[CivicLab Radio] [Social Justice Needs a Home]

We were located at 114 N. Aberdeen in the West Loop. The CivicLab was a space that brought together a community organizers, educators, designers, makers, artists, and technologists to co-work, research, teach, build community and create tools. We worked to increase civic engagement, foster direct participation and empower neighborhoods. It was created by Tom Tresser, and co-founded by Tom and Benjamin Sugar. The space was designed by Ed Linn and Jacob Bruni from the Chicago Design Action Network. I believe the CivicLab was the first co-working space and maker space in America dedicated to civic engagement fabrication, innovation, education, experimentation, and collaboration for social justice. We operated for two eventful years from July 1, 2013 through June 30, 2015. We were located at on the first floor of an old firehouse on 114 N. Aberdeen Street in Chicago’s West Loop. Here is a great profile on the space from Sharable (2014).

CO-WORKING

The best days at CivicLab were the ones packed with community.  We came into our space with only one friend in tow, Chicago Votes.  Who, at that time, was made up of two people and a band of Democracy Corps fellows.  In the coming months we added the Working Families Party (WFP), and Young Invincibles, Jonathan Peck, Move to Amend, the New Organizing Institute, The Roosevelt Institute, Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance and the Beukinga for Alderman campaign.  We were sad to lose Erica Sagrans from WFP, but we’re proud to say we once housed the person who led the Will Guzzardi campaign (Illinois State rep, 39^th District) to victory!

Chicago Votes doubled their staff as well as their programming to include 32 people between their Democracy Corps fellows and a team of organizers that conducted the largest voter registration drive in Illinois history.  Young Invincibles, once a small settler outpost of one, grew into a four person team as well.  It was bittersweet when both joined together to get a new space in July of 2014.  While they are dearly missed, we are also proud to have provided a home for these organizations as they found their footing and grew. We really delivered on our mission of providing a dynamic home for social change and public policy organizations and organizers to take root, flourish and collaborate.

CLASSES

A large part of being more engaged in public life involves gaining the necessary knowledge to be an informed participant.  We believe people need to make history, not watch it or be victims of it. Since we began we’ve held 80 different classes and workshops to that end.  Our class subjects covered a spectrum from classic civics to media making, to hands-on building and doing. Over 600 people took classes!

See images from our classes and activities here.

We learned about the true state of the Illinois Budget, Labor History, Parking Meter Survival, Privatization 101, Forgotten Chicago, and How to Research Elected Officials, and even how to become an elected official with our day long workshop “How to Run for Local Office, taught by master organizers Kitty Kurth and Kevin Lampe.  Brad Hunt, associate professor of social science and history at Roosevelt University and co-author of “Planning Chicago,” did a workshop on the history of planning in Chicago. We seek out subject matter experts for all our offerings. We are providing a real gateway where people can meet and learn from some Chicago’s (and America’s) most savvy and experienced civic academics and practitioners.

Food was featured pretty heavily in our offerings.   New Year’s resolutions brought people in droves to long-time supporter Jacqueline Fische’s “Vegan Fast Food Kitchen”.  Karen Roothaan offered a six-part series on how to grow your own food. We installed a stove in our full kitchen to facilitate events and classes with food and about food.

People explored How to Build a Mesh Network with Chicago Meshnet; the beginnings of programming in Processing in the course Design for Empowerment Extended, Art for Social Change, and even Storytelling 2.0 with master story teller Oba Willaim King, and people got messy with Art Therapy. Jeffrey Sweeton held a 3 part series of workshops for youth called Code Create.

We received funding from Shareable to work with the Public Lab to purchase citizen science kits and we offered classes and workshops in balloon mapping and open source sensor building.

TOOLS & INVESTIGATIONS

We set out to establish the CivicLab as a hub for civic investigation, innovation and tool building. Our biggest project here has been the TIF Illumination Project. Tax Increment Financing districts are a major piece of urban financing infrastructure. Ostensibly created to bring economic development to under-served and so called “blighted’ communities, TIFs have gotten out of control in Chicago. In 2023 they removed over $1 billion in property taxes from all properties in TIF districts – these public funds did NOT go to paying the bills for esseintial public services, but instead were doverted to secretive slush funds controlled by the mayor.

