The NYC Response Lab: Community Discovery in Response to COVID
In New York, we have a history of crises, and while on the surface they have all been completely different from each other, community response to them has been remarkably consistent. Much like during Hurricane Sandy, today’s neighborhoods fight back with communication, collaboration and selflessness. It is the unexpected nature of these situations that put traditional systems and infrastructure at risk and unable to properly respond. And like Hurricane Sandy, New Yorkers do what they always do best; they talk, and in many different languages.
As the COVID-19 pandemic worsened in March, our team at CIV:LAB was working around the clock, speaking to as many New Yorkers as possible to identify neighborhood level problems that could have short, medium and long term implications on our communities.In retrospect, for what would eventually evolve into ‘The NYC Response Lab, in true ‘entrepreneur textbook fashion’ (Steve Blank and Bill Aulet) these were our customer interviews. It became clear to us that not only did communities need all kinds of socio economic support, but that there were also plenty of actors ready to supply the resources and labor towards filling those needs. And as my former economist self would say, the problem was matching supply with demand.
We found numerous colleagues in government working tirelessly around the clock, managing incoming support and simply trying to grasp the multitude of factors and conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Startup ecosystem leaders and innovators were actively figuring out how to activate or adapt their product(s) to support the cause. Academia was also quick to volunteer their time, with many universities and data scientists from across the country contacting us to help. Crucially, our team at CIV-LAB convened all these players together to strategize an approach that would help neighborhoods across the City.
As a ‘startup initiative’ (and at that point with an undetermined but evolving identity), we found our beachhead market (ironically in coastline Red Hook) where COVID-19 had infiltrated the largely brown and black community in and around Brooklyn’s largest public housing facility. Upon identifying the problem (New Yorkers, especially communities of color, the underinsured, and lacking a primary care doctor, are sick or dying in their homes without support), we immediately began to coalesce with the Red Hook Initiative, Councilmember Carlos Menchaca, Cornell Tech, the Columbia University Language Resource Center and many medical professional volunteers to build a community-based screening tool that identified and supported hundreds of medically fragile residents (see below for pilot data).
Pilot Data
Our Red Hook initiative put into action our ‘product model’ (see below) with the innovation infrastructure we had spent the last two years building with the NYCEDC, ‘The Grid’. The Grid is part of the NYCEDC’s Urbantech NYC program and is an urban tech collaborative of over 130 multi-stakeholder organizations working together to solve local and urban problems, and New York in a pandemic was an optimal testing ground due to its urgency (demand) and many great institutions (supply).
The Response Lab Process
Our response grew to the pandemic through multiple projects much like the Community Medical Response Effort in Red Hook leveraged the Grid’s model — harmonizing NYC’s urban tech innovation ecosystem to close a clear hyper-local gap between neighborhoods and local institutions. While the Grid’s infrastructure and members gave us the ability to leverage our resources, connect those resources to communities, and formulate solutions, our response defined a unified mission to bring diverse stakeholders to the table faster and with more impact making the case that what we do with the Grid can be accelerated and focused.
That is why we have built the NYC Response Lab, an initiative started by CIV:LAB, Cornell Tech and the NYCEDC, leveraging the Grid, urban collaboratory, and numerous leaders in urban innovation from around the world.We work together to tackle the issues brought on by COVID-19, whether they be new problems or existing ones exacerbated by the pandemic. Our goal is 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.
COVID-19 is only the latest in a series of globally disruptive crises that New York has faced as a city: 9/11, the financial crisis and Hurricane Sandy being some of the most notable. It is clear that as a City, we can respond to these crises with ‘the best of them’. But more importantly, we now need to become more sophisticated at the organizational level, by creating more resilient, innovative, and social infrastructure that can respond physically, digitally and most importantly locally to the pandemic. We hope that the NYC Response Lab is the beginning to a more creative and resourceful approach to solving our communities and neighborhoods problems for whenNew York’s next crisis hits. With NYC Response Lab, we will allow New Yorkers to do what they really do best; respond to challenges together.
The Response Lab team and our many partners are continuously searching for problems to solve as well as for support (partner or financial) for our projects. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at <urbantechnyc@civ-lab.org> .
