CivicLex is a civic health non-profit that helps Lexington, Kentucky residents become civically engaged through local government, non-profit volunteering and engagement, community building, and much more.

During my time at CivicLex starting in February 2022, my focuses have largely been on overseeing our local City Hall coverage, while also assisting (and at one point leading) our social media.

News Coverage and Journalism

In September of 2022, I began serving as one of two chief writers of The CivicLex Weekly (with the departure of former writer Gillian Stawiszynski, I became the head writer in November 2022). The CivicLex Weekly goes out to roughly 4,500 Lexington residents every Monday. It summarizes the coming week’s most important meetings in City Hall, gives readers a heads up on ways to get engaged that week, and sheds a little light on our behind-the-scenes work.

Some of the big issues and stories I’m the most proud of are:

• A long form “Issue Explainer” on street safety in Lexington.
• A story on a dense solar panel regulation proposal.
• My summary of new zoning regulations being implemented due to a bill passed by Kentucky’s State Legislature.
• A write-up on a proposal to significantly change the Zoning Ordinance in Lexington.
• A summary of Council’s final changes to the FY25 budget and their adjustments to the revenue projections for FY25.
• A write-up of a controversial move to speedily approve license plate readers for the Lexington Police Department.
• An overview of economic data presented to Council as they prepared to work on the City budget.

In July of 2025, CivicLex launched a new news-focused website called The CivicLex Weekly. All of the news coverage in The CivicLex Weekly newsletter, as well as expanded news coverage we do in the future, will be housed on the new website. You can find all of my stories after January 2025 on The CivicLex Weekly website here. You can find all of my news stories before July 2025 on our old website here.

We hear often from residents, activists, and even city officials that The CivicLex Weekly is an invaluable resource for them. It’s short, simple, and also deeply informative. It is easily what most people in Lexington know associate with CivicLex’s work as an organization.

In addition to writing and editing the newsletter, I have appeared as a guest on multiple media platforms to explain local government issues. I appear on the semi-weekly CivicLex Chat Segment hosted by WUKY. I have also appeared on LEX18, My Old Kentucky Podcast, and the Lexington-focused L.A.M.E. Podcast.

Social Media

When I was first hired, I asked the team what they felt was most lacking in their social media. They replied that there were note enough faces on their feed. CivicLex hosts a number of events education Lexington residents on civic issues from Lexington elections, the city budget, redistricting, and more — but pictures of these events, pictures of staff, and pictures of the residents we serve we not posted often.

My task, then, was to personify CivicLex. I did this through a combination of simply posting pictures of our events. However, I wanted to retain the branding the organization effectively built. As well as posting unedited photos, I began incorporating photos into the graphic designs we had available.

When we did only need graphics without pictures of people, I wanted to make them a little more adventurous. I have created some, in my opinion, pretty fun graphics using many of the same design elements that CivicLex already had in their back-pocket.

Since I took over as CivicLex’s social media, our Instagram engagement has nearly doubled. The emphasis on sharing more pictures of the real people we interact with every day — as well as a general improvement of our aesthetic look — has been a major contributor to that engagement growth.

I have struggled the most with Twitter. As an organization we’re interested in making it more journalistic in nature, but are unsure how to make it work. We’ve discussed live-tweeting city meetings, but we take accuracy incredibly seriously — getting a detail wrong in the moment on Twitter may seem minuscule, but it’s a risk we take seriously. I hope to expand our Twitter presence as my tenure continues.

Graphic Design

On top of my two main duties, I have become CivicLex’s de-facto graphic designer. When we have a new event upcoming that needs promotional materials, or a new document to be published, it usually falls on me to create it.

One of my favorite design projects was the Player Guide for our Primary Candidate Guess Who Game. We revamped the classic Guess Who? board game to include primary candidates for local Lexington races. I designed an 11-page guide with information about all the included candidates that many people took home as a resource to educate themselves further on the races!

In October 2022, we held a large election event we called the Council At-Large Forum & Ice Cream Social. CivicLex held this event in 2018 when it was only a year old, and its visual brand was less adventurous. Here are some examples of the original design materials.

The organization had grown its brand quite a bit, but I wanted to find a way to honor some of the original assets while bringing them to modern CivicLex’s level. I did this by adding some of our signature blobs around the edges of materials and graphics, and updating fonts to match our current font standards. But I kept the original ice cream logo and based the Ice Cream Social’s color palette on that logo rather than using our standard white, blue, green, yellow, and oranges. I am very proud of how I built out the visual language of the event. Here are some sample materials below.

University of Kentucky Programming

In the Fall 2022 semester, I took over all of our programming for the University of Kentucky (UK). This primarily takes the form of our monthly City Committee Watch Parties (CCWP). At CCWPs, I select a recent or topical City Hall meeting for students to watch all together. Afterwards we’ll have a discussion on what students learned about the issue, how local government works, and how they feel about the meeting they watched. When possible, I invited local government officials to join in so that they are able to answer student questions — but most importantly, it is important for student involvement and for relationship building to have a personable face associated with the local government.