The problem
People are doing serious civic work everywhere: tenants organizing in Detroit, worker centers supporting immigrant labor in Phoenix, transit advocates fighting for better service in Nevada, mutual-aid networks keeping neighbors housed, local journalists exposing corruption, and public-interest teams building tools that make government easier to understand. The hard part is finding them. The public record is scattered across local news, organization websites, nonprofit directories, podcast interviews, campaign pages, government records, and research reports. A person may be visible in one city but invisible to someone outside that network. Atlas exists so useful civic work does not stay hidden just because it is local, poorly indexed, or spread across many sources.What Atlas helps users do
Find civic actors
Search by place, issue, actor type, source type, or keyword. Start with a
public question like “Who is working on housing in Detroit?”
Trust the record
Inspect source titles, dates, URLs, excerpts, corroboration, freshness, and
correction pathways before treating a profile as useful.
Turn discovery into work
Save actors, create source-linked briefs, track coverage, watch for changes,
export proof, or connect an API and agent workflow.
What Atlas knows
An Atlas record can include:
Atlas should make the confidence state visible. A profile backed by one old
source should feel different from a profile backed by multiple recent,
independent sources. The trust guide explains those
distinctions.
What Atlas does not claim
Atlas does not decide who is important, endorse a group, verify every statement inside a source, or turn a mention into a guarantee that a person is currently active. Atlas organizes public evidence and gives users enough context to make a judgment. That boundary is especially important because Atlas publishes information about real people. A confident-looking but weakly sourced record is worse than an empty result. The product is designed to show uncertainty instead of hiding it.How people use Atlas
1
A public user searches
They search for housing organizers in Detroit, open a result, and check
whether the profile has current source evidence.
2
A civic team builds a brief
A nonprofit entering Phoenix saves worker centers and tenant groups into a
workspace, adds coverage gaps, and exports a source-linked briefing for a
field team.
3
A developer builds an integration
A civic tech group uses the API to find transit organizations in Nevada, reads
source evidence, and links records into a local dashboard.
4
An agent runs research
An MCP client or Scout workflow runs discovery, syncs results, and opens the
run in Atlas so a human can review sources and visibility before acting.
Why Rebuilding America maintains Atlas
Atlas is maintained by The Rebuilding America Project because the nonprofit’s work depends on finding credible civic actors across the country and making that knowledge reusable. The platform is broader than one show, one organization, or one campaign. If someone is doing good work anywhere in the country, Atlas should be able to help people find it, verify it, and connect it to the broader network of public work.Start using Atlas
Quickstart
Choose the public, team, or developer path.
Browse Atlas
Walk through a public discovery example.
Trust and provenance
Understand what Atlas knows, how it knows it, and what it does not claim.
Build with Atlas
Use the API, MCP server, Scout CLI, or self-hosting path.