CommUNITY Projects

Unity Foundation sponsored and advised on the inclusion of a Teen Creative Lab within the Clark Family Branch of the St Louis County Library. This maker space provides a safe and secure, public place for youth to explore, create, and innovate in a hands-on manner. Including a recording studio and adjoining control room, a green screen corner, 3D printers that come with allowances for library members, a large-scale printer, a design studio, a gaming room, and 15 workstations, this 5,400-square-foot lab is intended to inspire and empower youth in the St Louis community. The library hosts ongoing workshops and events to foster an engaging and inclusive learning environment. 

Unity supports open-source initiatives by creating collaborative ecosystems designed to address diverse community challenges through technology. By partnering with organizations such as the Regional Data Alliance (RDA), Unity has developed solutions like machine learning tools that harmonize data standards between national screening tools and local service providers. This work improves the integration of data sources and enhances the delivery of community services. A sample project is the CommUNITY Infrastructure, which includes tools like the DDS Permissions Manager, allowing stakeholders to securely manage and share critical information. 

Unity also focuses on fostering transparency and community engagement through initiatives such as the We Move tool, developed in collaboration with Local Motion, a grassroots advocacy organization focused on transportation equity in Columbia, MO. This open-source solution, based on the Open311 API, enables citizens to report and track local issues, leading to greater transparency and responsiveness. Unity then turned the tool into an open-source, reusable platform called Libre311, which can be used in any community where transparency and awareness about geographically-based issues would be useful, such as reporting digital equity issues.

By transforming these tailored solutions and creating reusable and scalable open-source platforms, Unity creates scalable and adaptable technologies that can be customized in various community contexts. These projects aim to build inclusive digital ecosystems that connect disparate systems, facilitate secure data sharing, and promote active citizen participation. This strategic approach both drives innovation and ensures the long-term sustainability of these digital ecosystems, empowering a wide range of stakeholders to leverage and extend these tools to address their unique challenges. 

Unity Foundation has been a proud partner with Saint Louis University in leveraging an open source digital asset - the Micronaut framework - to help establish and support a software development project within SLU’s Open-Source Software Center, which was made possible by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Center provides students real world experience building and supporting an open-source library for building IoT (Internet of Things) applications using open-source software. This is valuable experience that they will carry with them into their professional careers.