Celebrating Women’s History Month and Making Our Own History

Strategy/PlanMobilityEVsEventsMicromobility
Written By Cityfi

By Nicole Davessar

Today begins Women’s History Month, and Cityfi is making a little bit of our own history. Cityfi is now a majority woman-owned business enterprise (WBE)!

As strategists and collaborators in the innovation and technology space, we think this really matters. Despite making up the majority of the population globally and in the U.S., women remain underrepresented in leadership positions in both public and private sectors. This means that often the perspectives of women, and the solutions they might bring, often struggle to find traction and grow. Last year, women founders received less than 2% of all venture capital invested in the U.S., and scarcely 17% when they were part of a mixed-gender team (compared to 80% for all-male startups). And while we celebrate now having more female CEOs running Fortune 500 companies than ever before, women still comprise only 10% of this top tier. Although better represented in the public sector, women leadership still lags with just 39% of the federal Senior Executive Service (SES) and 28% of the 118th Congress.

We believe leadership representation matters. Across the many disciplines Cityfi focuses on–transportation and placemaking, organizational development, climate and resiliency, policy, and transformative technology–we start by defining the desired outcomes and associated measures of success through a wide lens that encompasses both edge and mainstream users. Our leadership, of all genders, is committed to pursuing broader perspectives and elevating underrepresented interests and voices in defining desired outcomes, identifying obstacles and challenges, and proof-testing the viability of solutions for a diversity of people, households and abilities. The perspectives we bring and gather enrich our work and help our clients develop plans, products, programs and services that serve a broader public and greater good. 

And we are committed to “paying it forward.” As we look to the future, we hope to be able to grow and support even more companies and founders from underrepresented groups and cultivate the next generation of civic leaders and inclusive organizations. Their lived experiences will inform new and innovative solutions that will aid in addressing the intractable problems of our day and progressing toward a more equitable and inclusive future.

Cityfi Presents the Grantee Success Toolkit for The Opportunity Project

By Kyle Ragan, Mahreen Alam, and Alexander Kapur

Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau hosted the 2023 The Opportunity Project (TOP) Summit, where the Cityfi team presented the Grantee Success Toolkit that was developed for the Helping Communities Access Infrastructure Grant Funding sprint. The Cityfi team has been working closely with the U.S. Census Bureau and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop this tool over the last nine months. Through careful research, interviews and analyses our team is proud to showcase our final product, The Grantee Success Toolkit, which complements the digital products being developed by other participants in the sprint. This toolkit turns the traditional view on its head and encourages Federal Grant Program Administrators to think of potential grantees as customers rather than awardees. This toolkit provides grant administrators with practical steps they can take to improve grantee success by leveraging data and technology that the government already has access to. The investments from the federal government through IIJA, CHIPS and IRA represent a generational opportunity to transform our communities. Whether you are granting agencies looking at how to equitably distribute funds or looking for how to best position your organization for funding, the Cityfi team would love to talk with you!

Electrifying the Nation: Promoting Uptime in EV Charging

By Sarah Saltz

Last week, Cityfi Partner Alex Kapur moderated a webinar, hosted by our friends at the Urban Movement Lab, on how to address mission-critical EV charging network uptime. In this webinar, we explored the key factors affecting uptime from standards to procurement and contracting provisions to hardware to software and everything in between.

Panelists from the public (e.g., City of Los Angeles) and private sectors (e.g., Siemens) discussed why the issue is so systemic and persistent, who should be responsible for charger reliability and maintenance, and what current efforts are to solve the problem. A resounding theme was that publicly-subsidized charging fits the form of other public infrastructure, and so the risk-sharing and provider business models as well as commercial paper should reflect an appropriate balance of risk management by public and private parties. We learned that the issue is evolving as the charger landscape and technology change and that more strings attached to federal funding and data-sharing standards and protocols are coming - most critically, the recent Joint Office of Energy and Transportation’s Charger Standards for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program. We heard about several companies tackling the issue of uptime in different ways - from standardizing and aggregating data, facilitating communication from municipalities about blocked chargers, and innovating maintenance processes.

JOLT Charge, a webinar sponsor and one of Cityfi’s clients, solves the uptime problem before it even emerges by guaranteeing 95% uptimes but commonly achieving 99%, an industry metric only achieved by Tesla. They are able to achieve this through their unconventional business model, which generates revenue outside of energy sales and thus allows them to invest in rigorous maintenance protocols.

Adventures in Autonomous Vehicles at SXSW

By Karina Ricks

It is South by Southwest (SXSW) season in Austin, Texas again, and Cityfi will be there along with our partners to share what we have learned after working for four years with four cities as they navigate the arrival (and departure!) of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology in their communities.

We’ve learned a lot! Through pop-up engagements, outreach ambassadors, personal delivery device (PDD) demonstrations, policy explorations and pilot service deployments, San Jose, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Miami-Dade County shared the experiences, ambitions and concerns of their community members as they co-created and observed AV applications in their respective places. Funded by the Knight Foundation and working in collaboration with the University of Oregon’s Urbanism Next, the cohort of cities have and are bringing the public into the dialogue on AVs.

On a panel featuring Miami-Dade County’s Carlos Cruz-Casas and Kelly Jin of the Knight Foundation and moderated by new Cityfi Affiliate (and former Argo AI executive) Alex Roy, we will discuss the role and importance of cities and their constituents in shaping AV deployments and an upcoming “playbook” for cities to prepare for highly disruptive transportation technologies.

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