Civic Dinners began in 2016 as Jenn Graham’s side project: six to ten people around a table, three big questions, equal time to answer. By 2018 it was a platform that cities and organizations used to get new voices into the room, piloted in New Zealand and launched in Atlanta with the Atlanta Regional Commission. What it did not yet have was a business that scaled.
In May 2019 Jenn brought Civic Dinners to Startup Runway’s sixth showcase in Atlanta. ‘There’s nothing like a good meal that brings people together,’ she had told Hypepotamus a year earlier, and she meant to prove it was a business. She rehearsed with the program’s pitch coaches, worked the growth problem that was holding the company back with a table of mentors in the mock board meeting, and then pitched live to an audience and a panel of investor judges, the pitch you can watch below. She won the $10,000 Community Choice grant sponsored by the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact.
“How fun is it that you predicted that we’d change our name to something starting with ‘In’!”
Jenn Graham, to Startup Runway’s founder, June 2022
What followed was fast. That summer Civic Dinners hosted a dinner for 250 Diet Coke employees to launch the brand’s Unlabeled campaign, then partnered with Boost with Facebook to convene 80 small-business owners in Nashville, with Charleston next. ‘We’ve added another thousand people to our platform just in the last month,’ Jenn said that August. Techstars, Atlanta Seed Company and The JumpFund backed the company. Startup Runway’s founder had predicted, early on, that the company would one day rename itself something starting with ‘In.’ In July 2021 it rebranded as Inclusivv, with Golden Seeds joining as an investor, more than 40 brands served, 50-plus structured conversations, and 20,000 guests across 82 countries. Coca-Cola, Facebook, Vanderbilt and Emory were on the client list.
By mid-2022 Inclusivv had been named to TAG’s Top 10 innovative companies, reached the final four of SHRM’s Better Workplaces Challenge, renewed a government contract, signed a multi-year engagement with Goodwill, and added Cisco, Siemens and Mailchimp to the roster. Jenn’s TED talk on finding common ground over food has introduced the idea to a wider audience than any dinner could. The two v’s in Inclusivv, she says, stand for more voices at the table. In 2019 one of those tables was a mock board meeting in Atlanta.
