Nick Vlahos
Deputy Director
Nick Vlahos is the Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League. Nick is passionate about democracy, and specifically citizen empowerment and collaborative public service provisioning in contexts of inequality. He holds a PhD in political science from York University, specializing in the interconnection between political economy, decentralization, and deliberative democratization. Nick recently 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 by mobilizing 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.
