About The Engine
A community-driven venture studio to combat inequality
At the Engine we work with and for communities in the United States to build practical solutions – products, services and processes – that communities can use to combat social, political and economic inequality, and in the process build permanently equitable systems.
Proudly supported by:
Reframing innovation. For good.
We’re building a product, a process, and a service – as a way to test our model that communities can build their own solutions to problems of inequality at scale. Thereafter, The Engine switches to a community incubator model to expand and socialize our work nationwide.
Our statement of values
We believe that we live in an unequal country, and that while inequality isn’t inherently bad, structural inequality is destructive. Communities facing these structural problems have solutions. Universities have the duty to co-create meaningful change by building real solutions and taking real risks with and for their communities.
We BUILD: products, processes, and services.
Products persist
Products are real things that persist past their creator – especially important when that creator is a community of people.
This means products can keep solving problems even when their creator has moved on.
What we are building: The Women’s Power & Influence Index
What can we build?
People are doing amazing research and writing around solving inequality. We’re focused on leveraging that research to build services that communities can design, implement and run themselves to achieve social change at scale.
We’re building a new way for communities to solve problems
What service we are building: The New Policing Project
In this country we believe in the infallibility of the individual entrepreneur.
What about the community? Why can’t a community of people, a community organization, worshippers at a church or mosque, or the residents of a city – why can’t they engage in innovative processes?
We believe communities are just as entrepreneurial and innovative as the individuals who comprise them.
What process are we building: The Creative Justice Lab
The Difference Engine has a story
The Difference Engine has a story: it was the first automatic computing engine built through a collaboration between Charles Babbage (the first inventor of the modern computer) and Ada Lovelace (the first modern computer programmer). The device was well ahead of its time and led directly to the advent of modern computing. Babbage and Lovelace sought to use their Difference Engine to lessen the negative impact of the Industrial Age on a new class of “wage workers” who were often being taken advantage of by factory bosses.
For instance, one of the first uses of the Difference Engine was to create the first time clock to make it difficult for factory owners to overwork their staff. Lovelace and Babbage also used the Engine to lessen the mindless physical drudgery of factory work by automating rote tasks; and also used it to determine how shoddy structures in lower-income and earthquake-prone areas would be affected by aftershocks.
We love what this story represents
The Difference Engine was one of the first modern examples of how academic rigor, cutting-edge technology and entrepreneurship – brought together in a collaboration of equals during a time of stratified gender inequality – had the potential to transform humankind for the better. It’s a story of how the fruits of economic enterprise can be employed to better that enterprise and create an atmosphere of equity which then leads to positive change for the enterprise itself (the so-called “virtuous cycle”). The name and its story encapsulate my vision for the Center – an outfit that leverages the funds, goodwill and thought leadership of the economic, social and political sectors to discuss the structural inequality inherent within these sectors but then also DOES something about those issues to make a difference for the underlying sectors that give birth to the inequality itself.