The Persona Community is our way of putting real people back at the center of product and project decisions. It is a living library of community‑co‑created personas built through rigorous, ethical research frameworks such as Community‑Based Participatory Research, desire‑based inquiry, narrative sovereignty, and community‑based participatory design. Instead of treating “users” as abstract segments, we work with communities to create composite characters who represent actual learners, workers, families, and neighbors, with full histories, aspirations, and constraints. Teams then use those personas to pressure-test policies, products, and programs before they reach the real world.
The Persona Community functions as applied research and governance infrastructure. Each persona draws on a documented protocol that includes relationship‑building and positionality checks, strengths‑first interviews, reflexive thematic coding, triangulation with administrative and quantitative data, and community review for accuracy, agency, and dignity. Community members help draft and own these personas, with formal narrative ownership agreements and advisory boards that hold real authority over how stories are used. When a persona says, “I only have a prepaid phone and I’m not giving this app my location,” there is an audit trail behind that insight, including interview transcripts, themes, and community feedback that anchor what it represents.
We are currently building out the Persona Community across three applied contexts so people can see its fit beyond any single project. In workforce and education, personas represent adult learners, returning workers, justice‑impacted individuals, undocumented students, caregivers, and others whose lives are rarely captured by enrollment fields or HR codes; in this context, supporting teams to design skills‑visible, equity‑protective systems that feel usable and safe.
In social‑sector organizations, including nonprofits, social enterprises, and mission‑driven companies, personas capture the full humanity of people navigating housing instability, food insecurity, health inequities, or immigration systems, so programs and products can be reshaped around community‑defined strengths and desires.
In civic technology and local digital twin projects, personas place residents, workers, and digitally excluded communities at the center of complex simulations of energy transitions, mobility changes, and airport operations, connecting sensor data and models back to lived experience.
Taken together, these three use cases make the Persona Community a kind of public‑good thinking space that travels with the work. A city exploring digital twins, a college building new pathways, a coalition redesigning a safety‑net program, or a mission‑driven startup testing a product can all plug into the same shared library and protocol and either adopt existing personas or co‑create new ones alongside their communities.
In the Persona Community, each persona “lives” as a voice at a shared round table inside an AI-supported space for conversation and design. Teams can enter that space and ask questions, test ideas, sketch new policies or features, and see how different personas respond in real time, side by side. A workforce director might explore how a new intake form lands for a justice‑impacted learner and a single parent working nights. At the same time, a civic technologist tests how a mobility change affects an elder with limited digital access. Because the AI can surface patterns, tensions, and blind spots across the whole table, participants can iteratively refine their plans in consultation with personas rather than guessing from a distance. This round table structure turns the Persona Community into a practical engine for inclusive co‑design, where community‑grounded perspectives help shape each decision before it becomes practice.