Welcome

Dear Friends,

It seems like yesterday that 2025 began and here we are coming to its conclusion. 2025 has been a difficult year with a number of challenges but many more highlights. As I reflect on this year, the word that resonates is resilience. The work of the Civic Commons team, alongside many of you, has shown what is possible when we lean in and work with each other. I and the team at Civic Commons are thankful you're part of our community and we're part of yours.

—Michael Brown, Civic Architect

Reflecting on 2025

It’s been a very full year, and we accomplished a lot! Here are a few highlights we’d especially like to share with you:

Growing the Team 

It’s been a year of essential and exciting growth for the team, adding 4 new staff members! We are now fully staffed and energized by the inspiration and expertise from our new team members.  

Belonging Goes Statewide

Civic Commons started 2025 in Spokane supporting community leaders as they implemented Communities of Belonging, a Civic Commons-curated approach to help build stronger ties within and across communities. 

We concluded the year by accepting the role of convener at the Washington Belonging Table. The Belonging Table, first convened by the Othering and Belonging Institute, is a consortium of public, private and nonprofit institutions working together to ensure that every Washingtonian has a full sense of belonging and material actualization of belonging without othering.

The need for a restored sense of community and Belonging is urgent. Civic Commons, as the conveners of the Washington Belonging Table, will operationalize Belonging throughout Washington State by inviting members into co-creation and responsibility via surveying, network weaving, and narrative shift through storytelling around what it means to have a Washington for All.  

Storytelling with Data

The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity was built to provide a data-driven, economic scorecard to leaders in the private, philanthropic, government, and community sectors. The Scorecard offers common metrics and common language to enable collaborative strategy-setting and real solutions to our region’s toughest problems.  

 
In 2025, we refocused on shared prosperity by elevating the Scorecard:  

• In January 2025 we held a virtual event, The State of Prosperity. We enjoyed a lively and generative panel discussion connecting Scorecard data to the real-world solutions being pursued by attending organizations.  

• This summer, the team embarked on a full redesign of the Scorecard website. We partnered with Mitsui Creative and Community Attributes to reframe the scorecard data in a more accessible manner and updated some data sources, creating a more cohesive experience.  

Big Year for Network Weaving

Our Network Weaving work really took off in 2025. Black Home Initiative, Civic Commons’ first network weaving effort, continued to thrive and make immense progress toward their goals.  

A New Network to Weave: Starter Home Production Plan

In 2025, we embraced an opportunity to address our state’s affordability crisis and help make home ownership more accessible to first-time homebuyers of low- and moderate-income in Washington state.

Through a contract with the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, we created The Comprehensive and Scalable Starter Home Production Plan and Playbooks (SSHPP) - a robust, multi-year, action-ready strategy to build quality starter homes, inspired and informed by Civic Commons’ unique network weaving model.  

Our Starter Home Plan work in 2025 was immense:  

• We developed and submitted the Starter Home Plan and Playbooks to the Washington State Housing Finance Commission 

• We strengthened relationships with elected officials 

• We secured support from key elected officials and agencies for Civic Commons to advance implementation of the Plan and Playbooks 

• We conducted offsite factory tours with key leaders 

 
Stay tuned for more exciting Starter Home Plan work in 2026! 

Black Home Initiative Growing and Thriving

In 2025, Civic Commons received national recognition for our leadership of the Black Home Initiative (BHI) as one of six awardees for the Mutual of America Foundation’s Community Partnership Award.  “The 2024 Community Partnership Award winners exemplify the spirit of partnership and innovation that drives meaningful change in communities across the country,” said Sara Wiencken, Chair of the Mutual of America Foundation. “Their work is transformative for the individuals and families they serve and a model for how sectors can come together to create beneficial change.” 

Celebrating the achievements of the Black Home Initiative is celebrating the achievements of what over 120 partners across three counties have done collectively. The shared priority of the Black Home Initiative is to help over 1500 low-moderate income Black households become homeowners by 2028. The work of BHI takes a system transformation approach with the recognition that no one organization, funder, government entity or individual could do this on their own.  

To date, over 539 Foundational Black homebuyers have secured homes through the work of BHI! 

To conclude the year, BHI convened partners from across the network for the Virtual BHI Partner Summit. The gathering provided an opportunity to reflect on progress across project teams, share updates, and align priorities as we head into the new year. 

The summit highlighted key milestones, surfaced opportunities for deeper collaboration, and reinforced a shared commitment to advancing Black homeownership through coordinated policy, community, and systems-level work. Partners also discussed upcoming focus areas for 2026, including strengthened project team infrastructure, county-level engagement, and continued network alignment. The Virtual BHI Partner Summit served as an important moment to reconnect, align, and build momentum ahead of the In-Person All-Partner Summit scheduled for February. 

For more information on BHI or SSHPP, check out our website at civic-commons.org 

Funding Success

None of this work would be possible without the generous support of numerous donors and funders. This year, we were honored to receive over 2 million dollars in grant awards. Your continued trust and faith, in the form of financial support, is both humbling and inspiring, and we are so grateful.  

Happy Holidays

From all of us here at Civic Commons, we wish you and yours a great end to 2025 and look forward to what 2026 will bring!