For the Global Good, Mayors Move to the Spotlight

City leaders are thinking globally, even as they act locally. More than 300 mayors brought local government to the international stage in June when they promised to uphold the Paris climate accord. “We can’t wait for governments to act on climate change. For solutions, look to cities,” former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Twitter.
This is part of a larger trend of cities embracing their power to change the world by activating their residents. Set against a backdrop of population growth that predicts that two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2030, cities are seeding interest in civic engagement and local government with citizens who are eager to create more inclusive communities. “Inequality — in access and quality of services, and therefore, opportunity — is one of the single largest threats our society faces today,” says Jeff Senne, corporate responsibility operations leader and senior director at PwC. “Cities possess the highest levels of inequality and consequently provide the greater opportunity to address the root drivers of this issue.”
Global players appear to be taking notice. At this year’s Social Innovation Summit in Chicago, representatives from city offices around the globe met with business and philanthropy leaders to discuss insights and innovations related to local and global issues.  
Unlike their larger counterparts, local initiatives benefit from their scale and speed. City governments are smaller and more nimble than state and national governments. “At the city level, we can quickly impact and change residents’ lives,” says summit speaker Sharone April, director of the Jerusalem Innovation Team.
Technology also plays a role in a city’s ability to act quickly and agilely while serving its public. New online platforms, aimed at information exchanges between residents and local governments, have allowed cities to promote two-way conversations and civic engagement. In Philadelphia, a mobile lab called PHL Participatory Design Lab travels around town to give residents a chance to voice their thoughts on ways to improve their city. The city of Charlotte, N.C., plans to start a weekly podcast called Your Move, featuring city officials conversing with Millennials.
Members of the Minneapolis Innovation Team, one of about 20 innovation teams funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, discussed their web portal for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs. The portal offers resources to fledgling entrepreneurs, such as starter guides for common business types and information on how to navigate regulatory processes.
“It’s all in response to what communities said they want,” says Brian K. Smith, director of the Minneapolis Innovation Team. “When we make it easier for small businesses and minority and immigrant entrepreneurs to access the knowledge, financial and social capital they need to be successful, we not only help the business owners at the margins. We also make everybody’s lives easier.”
A similar online platform has gained popularity in Los Angeles. In September 2016, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Innovation Team introduced a program that helps small business owners cut through red tape. The open-source platform offers step-by-step guidance to overcome hurdles such as finding a location, negotiating a lease and getting a business loan. “We worked with city leaders and residents to design and test the portal and are consistently sharing the process and tools we used with other cities so that they can start with what we did and hopefully launch something even better that we can take from in the future,” says Amanda Daflos, director of the Innovation Team in the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office of Budget and Innovation.
That spirit of collaboration could be felt in another city, halfway around the world: An app called Coming Soon, based in Jerusalem, Israel, allows locals to name the types of businesses their neighborhoods lack. Coming Soon shares that information with entrepreneurs to help them target, refine and optimize their new ventures. “It provides powerful data for business owners so that they can open the right business in the right location,” April says. That data is especially powerful in a city where half of new businesses shutter within five years.
“Residents will be able to influence what is happening in their neighborhoods,” Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said in a statement. “This will impact the city through enhanced quality of life for residents and advance the business sector—a win-win for all involved.”
The focus is specific, but the ambition is broad. By creating hyper-local initiatives that encourage an engaged public, city and industry leaders hope to affect quality of life across diverse sectors, including climate, economy, technology and opportunity. Local mayors to the world: Perhaps there’s also room to act globally, but think locally.  
Presented by Social Innovation Summit. NationSwell and PwC are Social Innovation Summit partners.
Social Innovation Summit is an annual global convening of black swans and wayward thinkers. In June 2017, more than 1,400 Fortune 500 corporate executives, venture capitalists, CSR and foundation heads, government leaders, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, activists, emerging market investors and nonprofit heads convened in Chicago to investigate solutions and catalyze inspired partnerships that are disrupting history.

