2025 Impact Report
Dear Friends,
This past year at Cortico reaffirmed something both simple and urgent: in a time when trust is fraying — and spaces for authentic communication are increasingly rare — being genuinely listened to can change what’s possible.
Across classrooms, newsrooms, libraries, and community spaces, we saw how small-group conversations created space for honesty, care, and understanding. These moments weren’t loud or performative. They were human — and in 2025, they felt more necessary than ever.
Many people today are retreating from public spheres into private circles of trust — a text thread, a coffee group — a reasonable response to an increasingly noisy world. At Cortico, we believe this instinct holds wisdom. Our work asks a deeper question: how can small-group trust and intimacy be preserved while opening into public dialogue that allows shared learning and deeper connection at scale?
In cooperation with MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication, we continue to refine an approach that blends human-centered design, responsible technology, and collaborative listening. Through this work, lived experience becomes shared understanding — turning real conversations into insight and action — informing journalism rooted in community voices, empowering young people to lead through listening, enabling local decision-makers to make more informed choices, and creating a channel for foundations to hear real needs from the communities they serve.
None of this would be possible without our remarkable team, our dedicated partners, and the supporters who share our belief that understanding begins with listening.
Thank you for being part of this journey. Together, we are creating spaces where underheard voices matter, and where people feel invited into a future built with them, not just for them.
With gratitude,
Deb Roy
Cofounder and CEO
Cortico
Cortico starts with small-group conversations where people share personal stories and listen deeply to one another. With participants’ permission, conversations are recorded and transcribed so what’s shared doesn’t disappear when the dialogue ends.
In 2025, partners used this approach to bring forward lived experience that often gets missed in surveys, town halls, and public meetings.
Cortico on Campus
Cortico on Campus engaged 35 college students from 26 campuses to lead recorded small-group conversations with peers. The program builds student leadership and civic muscle by helping fellows design and host conversation campaigns on issues that matter on their campuses. Listen to the student voices shaping Cortico on Campus.
Youth Listening Lab
At the Youth Listening Lab, 40 high school students from six cities already leading Cortico conversations in their own communities came together to connect across projects and strengthen a growing network of youth conversation leaders. Hear what young people are building together.
Newark Opportunity Youth Network (NOYN)
In Year 2 of NOYN and Cortico’s Youth Voices Initiative, youth researchers spoke with an additional 170 peers to surface why school feels disconnected from their futures, adding new findings and recommendations to the Youth Speak for Themselves portal.
City of Durham
The City of Durham continued its Be Heard Durham initiative, using small-group conversations as ongoing civic infrastructure. To date, 485 residents have participated across 77 recorded small-group conversations, surfacing lived experiences that help the city better understand and meet the needs of its residents.
With small-group conversations recorded and transcribed, Cortico’s platform helps partners surface patterns across conversations through sensemaking – a systematic listening process led by people and supported by AI tools. In 2025, we added key platform features and expanded learning supports, including workshops and guided pathways, to better support partners in their analysis. This work is also strengthened by Cortico’s ongoing collaboration with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, which helps inform how our tools and methods evolve.
Expanded learning pathways
In 2025, we invested in partner capacity-building, expanding workshops and certificate programs that help teams do sensemaking with effectiveness and care. Participants practice the full arc of analysis, from highlighting and tagging moments in conversation to synthesizing themes that can inform decisions, strategy, and public-facing outputs.
Highlights included trainings with The Frederick Gunn School, where student leaders and faculty prepared conversation and analysis plans for the school year, and California Education Advocates, where organizers and coalition partners learned how to launch conversation and sensemaking pilots and translate lived experience into actionable insight.
AI Tagging Launch
This year, we introduced AI Tagging, a new feature that supports the most time-intensive parts of sensemaking without automating the work that requires human judgment. The tool suggests themes for key moments from conversations, with brief explanations, helping teams surface patterns across conversations while still relying on human listening and local expertise to interpret what’s being said.
After conversations are held and sensemaking surfaces patterns, Cortico helps partners share what they’ve learned in public-facing forms that highlight real voices. In 2025, partners published conversation portals and medleys that made community insights easier to revisit, cite, and build on. These outputs help insights travel beyond the original conversation, reaching stakeholders, decision-makers, and the wider public.
NPR
Nearly 30 conversations with communities across the U.S. shaped NPR’s Seeking Common Ground reporting, lifting local voices into a national series on our nation’s pulse after the 2024 presidential election.
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carnegie led a national learning network of eight education-equity groups to collect small-group conversations with immigrant and low-income families, culminating in a public Voices in Education portal.
The Haitian Times
A listening tour across nine U.S. cities invited Haitian-American communities to share lived experience, helping The Haitian Times deepen its reporting and build a public record of voices through the Echoes of Strength portal.
The Empowerment Foundation
In Cincinnati, The Empowerment Foundation hosted small-group conversations with Black mothers to bring lived experience into maternal health advocacy, now shared through a public conversation portal.
PBS FRONTLINE
PBS FRONTLINE launched a six-week youth fellowship at the MIT Media Lab, where students led conversations about AI and civic life—resulting in a conversation portal for use as primary source material for future reporting and a model for youth-led civic dialogue.
NYC Department of City Planning
Community conversations captured how Bronx residents understand the Cross Bronx Expressway’s legacy and are shaping a new story for its future, shared through a public portal and a voice-powered exhibition at the Bronx River Art Center.
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