The Big Easy Has a Bright Idea to Curb Violence

In a seemingly miraculous feat, New Orleans has managed to drop its notorious murder rate by 20 percent this year — to 155 deaths — the lowest number the city has seen in almost 30 years. Interestingly, however, it wasn’t because police got tougher on the streets, but because city officials got organized.
Under Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s NOLA for Life program, launched in 2012 to rethink the city’s murder reduction strategy, New Orleans’ Innovation Delivery Team led the charge in finding new approaches to curb violence.
New Orleans was one of five cities selected for the pilot program, which was funded with a $4.2 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2011. The team was comprised of eight people using the nonprofit’s innovation delivery method, which helps mayors create and implement big solutions to local problems. The team serves as an in-house consultant firm for City Hall while tapping into global resources and experts provided through Bloomberg Philanthropies.
The team worked with the New Orleans’ police department to analyze data relating to murders, while also looking to strategies from other cities such as Memphis, Chicago and New York. It also met with academics to help comb through the data more deeply while hosting focus groups with at-risk young men, providing a new path for a better murder reduction strategy, according to Fast Company.

“The biggest thing that went against common belief is that a lot of our violence was related to groups and gangs,” says Charles West, who lead the innovation delivery team. “We were always told that we didn’t have a gang problem. But we had gangs of significant size, and people just weren’t talking about it. More than anything, there wasn’t a specific form of policing strategy for groups and gangs.”

The team came up with 130 different initiatives to approach the violence problem according to West. NOLA for Life now operates a multi-agency gang unit which has helped the city ramp up prosecution of gangs.

Other initiatives involved agencies such as the Department of Sanitation, which can train and hire ex-prisoners to receive a commercial driver’s license in an effort to prevent recidivism and find a job.

“Everyone has found a place in it … and everyone is accountable,” West says.

But what made it work was the amount of coordination and organized approach in which city officials tackled the problem. If the city continues on this track for reducing its murder rate, it would be the first four years in a row that murders have dropped.

The Big Easy is currently making room so it can continue to fund the program with tax dollars, which will include more initiatives to step up economic opportunities for African-American men. Meanwhile, Bloomberg Philanthropies is expanding the program with $45 million and has called for more than 80 American cities to apply for funding.

MORE: Can $45 Million Worth of Data and Technology Improve U.S. Cities?

Can $45 Million Worth of Data and Technology Improve U.S. Cities?

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has long supported civic innovation, but the philanthropist is ramping up efforts to help local governments through his charitable foundation’s Innovation Delivery grants.
Bloomberg Philanthropies pledged $45 million to American cities looking to use big data and digital tools to help municipalities solve urban issues like economic development or infrastructure.

“We’re asking cities to do so much more,” says James Anderson, who heads up the innovation programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “We need cities to come up with bigger, better ideas more often, and we don’t want to leave innovation to chance.”

More than 80 prospective cities were invited to apply for a grant, which can range from $250,000 to $1 million annually for three years. Candidates must have at least 100,000 residents and a mayor in office for at least two years.

The Innovation Delivery grants will also come with a team of experts to help roll out the charity’s data-driven model, which has been developed based on programs in Chicago, Louisville, Atlanta, Memphis and New Orleans. The teams will serve as an in-house consultant agency for the recipients.

Touting success in the aforementioned cities, Bloomberg notes that using the Innovation Delivery model has led to Atlanta moving 1,022 homeless individuals into permanent housing and New Orleans reducing its murder rate to 19 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, retail vacancies in Memphis’s central economic corridor dropped 30 percent while Louisville was able to cut back the amount of ambulance responses redirecting 26 percent of 911 medical calls to immediate care centers or a doctor’s office.

“Innovation Delivery has been an essential part of our effort to bring innovation, efficiency and improved services to our customers,” Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer says in a press release. “Philanthropy can play an important role in expanding the capacity of cities to deliver better, bolder results. Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of few foundations investing in this area, and it has truly been a game changer for our city.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies will also fund any research, technical assistance and partnerships with other organizations that could expand the foundation’s model, according to the release. For cities that may not qualify or other interested lawmakers, the foundation has also compiled the Innovation Delivery Playbook, which outlines the approach through successful examples in the pilot cities.

Grant winners are expected to be announced this fall with the initiatives planned to kick off in spring 2015.

MORE: Watch: Rachel Haot on How Governments Should Adopt New Technology

5 European Urban Renewal Projects That Could Help America

Living, breathing, changing cities pose a challenge to even the best urban planners — how will they grow? Are they sustainable? Can every resident prosper and live a happy, healthy life?
No one has a monopoly on answers, and that holds true for the U.S. too. As our cities swell and we look for answers, maybe we need to cast our eyes to the Continent.
Creative thinkers across the Atlantic have come up with a host of bold new ideas that would not only help their own cities, but improve ours, too.
For Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge 2014, European cities with at least 100,000 residents submit ideas tackling some of their most pressing issues. If even one of them proves a game-changer, we could all win.
Submissions included novel ideas to spur the economy, save the environment and boost civic engagement. As Fast Company reports, 21 finalists will compete for a grand prize of €5 million (almost $7 million), with €1 million (almost $1.4 million) for each runner-up. The results will be announced in June.
MORE: Why the U.S. Should Adopt the “Finnish Way” of Education
A sampling of five creative finalists:
Health/Anti-obesity: Bristol, United Kingdom. Tackling obesity and unemployment by creating a new economic system that increases access to locally grown, healthy foods (A similar idea is taking off in Texas).
Civic Engagement: The Hague, Netherlands. Enabling citizens to allocate a portion of their own taxes to support local projects.
Transportation: Krakow, Poland. Encouraging residents to opt for greener modes of transportation with smart, personalized transportation incentives and a seamless public transit payment system.
Energy: Lisbon, Portugal. Reducing the carbon footprint and upping sustainability by transforming kinetic energy generated by city traffic into electricity.  (At the Riverdale Country School in New York, kids are powering their school just by walking).
Environment: Stockholm, Sweden. Combating climate change by engaging citizens to produce biochar, an organic material that increases tree growth and purifies storm runoff.
The list of inspirational projects continues. There’s Barcelona’s initiative to improve the quality of life for aging residents, and a plan from Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, to help young entrepreneurs launch local high-tech businesses.
ALSO: What Can We Learn From Sweden About Long-Term Unemployment?
Read the full list of finalists yourself. Ponder the possibilities for your town. If Lisbon can harness traffic to the power grid, what could L.A. gridlock provide? If Stockholm can save the trees, why can’t New York?
What can your city do?