By: Suzanne Skjold

I was excited to see what the platform’s bill tracking capacities could mean for +PolicyLab’s participant organizations and their coalitions, and I wasn’t alone! Dozens of Fellows across sectors shared the same interest in getting more involved in legislation that mattered to their organizations and to Hawaiʻi’s future.

My hope was that using CivicNexus together would help +PolicyLab track and support priority bills more efficiently across organizations, a top goal for the group. I also hoped it would provide insight into what priorities had shared energy, offer a broad view of all the work community advocate groups do each session, and show where opportunities to increase support may lie.

As users, we were excited about CivicNexus’s time-saving features and user-friendly displays to streamline labor-intensive tracking work. Automatic updates made it possible to track bills from seven organizations in real time—something that would otherwise be beyond +PolicyLab’s capacity.

Beyond the technology benefits and opportunity to learn together, the experiment pointed to something bigger about how we might increase community legislative participation. It hinted at what is possible when a group builds trust to share more openly and track bills together AND how much untapped interest there is for legislative participation that’s less time consuming and more accessible to non-experts.

It surfaced the lost opportunities for impact when policy advocates and community organizations who serve the same people work in isolation from each other around policy. A platform like CivicNexus can even help link “superusers,” like advocacy organizations, with nonprofits and businesses whose work touches the same communities but aren’t usually focused on legislation.

For +PolicyLab, even one year of using and testing CivicNexus produced valuable insight and new ideas about how to work together, be more targeted in action, and meaningfully involve organizations beyond advocacy groups. +PolicyLab is planning how it can continue to build on this learning for the 2027 Legislative Session.

About +PolicyLab: +PolicyLab was founded in 2025 with initial Impact Funding from Hawai‘i Leadership Forum. +PolicyLab’s purpose is to bring advocacy leaders from multiple organizations together to build trust, share strategy, connect networks, and strengthen the collective capacity of the community advocacy sector for greater adoption of legislation that widely benefits Hawaiʻi’s residents.