Nick Vlahos

Nick Vlahos is the Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League, working to improve official public meetings, mapping the American healthy democracy ecosystem, researching local civic leadership, and bringing together parliamentarians for an exchange on global innovations in democracy. Nick is passionate about citizen empowerment and collaborative public service provisioning in contexts of inequality. He resides in Toronto and holds a PhD in political science from York University. In 2020, Nick published a book entitled The Political Economy of Devolution in Britain from the Postwar Era to Brexit. He also writes about how public participation and deliberation can elevate social well-being, mobilize problem-solving strategies facing local areas and (re)build better connections to elected officials and formal political institutions. Previously, Nick was a fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, at the University of Australia leading an international research and civic engagement initiative called Connecting to Parliament. He is a member of the Democracy R&D network and the participatory governance cluster of Participedia. Nick also worked on the ground in Alexandra Park, a social housing revitalization neighborhood in the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, leading tenant engagement, including participatory budgeting concerning capital infrastructure. In addition, Nick was part of the first Bloomberg Philanthropy innovation team in Canada, working on a project concerning civic engagement with underrepresented populations at the City of Toronto’s Civic Innovation Office.