Exploring Life & Business with Shawna Chase of Livin’in

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shawna Chase.

Hi Shawna, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I came to this work the long way around. My arts background is classical piano and theatre. I have twenty years in product leadership, seven of those at the New York Foundation for the Arts, plus time at GE building enterprise systems. I realize those are two worlds that don’t usually talk to each other (artists and engineers) but I was asking the same question at both ends, How do you design something so the people it’s meant to reach can actually reach it?

That question followed me to Atlanta and I kept noticing the same pattern across very different sectors i.e. a nonprofit with the right services but the wrong front door, a foundation funding programs the community couldn’t find, a city full of resources the people who need them can’t find. The gap between investment and impact was getting bigger.

Livin’in started as an arts discovery app and became the through-line – a civic infrastructure platform, a Substack, and an app layer that puts community members in the driver’s seat instead of treating them as referral targets. ImpactMS is the consulting practice that funds the mission and works directly with nonprofits and anchor institutions on the measurement side: showing organizations where their community investment lands, and where it can be improved. Lastly, there will be a nonprofit arm that will run the training and cohort work.

Three structures, one mission, the same bridge built from both ends.

I’m currently building out of Buckhead, working with Atlanta organizations doing the real work on the ground, and trying to make sure the systems we hand the next generation are better than the ones we inherited.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?

No, its never easy for anyone and the harder part for most solo founders is the loneliness of building something the existing categories don’t quite fit…then having to market for it while exploring.

When you tell people you’re building “civic infrastructure” half of them think you mean roads and the other half think you mean an app. When you say you’re a consultant *and* a founder *and* starting a nonprofit, the funders who fund nonprofits want you to pick one, and the investors who fund tech want you to pick a different one. The shape of the work doesn’t match the shape of the rooms you’re trying to walk into, so you spend a lot of time translating yourself and figuring out positioning.

The other quiet struggle has been pacing, sometimes its okay to ship at 80% readiness and learn in public, other times the work matters too much to ship sloppy. Finding the line between those – not perfectionism, not carelessness, just *appropriate* care – has been a daily practice and I’m not always good at it.

What’s helped is the people, Atlanta has a generosity I didn’t expect. Every time I’ve been stuck, someone has answered an email, taken a call, or said “have you talked to so-and-so.” that has been extraordinarily helpful.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Livin’in is civic infrastructure for Atlanta, and eventually for any city willing to look at itself honestly.
At the simplest level, it’s three things working together. A Substack publication, Livin’in: Weekly, where I write about the city’s arts, tech, and culture through the lens of who gets to participate and who doesn’t. A trademark and a platform app that helps community members find the resources, services, and opportunities meant for them, without the broken pathways that define most of how social services actually work today. Finally, a mission that ties it all together – closing the gap between community investment and the people it’s supposed to reach.
What sets Livin’in apart is the starting assumption, most platforms in this space treat community members as referral targets e.g. people to be routed, tracked, and counted. Livin’in starts from the opposite premise, that community members are the primary agents. The system serves them, not the other way around.
I’m proudest of the brand’s intellectual honesty. Livin’in doesn’t pretend the work is easy or that the answers are simple. The brand’s whole thesis fits in one line – the gap between here and help is a design problem, not a personal failure. It’s a refusal to blame the people the system was supposed to serve. I also run a consulting practice, ImpactMS, that works directly with nonprofits and civic institutions on the measurement and analytics – showing organizations where their community investment lands and where it doesn’t. ImpactMS is the engine. Livin’in is the mission.
What I want readers to know is that this isn’t a tech company pretending to care about community, and it isn’t a nonprofit pretending to be a platform. It’s both, on purpose. Atlanta is the proving ground and if we can build it here, it travels.

How do you think about luck?
Both, honestly – and I think the older I get, the harder it is to tell them apart from the choices.
Good luck has shown up most often as people. The right person answering an email on the right day or a warm introduction I didn’t ask for. Someone in a room mentioning my name when I wasn’t there. None of that I controlled. All of it changed the trajectory of the work whether I get to find out about it or not.
Bad luck has mostly been timing. Building civic infrastructure in a moment when public trust in institutions is at a generational low. Launching a community-focused platform when nonprofit funding is contracting and the foundations that should fund this work are pulling back from the kinds of risks I’m asking them to take. None of that is anyone’s fault, it’s just the weather you build in.
I’ve come to believe that luck – good or bad, is mostly the part you can’t control. The part you can control is whether you’re built to receive the good luck when it shows up, and whether you’re built to survive the bad luck when it doesn’t. Most of the work, quietly, is just staying ready.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.livinin.io
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnachase/
• Other: https://livininapp.substack.com