Marci Harris

Marci Harris is a former congressional staffer, lawyer, and co-founder and CEO of POPVOX. She likes to say that her “first startup was a town,” as she led rebuilding efforts after a tornado severely damaged Jackson, Tennessee, in 2004, leveraging public and private resources, leading a community-wide ideation and “dreaming” process, and working with federal, state, and local officials to not just rebuild but reimagine what was possible. Her policy work led her to law school and eventually to Congress, where she covered tax, trade, and health for a senior Ways and Means member and was the committee lead on transparency and anti-fraud measures for the Affordable Care Act. In Congress, Marci grew frustrated with the absence of tools to help staffers process and manage the ever-increasing influx of information from constituents and advocacy groups. In 2010, she left Washington to co-found POPVOX, which since 2011 has delivered millions of verified constituent messages to Congress through its neutral, transparent online platform and cataloged the policy positions of thousands of advocacy organizations. In 2011, POPVOX won the social media category of the 2011 SxSW Accelerator competition and was featured in the documentary “Ctrl+Alt+Compete.” Marci was named as one of Fast Company’s “Top 100 Most Creative People in Business” in 2012, received a Tribeca Film Festival Award for Creative Disruption in 2012, and was listed as one of D.C.’s “Tech Titans” by WashingtonianMagazine in 2013. She was a 2013 “Fastcase 50,” and a 2014 “Digital Citizen of the Year.” She serves on the board of LaunchTN and VoteRunLead. She is also a mentor at theCO, a makerspace and entrepreneur center in Jackson, and at Code for America in San Francisco.