Enterprise AI To Empower Resident-Led Community Action & Resource Allocation
For more than 50 years, Strength Based Community Change (SBCC) has worked alongside Los Angeles residents to build individual, family and community well-being. Its resident-led model has created deep institutional knowledge about how communities organize, develop strengths and create lasting change.
The relationship with SBCC began by helping the organization communicate that impact, developing a new brand system, digital experiences and growth platforms capable of expressing the depth of its work to residents, civic partners, philanthropies and government funders.
Surplus Ventures has since expanded that work from communicating organizational impact to building the intelligence infrastructure behind it.
SBCC Navigator is a Community Impact Intelligence System designed to connect the people, programs, communications, institutional knowledge and measurable outcomes generated across the organization—giving SBCC a new way to understand what is happening across its communities, coordinate action and demonstrate impact.
SBCC's greatest asset has always been the knowledge created through decades of direct relationships with residents and communities.
But as the organization expanded, that knowledge became distributed across teams, individual staff members, program records, spreadsheets, communications platforms, attendance systems, surveys and reporting requirements.
The opportunity evolved in two stages.
First: How could SBCC more powerfully communicate who it is and the impact it creates?
Then: How could SBCC turn the enormous amount of knowledge generated by its work into organizational intelligence?
Navigator addresses the second challenge by creating a shared system through which teams can capture what they learn, find information quickly, communicate with residents, understand participation, identify patterns and translate thousands of individual interactions into evidence of community-level change.
Rather than introducing another disconnected piece of software, the goal is to create an increasingly intelligent - an operating system for community impact.
• Organization-Wide Workflow & Information Architecture Mapping
• Community Impact Intelligence System Strategy
• 16 Division & Program Workspaces
• Unified Resident & Participant Profiles
• Global **Add New Profile** System
• AI-Powered Natural Language Search & Knowledge Discovery
• Voice & Conversational AI Prompting
• AI-Assisted Organizational Responses & Synthesis
• Program Roster, Registration & Attendance Data Integration
• Communications Hub for SMS, Email, Surveys & Resident Responses
• Twilio, Mailchimp & Outlook Workflow Integration
• Survey, Qualitative Feedback & Community Insight Capture
• 12-Indicator Impact Measurement Framework
• 10 Core Organizational & Funder Reporting Models
• LA County, Philanthropic & Government Reporting Workflows
• Product Requirements, Prototyping & Implementation Roadmap
• Quick-Strike Community Website Build for the COVID-19 **Give Your Gift** Resiliency Program
• Immersive Brand Development Workshops
• Holistic Brand Identity & Visual Design System Development
• Brand Operating System Implementation
• New Digital **Town Hall** Website Experience Design & Build
• Strategic Partnerships & Growth Marketing
• Workforce & Micro-Credentialing Website Platform Development
Navigator transforms SBCC's accumulated community knowledge into an accessible organizational intelligence layer.
Instead of requiring staff to know which spreadsheet, system, program or colleague contains an answer, Navigator creates a common environment for discovering and acting on information across SBCC.
Teams can understand who is participating, how they are engaging, what services and programs are reaching them, what residents are communicating, what patterns are emerging and what outcomes are being created.
AI provides an additional layer across this information—allowing staff to ask questions in natural language, discover relationships across programs and synthesize qualitative and quantitative information without requiring every employee to become a data analyst.
The result is not AI replacing SBCC's human intelligence.
It is AI making SBCC's collective human intelligence more accessible.
Navigator creates a pathway from individual community interactions to organization-wide learning:
RESIDENT INTERACTION → PROGRAM ACTIVITY → CAPTURED KNOWLEDGE → ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE → MEASURABLE IMPACT
For frontline teams, it reduces the friction of finding information, maintaining profiles, communicating with residents and understanding previous interactions.
For program leaders, it creates greater visibility across participation, engagement, needs, outcomes and emerging community themes.
For executives, it provides a clearer view across SBCC's divisions and a common intelligence layer for organizational decision-making.
For funders and government partners, it creates a stronger connection between SBCC's day-to-day community work and the evidence required to demonstrate reach, outcomes and impact.
And for SBCC itself, Navigator begins converting 50+ years of community knowledge from institutional memory into institutional intelligence.
• SBCC.Community launched as a new participatory digital platform, generating more than 500 community video submissions during its initial activation
• The SBCC Board of Directors unanimously endorsed the new brand system and its articulation of the organization's mission
• First 5 LA extended its funding relationship with SBCC for an additional two years
• The original brand and digital transformation established a stronger external platform for communicating SBCC's mission, programs and community impact
• SBCC Navigator extends that transformation inside the organization through a unified Community Impact Intelligence System spanning 16 organizational workspaces
• A 12-indicator Impact Measurement Framework creates a common structure for connecting program activity to measurable community outcomes
• Integrated profiles, attendance, communications, surveys and reporting create the foundation for a more complete understanding of the resident journey
• AI-powered search and synthesis begin turning fragmented organizational data and institutional knowledge into information teams can query, understand and act upon
• Navigator creates the infrastructure for SBCC to move from reporting what happened to continuously learning from what is happening
What began as a challenge of telling SBCC's story has evolved into building the system that helps SBCC understand, operate and prove its impact.
Interested in learning more about how SURPLUS can help your team?
Reach out to Info@Surplus.Ventures
