Building a Platform for Healthy Local Digital Spaces

New_ Public, Interim Head of Local Lab, 2024–2025

My Role: Product strategy, team building, fundraising, people management · Timeline: 13 months · Team: Rebuilt from 4 to 6 · Funding Secured: $1.8M from foundations including Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and others

The Challenge

Local communities across the U.S. are fracturing under the weight of polarization, declining trust in institutions, and the loss of shared communal spaces. Pew Research shows that roughly half of U.S. adults now get their local news from online groups — more than from newspapers. But the platforms hosting these communities, like Facebook Groups and Nextdoor, prioritize engagement over community health, often fueling conflict and division rather than connection.

New_ Public's prior research had confirmed the problem, while revealing that existing platforms couldn't be fixed from the outside. Earlier pilot work with decentralized platforms like Hylo showed that working with resource-constrained tools without established audiences wasn't a viable path to scale. And attempts to build features on top of Facebook ran into fundamental constraints: algorithmic ranking, narrow response options, limited admin tools, and no access to user data made it impossible to meaningfully improve the experience. The team needed to build something new from the ground up.

But when I stepped in as Interim Head, the Local Lab was at an inflection point. It had strong research foundations but needed to make the leap from insights to a shippable product — with a team that needed to be restructured to get there.

The Solution

I took over a team in transition and moved quickly to refocus it around product execution. I created new processes and meeting structures, drafted team norms, developed an 18-month strategy and staffing plan, and coached team members directly on pilot work. In a subsequent team retro, the team highlighted the new norms documentation, OKR review process, and shift to working meetings as changes that meaningfully improved how they communicated and collaborated.

On the people side, I managed performance processes for four staff members and restructured the team to align with the shift toward product execution. I hired a new community strategist, a project manager with product management experience, and a founder-in-residence to serve as head of product. I also helped hire a head engineer. The result was a team built to ship, not just run R&D pilots.

Simultaneously, I stepped into an unexpected fundraising role. I contributed significantly to major grant applications to Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Walmart, Omidyar, and others — ensuring that programmatic goals and proposals were tightly aligned and playing a key part in earning funders' confidence. During my tenure, $1.4M was secured, with an additional $400K arriving after I transitioned to Managing Director.

I shaped the product strategy for what would become Roundabout — a platform designed from the ground up to center stewardship, local relevance, and community care rather than engagement-driven dynamics. The platform was built around two core local use cases that our research had identified as the primary reasons people turn to local digital spaces: neighborly exchange and trusted local information. It was designed to support the community stewards who make these spaces work — with tools for norm-setting, safety moderation, and proactive facilitation — rather than treating moderation as an afterthought.

The Outcome

The team I built carried Roundabout across the finish line. The platform launched in January 2026 and is now live in five pilot communities — Richmond, VA; Chattanooga, TN; Lincoln County, WI; Lancaster County, PA; and Alamance County, NC — with hundreds of community members actively participating. Growth in each pilot has been steward-led, supported through structured onboarding and early-use feedback. More than 340 people are on the steward interest list, establishing early traction and a clear pathway for expansion.

Roundabout represents something rare: a platform built not to maximize engagement, but to build social trust. It exists because a team made the hard call to stop trying to fix platforms that weren't designed for communities and instead build one that was.