An FCI project · placements across Canada
CIVIC places students, faculty and partners inside Canadian municipalities to work on real problems under real constraints. Then it does the thing most placement programs never do: it brings them back, captures what they learned in a white paper and puts that fix in front of every other city facing the same problem.
CIVIC stands for city innovation via internships and co-op.
Drag a tile off the rack. They bump, they fall, and a fresh one drops in.
of Ontario municipal employees entered the sector through a student co-op or internship.
of those who came in through a co-op have stayed in the sector for 11 years or more.
Source: AMO Municipal Employee Survey, November 2023. Nearly 2,400 Ontario municipal employees, self-selected.
What CIVIC is
CIVIC stands for city innovation via internships and co-op. It embeds students, faculty members and partners directly into municipal, community and industry organizations across Canada, where they work on live operational and policy problems from the inside.
The loop
Most placement programs are one-way: a student goes out, does good work and the knowledge stays wherever they left it. CIVIC runs on a loop. Follow it around once.
Scroll to ride the line, or click a station
Station 01
A student, faculty member or partner joins a municipal, community or industry team somewhere in Canada. Not a satellite project and not an observer role. A desk inside the organization, with the same deadlines as everyone around it.
In the field
Station 02
The work is shaped by the constraints that shape everything a municipality does: budgets, bylaws, procurement rules, legacy systems, council timelines. If a solution cannot survive those, it is not a solution yet. That is the point of being there.
In the field
Station 03
When the placement ends, the person comes back to FCI at the University of Waterloo. This is the turn most programs never make. What was learned does not stay behind in one inbox in one city. It comes home with them.
The turn
Station 04
Back on campus, they pair with a planning student and unpack the placement together: what the problem actually was, what worked, what broke and what another municipality would need to know before trying the same thing.
Back at Waterloo
Station 05
Together they write a white paper. Not a reflection essay. A working document that names the problem, the constraints and the fix, written plainly enough that a city that was never involved can pick it up and act on it.
Back at Waterloo
Station 06
Other municipalities adopt what the paper describes. Adoption surfaces new problems, and new problems open new placements. The loop starts again, somewhere else on the map. That is the whole design: nothing learned once stays learned once.
Outward, then around again
Why placements
CIVIC is after the practical fix that gets put into practice and leaves a community better than it was. No pomp, no circumstance, no report that sits on a shelf. Every placement is held to three tests.
Every idea is shaped by the host's operating conditions: what the budget allows, what the bylaw permits, what the software can actually do. Constraints are design inputs, not obstacles.
If it can't survive procurement, it isn't finished.
Solutions are co-developed with the practitioners and residents who will live with them: the clerk who runs the process, the crew that drives the route, the counter staff who answer for it.
If they won't use it, it doesn't ship.
The measure of a placement is not novelty. It is whether the work holds up inside the host, whether it can scale beyond it and whether a municipality that was never in the room would pick up the paper and act on it.
If it only works once, the loop isn't closed.
Placements
Every node is a placement: a person embedded in a municipality, working a real problem. Select one to see who went, what they worked on and where the white paper landed.
Select a node on the map to see its placement.
Map data: Natural Earth. Placements are added as they are confirmed.
Success stories
A CIVIC story is not finished when the placement ends. It is finished when the paper exists and another city can act on it. Here is the first one, still in the loop.
Edmonton, AB → Waterloo
An automated seasonal staffing system for the City of Edmonton's Parks and Roads Services branch. It replaces a manual process that could not balance operational needs, collective agreement requirements and employee preferences at the same time.
White paper library
Every completed loop produces one of these: a plain-language working document, co-written by the person who was embedded and a planning student, built for municipalities that were not in the room. The first one is being written now.
Get notified when it publishesSmartShift: automating a seasonal staffing decision
Get involved
CIVIC needs people willing to be embedded, researchers with questions worth testing and organizations with problems worth solving. Pick your door.
Spend a co-op or internship term inside a municipality, working a problem that matters to the people who live there.
Use a placement as a field site. Test your research where the constraints are real and the results have to hold up in practice.
Host a placement. Get embedded capacity on a problem you already have, and a documented fix your peers can reuse.
Stay in the loop
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