Alex Johnston is the founder and CEO of Cities Reimagined, a social enterprise that helps civic leaders diagnose and solve urban problems. Alex’s work is focused on addressing systemic challenges that prevent economic growth, social mobility, and human connection in cities. Alex began her career as a social worker in Central Virginia working with teenage mothers living below the poverty line. After seeing firsthand how difficult it was for her clients to navigate the process of applying for food stamps, she began asking her local government leaders who was working on making these processes less complicated. The first city employee she asked said, “No one - that’s not something we do”, while the next said, “If they want it bad enough they will figure it out”. The last answer she got was, “Someone should really fix that”. Two weeks later, Alex quit her job as a social worker and started Cities Reimagined with the idea of placing the end user at the center of the design process. She believed that the person applying for food stamps should be the one designing the application. Since founding Cities Reimagined in 2013, Alex has worked with corporate philanthropy, local government, and global NGOs to design citizen-centered systems that build trust and facilitate connection between people living in urban cities. Her background in business gives her a knack for developing solutions with a triple bottom line: systems that benefit people, planet, and profit. Alex’s work in Detroit was awarded the HUD Secretary’s Award for Public-Philanthropic Partnerships. Alex holds a Masters in Cities with Honors from the London School of Economics, an MBA, and a certificate in Creative Cities from NYU. She is also a graduate of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia. Alex is also a Senior Fellow for the Institute of Social Innovation at Babson College where she collaborates with social entrepreneurs to address social, economic, and environmental challenges in cities.You can subscribe to my weekly roundup of the most interesting things happening in cities here: https://urbanissues.substack.com/