Mission EDC to host first Civic Innovation Summit

MISSION, RGV – Mission Economic Development Corporation will host the 2018 Civic Innovation Summit Feb. 22 to focus on ideas through the lenses of technology and business.

According to the summit’s website, the event will provide powerful insight, practical tools and connects those attending to a community of economy builders.

Alberto ‘Beto’ Altamirano, the Expert-in-Residence for the Mission Center for Education and Economic Development (CEED), said the Civic Innovation Summit will feature workshops, panels, and presentations. This will allow those attending to experience and learn from real-time solutions to the economic challenges affecting small cities and big cities.

“Mission EDC’s Civic Innovation Summit is a gathering of game-changers and builders of the Rio Grande Valley’s new economy,” Altamirano said. “The summit is [designed] to bring together forward-thinking minds of the RGV with the expertise of social innovators, entrepreneurs, educators and policy-makers from across the country.”

The summit will feature 30 speakers such as the Weslaco City Manager, Mike Perez, the CEO and co-founder of the DREAMer’s Roadmap, Sarahi Espinoza and CEO and co-founder of Codeando México, Juan Pablo Escobar.

“We’re going to have great people such as Mark Madrid who is the CEO of the Latino Business Action Network (LBAN) in California,” Altamirano said. “[LBAN] focuses on how to explore the state-of-affairs for businesses across the country … and how we can create more robustness and high impact businesses.”

In a previous interview with the Rio Grande Guardian, Altamirano spoke about co-founding a civic engagement application, Cityflag. The application is designed to establish a bridge of communication in a local community between its residents and its government. He also shared other innovative ideas for the RGV–one of which was the summit.

“We hope to have some type of panel towards the end of our initiative in Mission where we can host some type of innovation summit,” Altamirano said. “We can have folks from all over the state come down to the Rio Grande Valley and talk about different innovations, the tech sector, the sports sector and any kind of initiative that innovation really helps.”

The Civic Innovation Summit will occur Feb. 22 at the Mission CEED building from 8:20a.m. to 6:00p.m.

Editor’s Note: For more information about the Civic Information Summit, click here. 

Editor’s Note: The links to two livestream conversations with Beto Altamirano are provided below: