Before Steven Levine helped organize companies around civic participation, he helped organize 393 classmates around a gift. At NYU Stern, he was part of the committee that brought his full-time MBA class to 100 percent participation in its class gift. It is a small episode beside a White House job or a company launch. It also has the advantage of being countable. Everyone meant everyone.
There is something appealingly concrete about that achievement. A good speech can leave a room feeling pleased with itself. A participation count asks who actually joined in. Levine, who earned his MBA in 2012, would go on to build a career in the space between those two outcomes: the message delivered and the person moved to act.
Today he is co-founder and co-CEO of Meteorite, the Los Angeles firm he launched with Stephen Massey. The pair build coalitions that bring organizations together around shared problems. Levine’s route there passed through television, presidential communications and a media company with a particular relationship to its audience. The job titles change. The question of what people do with an invitation keeps returning.
A camera, a president, a public
Levine worked at NBC before entering the White House communications office under President George W. Bush. Television gave him experience in the machinery behind a public-facing institution. His work included marketing and production for NBC News, MSNBC and the Today show, along with production support for Saturday Night Live. That is quite a range of reasons for someone to be watching.
As White House Associate Director of Communications, he executed presidential media events held on White House grounds. His work included Bush’s addresses on the Iraq troop surge, the financial crisis and his farewell. The assignment put him close to the practical decisions through which a presidency becomes visible: the event, its setting and its delivery to the public.
A presidential address is a useful reminder that communications has physical requirements. Someone has to make the occasion work. The audience sees a president speaking; behind that moment sits the labor of arranging how the message reaches them. Levine’s later work in social impact would keep that concern with execution, though the participants and purposes would change.
“But I’m a big believer in civic participation.”
Steven Levine, reflecting on his White House years, 2018
His White House experience also complicates any tidy reading of his later civic work through a single party affiliation. In 2018, he described himself as a political moderate with progressive social views. Participation was the conviction he emphasized. It provides a useful thread through institutions that otherwise look like a rather eclectic address book.
Univision’s invitation to act
At Univision, Levine worked in the office of the CEO and became a vice president. He helped develop the strategy behind its internal advertising agency and political and advocacy group, built its social impact brand, Univision Contigo, and led its 2016 voter engagement initiative. A broadcaster’s relationship with its audience was becoming a platform for participation.
That work had a defined public: the Hispanic community in the United States. The connection matters. An invitation delivered through an institution people already know has a different starting point from one arriving from a stranger. Levine’s work brought community engagement into the business of a media company, using its existing relationship with viewers.
His remit also included education. In December 2014, he joined an early education summit panel at the White House as Univision’s senior director for community empowerment initiatives. The panel brought together figures from Common Sense Media, PBS and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. It was a meeting of media, public institutions and the question of what children need before they enter school.
The setting placed him among organizations with different tools and a shared concern. A broadcaster, an education organization and a government office do not have interchangeable roles. Bringing them into the same discussion makes their differences useful. That pattern helps explain the kind of company Levine would later build with Massey.
A firm for the space between organizations
Levine and Massey launched Meteorite in December 2017. By the following spring, their work included the TurboVote Challenge, a Democracy Works initiative bringing brands into efforts to increase voter turnout. Meteorite offered a way for organizations to find causes connected to their own work and turn that connection into campaigns.
The firm’s present approach gives coalition building a longer horizon. Meteorite describes its work as aligning stakeholders and mobilizing industries, with an emphasis on arrangements that endure. Its account of the Civic Alliance follows an election-focused effort into civic work continuing across multiple election cycles. The recurring task is keeping a collection of organizations useful to one another.
That requires more than a common position. Meteorite’s services address the architecture around a coalition: who belongs, how members work together and how shared commitments become activity. For a communications professional, this is a shift in what counts as the finished product. The announcement introduces the arrangement. The arrangement still has to function.
An editorial reading of a career moving from media events to collective action.
Democracy, with a shift schedule
Levine’s work as a director of the Civic Alliance brings those ideas into the workplace. The alliance is a nonpartisan business coalition supporting democratic participation. Its members have included companies across technology, retail, entertainment and other industries. Its stated aim includes a year-round culture of civic engagement, with resources that companies can put to use.
There is a practical reason for working through employers. Companies already communicate with people, organize their time and establish policies that affect what a working day permits. Those ordinary powers can make room for civic activity. A reminder can direct someone to registration information. A scheduling decision can give someone time to vote.
The alliance offers toolkits, case studies, peer coaching and connections to nonpartisan organizations. Such resources give an interested company a starting point and colleagues with experience. They also make participation less dependent on one person improvising an entire program shortly before an election. Enthusiasm benefits from having instructions within reach.
The examples show how modest the mechanism can be. Phone.com described providing paid time off to vote and a full day of paid time off for employees volunteering as poll workers. In its account of joining the alliance, the company connected civic participation to a workplace benefit an employee could actually use.
Starbucks’ 2020 plans combined employee support with customer information, including resources through its app. Levine welcomed the commitment to giving employees the practical support to register and vote. The company’s public-facing channels and its internal policies offered different routes toward the same goal: helping people take part.
The Corporate Civic Playbook makes this operational character especially visible. Its Old Navy example describes eight paid hours for employees selected as poll workers, up to three paid hours to vote and an Election Day without meetings in 2020. A broad civic commitment had acquired a recognizable office accessory: an altered calendar.
Paid time for Old Navy employees selected to serve as poll workers in its 2020 program, one case featured in the Corporate Civic Playbook.
A member-company example, not a Meteorite employment policy.These examples belong to the companies carrying them out. Levine’s coalition work sits around that activity, helping connect businesses to a common purpose and to ways of acting on it. The distinction gives the story its scale. Participation accumulates through many decisions made by many organizations, each with its own employees and constraints.
Start with the people already in the room
More recently, Levine and Massey have described a framework that begins with a company’s own people, then moves outward to families, communities and the broader public conversation. Their question concerns where a business has the credibility to lead. The sequence puts the nearest relationships first and asks wider ambitions to rest on them.
It is a useful way to read Levine’s earlier work. A broadcaster has a relationship with viewers. An employer has responsibilities to employees. An alumni group has a shared institutional history. Each begins with an existing connection. Each also needs a reason for people to do something together that they would not do separately.
Levine has tended that last kind of connection in Los Angeles. As a regional NYU Stern alumni leader, he spoke about getting involved as a way to meet people in a new city. He valued the shared memories that brought graduates together. Professional networking, in this telling, starts with the fairly human wish to find your people.
His personal enthusiasms are equally specific. He and his husband married in Hawaii, and his 2018 alumni profile recorded their fondness for traveling there. Back in Los Angeles, he recommended the loco moco at Rutt’s Hawaiian Café. Even a career involving the White House and corporate coalitions leaves room for a lunch recommendation.
The 393 classmates remain a helpful place to leave him. The number captures a version of participation small enough to picture and complete enough to check. Levine’s work has grown into larger rooms, more institutions and longer commitments. The underlying challenge retains its human proportions: give people a reason to join in, then make it possible for them to do so.