In February of 2013 we launched The TIF Illumination Project to explain and expose how this program works and who is helped and harmed by it. We combine data mining, investigatory journalism, graphic design and community organizing to reveal the impacts of TIFs on a ward-by-ward basis. We combine all our data onto a powerful and easy-to-to grasp graphic poster which we distribute at local TIF town meetings or Illumination. All this work was done and is done by volunteers. The early graphics were by Carlyn So.

The first ward we Illuminated was the 27th, where the CivicLab is located. Over 230 people attended the first TIF town hall on February 11, 2013. The invitation was made to attendees to go back to their communities and organize their own TIF Illumination meetings. We have been literally overwhelmed with the response.

The first such meeting took just three weeks to organize and since then we have presented all over the city and elsewhere in 245+ public meetings (through March of 2025) in front of over 15,000 people. A partial record of these meetings are online here. You can purchase presentations from these meetings from our TIF Data Store.

The most important thing about this amazing unleashing of civic knowledge is that every one of these meetings has been independently organized and facilitated. In some cases they are organized by long-lived and well established community groups. In other cases the meetings were organized by new coalitions or neighborhood groups that had never pulled off a public meeting before.

The TIF Illumination Project is a very powerful example of data and visualization combined with original reporting and old-school organizing to galvanize citizens to act, to come together and to learn about how their government works. Our Illuminations have literally sparked hundreds of hours of discourse, civic indignation and more – we’ve unleashed priceless civic imagination where neighbors across the city are questioning old Chicago Machine driven definitions of “community development” and clout-driven plum projects fueled by public dollars and are asking the most basic questions of public life such as – what, exactly, does a “World Class” city look like? and who gets to decide what a “developed” community looks like? They are wondering if there are other more grassroots solutions to persistent problems of poverty, access to public services and long-term sustainable and equitable local economic development.

Our work has led to practical reform. We called for TIF information to be put on Cook County property tax bills and this has been done.

Our origiinal research revealed that there was $1.71 BILLION in property taxes sitting in TIF accounts on January 1, 2014 and we have continued to analyze all of Chicago’s TIFs every year around mid-July when the latest annual reports are released. All of this work – from 2013 to the present is available here: https://tifreports.com/chicago-tif. NOTE – Most of the content at The TIF Illumination Project is behind a pay wall because this work has been shunned by locl and national funders.

Our TIF research has become part of local political discourse – is Chicago broke or are the true sate of our finances being intentionally obscured? This key question sparked a major publishing project and Tom Tresser organized and release “Chicago Is Not Broke. Funding the CIty We Deserve” in July of 2016. Over 4,000 copies have been sold despite the fact that no major media platform has reviewed the book. It was refreshed and brought up to date in 2024. You can purchase a hard copy for $20 (+shipping) or view it online via ISSUU for $15.

Now expanded this sort of civic investigation and illustration to take on Illuminations of charter schools, the use of hedge funds to gobble up distressed properties, the spread of privatization in Chicago and revealing conflicts of interest across the web of powerful elected and influential who drive public policy here.

We also worked with the Public Lab to create workshops and a lending library of citizen science kits  that can perform sophisticated analysis of the environment using balloon mapping and low-cost senors.

The CivicLab also housed investigative reporters who built an instance of SecureDrop, a system that allows whitleblowers to connect with reporters without fear of discovery. This work was based on the tools developed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and owes its inspiration to the career and spirit of Internet innovator and activist Aaron Swartz.

CIVICLAB RADIO

Thanks to University of Chicago intern Peggy Xu we produced a series of podcasts covering a range of civic engagement topics. We have always wanted to produce original civic reporting. Listen to the five episodes here.

MEETINGS

CivicLab also offered space for people just looking get stuff done or celebrate what they already got done.  Restore the Fourth Chicago (RT4) has been with us since nearly the very beginning.  In the previous year, RT4 Chicago held our first ever protest poster party for their rally, and they marched once again in the dead of winter.  They co-sponsored Surveillance: What’s Possible, Chicago? where audience members left with their very own drawing of their surveilled selves.  In the future, we can look forward to Cryptoparties, FOIA Fiestas, and screenings of surveillance related films; first up, The Lives of Others.

