Who We Are

Origin Story

Founded in early 2021, Edge Collaborative is a civic incubator, born from the needs we saw while working in local government. There, we had an up-close seat to the mechanics of public bureaucracy - including both its broad range of capabilities in serving its constituency as well as a variety of its institutional blind spots. 

We observed a few things during our time there:

• In many cases, community and volunteer groups serve as the culture and history-keepers of a place. They are grounded in how the community has evolved and changed over time - often to their detriment;

• Many of the public systems that have been designed for administration and compliance have in turn left very little room for meaningful community input; 

• Cities wanted projects to attract investment, and community groups demanded that projects respond to their neighborhood needs and environmental considerations. Very often, these dynamics led to antagonism and increased tensions between the two.

Over several years, we came to understand that many of the emergent disconnects in the region might be better addressed if the region could fundamentally reimagine its challenges as opportunities to collaborate. Doing so would entail bringing groups that normally didn’t interact with one another - a coalition of unlikely allies. But to do this would require investing in a layer of civic infrastructure - to translate local community-led priorities into a tangible set of projects and public-private partnerships. 

After leaving City Hall, we founded a civic incubator to do just that – animated by a belief that our most significant economic and social challenges – inequality and climate – are also our greatest opportunities to innovate and work together. We believe that all of us deserve a more participatory, inclusive economy where communities have greater agency over their future. We’re starting this work in Stockton. And the challenges for Stockton, as for other American cities, will grow as we grapple with an unprecedented magnitude of economic transition over the next several decades.