Opinion: Empowering Everyday Experts To Improve Our City

With the recognition that living an issue everyday makes you an expert, and that everyone has their own set of "Wouldn’t it be great if…" insights, we recently organized and co-hosted the region’s first-ever "Policy Pitch Night" to give people in Greater Cincinnati a chance to submit and pitch their policy ideas for how to improve our city. The submissions were open to anyone, and we received dozens of innovative ideas from everyday experts across the city. Five finalists were selected by a group of judges from within our "Bridgebuilder" network of community leaders. On a recent weekday evening, these five finalists pitched their ideas – Shark Tank style – in front of a panel of city leaders and a diverse audience of 100 people. Each person in the audience then voted for their favorite policy, and Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld’s office has promised to champion and implement the winning idea at City Hall. Ideas ranged from increasing the diversity of city-appointed boards and commissions to creating an Office of Homelessness Eradication to developing a new city branding strategy to attract more people to move here. Ultimately, the audience chose as the winning pitch an idea from MORTAR co-founder Derrick Braziel, whose experience led him to advocate for policy and personnel changes to better support minority business growth and innovation.