key sponsor for our work.

As Response Lab is a new initiative, we have yet to receive any financial support for it, but we are actively fundraising for it.

Our estimated budget for the Response Lab is $14 million over the next five years, extending through 2025, to ensure that our community platform and technology are scalable globally.  We expect our staffing to include six to ten core staff members, including an Executive Director, Deputy Director, Project Development Lead, Product Manager, two to four Developers, and a Creative Lead. In the second half of 2020 we hope to secure $1m; in 2021, $2.5m; in 2022, $4m; 2023, $3.5m; and by 2025, $3m annually for a staff of at least 10 full time employees. 

We will have significant in-kind support from our local partners and ecosystem network, which is vital to our operations and success.We have applied for a number of grants to fund Response Lab’s work, including from the Robert Woods Foundation, Booz Allen Foundation, the Partnership for New York, and the NYCEDC.

Our forecasted budget for the second half of 2020 is expected to be $1,000,000 to ramp up our staffing, initiate our community outreach and marketing, and fund technology initiatives, including technology competitions. We expect our budget expenses for 2020 to be as follows: Management and Ramp Up of Staffing = $500,000; Community Outreach and Marketing = $300,000; Tech Initiatives and Competitions = $200,000.

Our model is to work with great institutions to make cities better and more resilient. The Response Lab will bring together a network of community leaders, entrepreneurs, industry and nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies to inspire innovation—a model that reflects the Elevate Prize’s platform. 

With The Elevate Prize’s support and network, the Response Lab will be in an even better position to serve NYC communities, and to expand our work to serve citizens across the country and globally. We are excited to work with the Elevate community on partnerships outside of New York to help refine our model and scale it to new places. Deploying our model in other cities will create a network of Response Labs, widening the pool of collaborators and increasing the number of scaled solutions across neighborhoods and cities, in a meaningful, ecosystem to ecosystem model. 

CIV:LAB has successfully secured funding for this type of work in the past. Unfortunately, the largest contract we have, with the NYCEDC, is currently on pause and may never come back. Along with the intellectual resources and partnerships that The Elevate Prize would help us secure, the financial support would allow Response Lab to effectively engage the communities we hope to serve and inspire innovation that addresses the problems those communities identify.

• Funding and revenue model: As a home to many projects, we need support not just with the model for the initiative as a whole, but each project must be meticulously thought through 
• Board Members or Advisors: We need support financially, refining the model and scaling to new locations. New board members and advisors outside of our network would be a big help! 
• Monitoring and evaluation: Always an issue for us as our model must track and communicate the impact of an array of projects
• Marketing, media, and exposure: Our work is special and impactful, but we need help telling the story and improving our global reach

Some of Elevate’s partners, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which are already committing resources and expertise towards community response and COVID-19 solutions could be powerful partners for the Response Lab. Not only does the Gates Foundation support social impact innovation, they have actively disseminated information and solutions regarding COVID-19. The Response Lab embodies the spirit of an article recently highlighted on their website that proclaims “Innovation and sound policies are critical to protect people during the crisis.”

In addition to expanding the Response Lab’s network and sources of external expertise, I want to ensure that we create an agile business and model, delivering value to citizens and aligning the incentives of all participating stakeholders. Groups like the MIT Center for Entrepreneurship could help us to perfect our model, improve project resilience and sustainability, and ultimately ensure an increase in collectively-created impact.

As we look to build our team, we must ensure diversity and recruit young adults from the neighborhoods that our programming serves. It will be essential that we identify partners in this recruitment process to create lasting inclusivity. While I will primarily work with community based organizations to fill these roles and increase local development, however as we scale and refine the process, groups like Code for America or Americorps could be strategic partners. 

We welcome any organizations that can thoughtfully bring expertise or philanthropic support to either the Response Lab as a whole or to specific projects.