2024 Impact Report

Dear Friends,

As we reflect on another remarkable year at Cortico, I’m reminded of the vital connections between learning, listening, and community understanding. At the heart of our work is our role as a learning organization—a commitment exemplified by our deep partnership with MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). Together, we continue to explore how technology and human-centered design can transform the way we listen to and strengthen communities.

Our values guide every step we take. We believe in fostering authentic conversations, amplifying underheard voices, and modeling a culture of curiosity and respect.

These principles are the foundation of our most significant accomplishments this year, and I’d like to share a few highlights

NPR Collaboration: Through our conversation-led reporting initiative with NPR, we’ve helped bring the stories of underheard voices to national attention. These powerful outputs demonstrate the transformative potential of inclusive listening.
Carnegie Corporation of New York: Building bridges across communities, our work with Carnegie has engaged a cohort of eight equity-focused community based organizations in dialogue around access to information and education. Many participants expressed that they had never before been asked to share their experiences, underscoring the profound impact of simply listening.
Newark Opportunity Youth Network Portal Launch: In Newark, our continued engagement has flourished, driven by Sensemaking Fellows who exemplify our “train-the-trainer” approach. Their work ensures that insights generated through small-group conversations are put into meaningful action, as showcased in one of our latest voice medleys.
realtalk@MIT: Our ongoing partnership with the Division of Student Life at MIT has created spaces for authentic conversations, further strengthening the university community.

This year has also marked significant evolution in our technology. We’ve developed an app designed to center the experience of conversation participants, blending usability with purpose. Alongside this, our AI prototypes represent a bold but thoughtful step into the future. We remain steadfast in our commitment to leading responsibly in this space, resisting the allure of “push-button automation” in favor of tools that elevate human connection. Notably, our partnership with Jobs for the Future showcased an early version of this prototype in action, demonstrating how technology can empower organizations to share and act on insights.

Looking ahead to 2025, we are excited to deepen our impact

Launching an RFP to expand our work on college campuses and invite student leaders to lead conversations and affect change within their communities
Building skills through dedicated project-based learning and certificate programs that bring Cortico’s tools into classrooms and organizations
Working with high school students, educators, and administrators to build civic muscle through constructive conversations
Extending the model we developed with NPR to more journalists as a toolkit to better understand and connect with the communities they report on

None of this would be possible without the dedication of our extraordinary team, the passion of our partners, and the generosity of our supporters. Together, we are igniting a new era of constructive communication and creating spaces where every voice matters.

In celebration of all we accomplished in 2024, listen to this voice medley featuring our partners sharing the impact that Cortico has brought to their work.

Thank you for your unwavering belief in our mission.

With gratitude,

Deb Roy
Cofounder and CEO
Cortico

2024 brought exciting growth to our network of partners. Of our now 220+ total partners, 2024 included:

In 2024, these partners honed Cortico’s three-step approach to amplify underheard voices and perspectives in neighborhoods, classrooms, workplaces, and communities:

Read on to learn how the Cortico approach made an impact in 2024.

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TALK

At the heart of Cortico’s approach is good conversations, where everyone has the unique opportunity to share their story in small-groups. By creating spaces for people to hear and be heard, this is the first step in amplifying underheard voices.

In 2024 we teamed up with partners who are passionate about building better listening channels. Take NPR, who shifted from traditional interviews to using small-group conversations to more deeply engage with a diverse range of underheard perspectives.

Local journalists from around the country collected conversations with people in their communities who they don’t typically reach, such as: a conservative demolition derby team in northern New York state, Muslim Americans in Central Florida, farmers in western Colorado, Indigenous college students in Oklahoma, and a book club for mothers in Abilene, Texas.

Or take Carnegie Corporation of New York, who empowered immigrant and low-income families around the country to share their invaluable experiences with their children’s education. Conversations with parents, students, and teachers aimed to answer two key questions:

1). What specific education-related information do low-income families and immigrant communities need to support their children’s academic progress, and where do they find it?

2). How do these families, including non-English speakers or newly arrived immigrants, access education information, and who do they turn to for guidance?

Across the board, our partners used the power of recorded small-group conversations to help ensure voices were not left on the sidelines:

We don’t hear a lot about the youth voices that we were able to gather because LGBTQ+ issues and religious issues…we often see them as in conflict. Those are tough conversations to have. And so giving a space for folks to talk about that and amongst their peers, amongst people who understand–I thought that was really, really powerful.
Sarah Searfoss, Communications Manager, NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

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UNDERSTAND

Cortico’s approach goes beyond talk — it’s a method for better understanding, with concrete outputs like conversation maps and voice medleys. These outputs are made possible by “sensemaking”—a balance of human-led and AI-assisted analysis that surfaces patterns, themes, and insights across conversations. In 2024, we saw more engagement in sensemaking than ever:

We believe anyone can be a sensemaker. By positioning users as active participants in sensemaking, we are embracing a shift from conventional analysis methods to community-powered understanding.

In 2024, we expanded our workshop and certificate offerings to help more community members share their perspective as part of a collaborative sensemaking process. Thanks to Cortico’s Learning and Practice team, more participants are now equipped to do analytic listening with their communities, designing engaging conversations, deploying natural facilitation abilities, and utilizing the technology of Cortico for collaborative analysis and deeper listening.

2024 also included a milestone introduction of AI prototypes, helping users identify patterns and themes across many conversations more effectively. We use AI not just to make sensemaking easier, but also to make conversation analysis accessible to anyone without extensive training. As we continue to thoughtfully rollout AI features in 2025, we remain dedicated to our guiding principle: AI to support, not replace. Our “slow” and strategic approach to AI ensures that the journey from conversation to insight remains grounded in human intuition and local knowledge.

The process Cortico is going through is modeling the thoughtfulness they bring into being in the greater world through their tools. This experience has even stimulated deeper conversations within our organization about how we interact with AI ourselves and how we bring it into our classrooms. Cortico is weighing the pros and cons of AI as well as anyone could in their pursuit of a stronger, more inclusive and resilient, public sphere. So I have confidence in the process, and feel grateful to be a part of it.
Jennifer Chace, Founder, Maine ED 2050

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SHARE

After surfacing underheard voices and making sense of them, it’s now time to amplify. Cortico makes it possible to share the big picture of what people are saying – with a variety of voice-powered outputs – extending the power of small-group dialogue long after the conversation ends.

We work with partners to allow their conversations to travel, helping them tell the story of their community and provide participants an impactful way to hear and be heard. Below are just a few highlights from 2024:

The Haitian Times used voice medleys to elevate authentic stories of the Haitian-American experience and illuminate a deeper understanding of their community needs and wants.

From Newark Opportunity Youth Network (NOYN), this powerful medley highlights the experiences youth shared for why they are absent from school.

NOYN youth leaders also used the Youth Speak for Themselves portal to share insights on absenteeism and education reform with key stakeholders, including at Teach for America’s new teacher training.

Deloitte teamed up with community-based organizations around the country to create the Climate Voices portal. The portal captures the perspectives of those in traditional energy sectors, bringing their voices into the broader climate agenda. Deloitte is using the portal to help create a scalable model that other regions and sectors can adopt, ensuring every community has a voice in the global climate transition narrative.

And finally, NPR utilized conversation highlights to craft a series of compelling stories that shed light on how and when communities hear each other in a divided country.

Working with Cortico has provided a new way to share underheard community voices and strengthen our data-driven approach to City decision-making. The Portal tool, in particular, provides a more expansive and transparent way to share what we’ve learned from residents. We heard from residents that they felt heard and valued as participants in the conversation.
Constance Stancil, Director of Neighborhood Improvement Services, City of Durham

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