A community-owned research platform that connects the voices of people experiencing homelessness across Contra Costa County — giving the County a closer-to-real-time picture of the system than any annual count can provide. AI handles the scale. Fellows handle the truth.
The homelessness response system gathers enormous amounts of community input every day — intake interviews, public comments, surveys, outreach conversations. Each voice is heard in its own room, by its own team, on its own timeline. No single team can read across all of it, so valuable patterns stay scattered.
There's a timing opportunity too. The annual Point-in-Time count is an essential benchmark — but it's one night, once a year, and conditions on the ground shift monthly. The Network gives the County a closer-to-real-time signal of the true status of homelessness, so services can be tuned as needs change, not a year later.
The Civic Signals Network is infrastructure for connection. It doesn't replace community voice — it amplifies it. It doesn't summarize what people said — it equips Fellows to show what it means.
Coordinated entry intake — someone describes losing housing after a medical crisis, and the gap between hospital discharge and shelter.
Public comment at a Continuum of Care meeting — a provider describes the same discharge-to-shelter gap from the other side of the desk.
Outreach conversation at an encampment — months later, a different person describes hitting the exact same gap.
Each signal is heard in its own room. The pattern stays scattered across teams and timelines.
The Civic Signals Network connects them — surfacing the pattern, documenting the reasoning, and delivering it to the County's planning table in time to act.
The Civic Signals Network is not an AI tool that replaces community judgment. It is a research workspace that Fellows direct — giving them the analytical reach to read thousands of voices without losing sight of any single one.
Public comments, testimony, survey responses, meeting records, and direct feedback from people experiencing homelessness are gathered across the county. Input arrives in multiple formats and multiple languages.
AI handles what no person could: reading thousands of inputs at once, translating across languages, clustering similar concerns, and flagging patterns that appear across the whole system simultaneously.
Fellows review what the AI surfaced. They verify patterns against their own community knowledge, decide which signals are most significant, document their reasoning, and determine what the findings actually mean for the communities they represent.
Fellow-produced findings are delivered into the County's strategic planning, implementation, and evaluation processes on timelines that match when decisions are actually being made. Findings are attributed to Fellows and delivered as documented community research, not anecdote.
"'AI-enabled' community engagement can quietly replace community voice with algorithmic summary — if it isn't designed to prevent it. The Civic Signals Network is designed to make that failure mode impossible."
The Civic Signals Network was designed by the Civic UX Research Lead with these principles as hard constraints — not aspirations.
Every finding produced through the Network is documented with the reasoning behind it — who said what, how it was interpreted, and why it was prioritized. Findings carry weight because the community can see how they were made.
The research workspace is built around Fellow judgment, not algorithmic efficiency. Usability testing with Fellows — conducted by the Civic UX Research Lead — ensures the platform multiplies what Fellows can attend to without obscuring their view of the community.
AI translation ensures that community input in every language spoken across Contra Costa County is included in Fellow analysis — not filtered out before it reaches a policymaker. Multi-lingual output means findings can be shared back with the communities that generated them.
Beyond listening at scale, the Network maps the service landscape as people actually experience it. This is gap analysis grounded in lived navigation: Fellows identify not just what services exist on paper, but whether the connections between them hold in practice — and where the County's next investment would build the most bridge.
Warm handoffs that carry someone from one service to the next — outreach to coordinated entry, shelter to housing, housing to aftercare. The map shows where these connections hold, so the County knows what to protect and replicate.
Points where the path forward drops away — a referral with no receiving program, an eligibility gap, a waitlist with no interim support. The map shows where a new connection would catch the most people.
The Civic Signals Network doesn't produce algorithmic summaries. It produces community-validated research findings — documented, attributed, and ready for the rooms where decisions are made.
Published throughout the year, these reports give the County a closer-to-real-time picture of homelessness between annual Point-in-Time counts — so services can be tuned as needs change, not a year later.
A living map of the county's service landscape — where the bridges hold and where the cliffs are — with gap analyses that show where new connections would help the most people.
Formal written input into the County's strategic planning, implementation, and evaluation processes — delivered on the timelines those processes require, not after decisions are already made.
Findings translated into plain language and multiple languages for sharing back with people experiencing homelessness, providers, mutual aid networks, and local organizations — so the community sees what Fellows found, not just policymakers.
The Civic Signals Network is at the heart of everything LELI does. If you're a researcher, a county partner, or a community organization, we'd love to talk.