We closed out 2013 with Democracy in Action’s holiday party (link), and began the year with The Great Chicago Buildout by Toolkits for Action.  Our friends at the Raise Your Hand Coalition held a day long retreat led by master teacher (and civic comedian) Don Washington, and in a similar vein, we hosted Teachers for Social Justice.  We were graced with the presence of the Chicago Women Developers group and we partnered with The Chicago Time Exchange for a day of skillsharing and free-sales during sharing economy week.  More recently, we made a bunch of new friends when the Chicago Chapter of the New Leaders Council held their weekend long leadership trainings.

We were extremely proud to host {she crew} over the summer of 2014.  {she crew} is “a six-week summer program for girls, ages 12 to 14, to engage in a multi-disciplinary journaling workshop that culminates in a theatrical performance written entirely by the participants.  We are investigating the question of what it is to be a woman, how one defines womanhood, and how we see ourselves in relation to that definition.”  They begin each day by cooking a meal in our kitchen, followed by writing and performance exercises, yoga, and so much more.

EVENTS

In October of 2013 and again in October of 2014 we hosted Chicago’s version of the Global Cardboard Challenge, organized by Jeff Sweeton of CodeCreate. Dozens of kids, parents and artists converged at the Lab to make a wide range of fun things using only cardboard.

One very fun series we did on a monthly basis was called “What’s Possible, Chicago?” (WPC) in collaboration with Tim Magner of Nature’s Farm Camp.  WPC was a performance series in which we take a single topic about life in Chicago and discuss it from a multitude of angles.  It would be impossible to highlight any of the 30+ speakers who came to present, but the photos are demonstrative enough: Space, Passion, Surveillance, Food, Education.  To our pleasant surprise we became the home to a forum on asthma by InterFaith Illinois. We proudly looked on as {she crew} finished their final performances, and Mom’s United Against Violence and Incarceration held an evening of stories called “Sticks and Stories”.

IMPACT

Over 80 stories have been written about the CivicLab and its work, mosly in the local media. We were profiled in the July 22, 2013 cover story for The Nation, “Chicago Rising!” We were blessed with a wonderful profile  in Shareable, The Ward Room and Progress Illinois. Co-Founder Tom Tresser was even featured in a creative animate produced by local public radio station WBEZ to explain the TIF program.

We advocated that TIF impacts be placed on the property tax bill with an online petition. In July of 2014 Cook County Clerk David Orr gave the citizens of Cook County exactly that. Now 220,000 property owners across the county will see, for the first time, exactly how much of their property taxes are being gobbled up by the 435 TIFs across Cook County. In November 2014 we launched our first crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to produce short TIF training videos so we can place them online where people will access them at no charge. The first two videos, “TIF 101” and “TIFs Off the Rails – Public Policy Problems With TIFs” have been produced thanks to 120 donors! Thanks to Professor Rachel Weber of the University of Illinois at Chicago and then Cook County Clerk David Orr for appearing in our first video. And thanks to Professor Richard Dye, Professor Stephanie Farmer and community leader Doris Brooks for appearing in the second.

After dozens of community meetings, in 2019 we determined that TIFs were corrupting and racist and should be abolished. See this petition for the arguments.

Tom Tresser’s TIF and civic-related presentations have been viewed over 280,000 times! This work has made a difference. See this image of seven newly elected aldermen protesting outside City Hall in April of 2019!

We were often asked – what is the goal of the CivicLab?

We like to say our mantra is Investigate. Fabricate. Educate. Activate. Liberate. Repeat. We often refered to ourselves as a “do tank” as opposed to a think tank. Our tag line was “Making Democracy.” We practiced the discipline of the Ladder of Participation as articulated by Sherry Arnstein in 1969. We also practiced the ways of popular education and planned serendipity.

We believed people should be makers of history. They should be active, creative, connected and resourceful shapers of their democracy. We believe that America is a “work in progress: to be fashioned by her participants and so we are all makers in this sense. In order to be effective makers folks need information, tools, mentoring, practice and a place to work. The CivicLab wanted to be – and was during our brief existence – a platform for civic collaboration, research, education, innovation and tool making. We helped to make democracy more present, powerful and inclusive in Chicago.