Improving America, One Conversation at a Time

Is it possible to solve some of our greatest national challenges while chatting over a cup of coffee? The U.S. Conference of Mayors and Starbucks think so.
When the Solutions City Initiative was announced at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Conference of Mayors in June 2014, the idea was that these conversations between mayors and their constituents would focus on supporting veterans, providing access to education and empowering America’s youth. But all five participating cities (Baltimore; Columbus, Ohio; Orlando, Fla; Phoenix, and Sacramento, Calif.) have focused on the fact that more than 6 million young people ages 16 to 24 are neither in school nor employed (a group that has been identified as “opportunity youth”). That’s because, when it comes to these cities and some of the issues their chief executives grapple with, “disengaged young people is at the top of their list,” Blair Taylor, chief community officer at Starbucks, tells NationSwell.
According to Taylor, Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, Calif., and president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors played a key role in making this partnership happen. “I believe strongly in the power of public-private partnerships,” Johnson says in an email to NationSwell. “The best opportunities allow us to leverage private sector resources to address community challenges. The Solutions City Initiative does just that, by utilizing Starbucks’ corporate citizenship best practices and Community Store model and combining it with the power to convene held by the Office of the Mayor.”
With just a couple months left before the 83rd annual Conference of Mayors in June 2015, NationSwell checked in on the program’s progress. Here’s how several of the cities are faring.
Baltimore
At a Starbucks in Southside Marketplace, a young man named Rashaud Dubose explained how his participation in the Hire One Youth initiative, which connects unemployed youth from disadvantaged backgrounds with work experience in the private sector, led to full time employment as a customer service sales representative at Wells Fargo.
Gathered around him, among the scent of coffee grounds and the sound of steaming milk, were Alan Fink, owner of ABC Box Company, president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee Donald C. Fry, and the mayor of Baltimore herself.
“We’ve heard young people share how they didn’t even know about a particular career path,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who moderated the city’s first hall discussion last October. “So many young people are limited by what they see in their home and their neighborhoods. These types of workplace opportunities are such a great way to open people’s eyes to that experience and help these young men and women find their full potential.”
After the first event, which targeted private sector employers, the city planned separate events geared toward nonprofits and foundations, and its upcoming town hall in June will focus on training. ”There are some ideas coming out of the town halls that we’re thinking about implementing,” says MacKenzie Garvin of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Neighborhood Development.
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Columbus, Ohio
Through five town halls and one strategic planning session, stakeholders across sectors came together over fresh brews, bringing fresh ideas on how to bridge the gap between out-of-work youth and businesses in need of employees. (There are more than 20,000 opportunity youth in Franklin County, where Columbus is located, alone.) “Through our meetings, we’ve been able to discover the challenges that these groups face in addressing opportunity youth and also the challenges that the youth themselves face,” says mayor Michael B. Coleman, emphasizing the importance of young people joining the conversation.
Through the Solutions City Initiative, Coleman says that many organizations and community partners learned about each other and can now work together “to help expand and elevate their work.” Coleman and his team will now transition from a convening role to a planning role, figuring out next steps to meet the needs of opportunity youth in the city.
Orlando, Fla.
While it was announced as one of the five Solutions City partners, Orlando has yet to hold any conversations with the community. “When we were approached to be part of this exciting initiative, we explained that we had several town halls for new initiatives under way and wanted to wait to get those completed until we embarked on the Starbucks project,” Kathy DeVault, director of strategic partnerships in the Office of Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, tells NationSwell via email.
The city however, says that it plans to return to the opportunity next month. “We have had several discussions with Starbucks about our desire to convene town halls that will address opportunities for youth, with a focus on the potential for bringing more STEM programming into our After-School All-Stars program which serves some of Orlando’s most at-risk middle school students,” DeVault says.
 
While the full impact of the Solutions City Initiative cannot be known until more of its ideas are implemented, the program is undoubtedly good press for the convening power of the coffee giant. As Taylor admits, Starbucks is in business at the end of the day, and the initiative is part of their bottom line. As the company looks toward the future, they want to have a pipeline of prospective employees and connections with communities that could be home to future locations.
Who knew there is that much opportunity in a cup of coffee?
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(Homepage photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)