For the past four years, Living Cities and The Ash Institute at Harvard’s Kennedy School have been working together to help catalyze and support innovation in America’s cities through the Project on Municipal Innovation. A cornerstone of that work has been the Urban Policy Advisory Group, (UPAG) a bi-annual meeting of chiefs of staff or chief policy advisors from the nation’s 35 biggest cities. UPAG, long supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, has evolved into a unique forum where these public sector leaders can learn from and challenge each other by sharing what’s working, bringing in outside experts who provoke them to think differently and getting a sense of the promising ideas that are spreading virally across the country. These UPAG meetings are a ‘must attend’ for me. With participation from every corner of the country, they are an amazing window into the current state of our cities.

Last week, these ‘chiefs’ came to Harvard for the latest meeting and we kicked off the session with a group discussion about the future of our cities. We framed the discussion with a provocative question raised by President & CEO of the Cleveland Foundation Ronn Richard at a previous gathering who speculated, “If the nation had identified and addressed the weaknesses of the levees in New Orleans before they broke, we wouldn’t be working so hard for the past six years to address the fallout from their failure. Shouldn’t we be looking to identify today’s levees before they break?” So, that’s what we did, we asked the chiefs to identify what they see as the ‘levee issues’ of tomorrow.

While their answers were wide ranging, some issues kept coming up, time and time again. These three central issues ---today’s levees—are described below:

1. The American education system is not adequately preparing people to enter the next generation workforce. In fact, city mayors increasingly cite education as the number one barrier to economic growth and prosperity. It is clear that addressing this challenge will require every stage of our education system, from cradle to career and beyond, to equip people with the 21st century skills demanded by a knowledge driven global economy. This means fixing broken K-12 systems (over which most mayors have no control) and ensuring that workforce development programs effectively engage people who are in danger of being chronically unemployed, such as people with histories of incarceration and people whose skills have been rendered obsolete due to changes in the job market.

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As the country and policy makers focus on job creation and economic revitalization, they eventually look to small businesses. There are strong reasons to do so. Almost 99% of all US firms are small businesses (defined by the Small Business Administration as firms with fewer than 500 employees); they contribute 50% of the US GDP and are the source of most new job creation. Besides creating jobs, small businesses also help build the local tax-base, create and contribute to a sense of place, and provide an important source of wealth creation. Hence, if you want to address unemployment and improve economic vitality, strategies that support small businesses must be considered.

Finding ways to foster the success of small business is on the agenda for Living Cities’ Integration Initiative (TII) sites (Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and Minneapolis/St Paul). However, the sites face the challenge of developing strategies that recognize the fact that small businesses are extremely diverse and take many forms: from the immigrant food cart to the small plumbing shop, from the 30-person advertising firm to a rapidly growing biomedical technology company. Although small businesses share a common set of needs: access to customers, capital, management skills, networks and supportive local governments, meeting these needs requires approaches that distinguish among the diversity of small business types. To help these Integration Initiative sites develop successful strategies for fostering small business success, we have created a short guide that will be presented at a conference on February 7th in Washington, DC. This paper provides a broad framework that outlines the different dimensions and characteristics of this sector to ensure that small business support strategies are targeted and customized to maximize success.

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“Do you thrive in ambiguity?”

The interview up until that moment had been going well, but this question gave me pause. I sat back in my chair, and thought quickly. My initial reaction to the question was that it was an odd one, maybe even antithetical, given that Living Cities was searching for an evaluator to oversee its organizational evaluation and learning efforts.

My second reaction was quite the opposite. When an organization strives for something as complex as Living Cities does—to harness the financial and creative power of cross-sector collaborators to transform systems that are meant to spur economic opportunity, so that they work for all people in an urban area--this is uncharted territory; territory that is by nature, ambiguous.

So I responded. “Each time I have evaluated systems change initiatives, I walk into ambiguity and work within it. As an evaluator, however, my role is to bring a new level of clarity and systematic inquiry so that organizations like yours can learn and grow your impact.”

Then I shot back. “Do you think Living Cities is ready for evaluation?”

“Absolutely,” they responded.

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Now, four months after that conversation, the Living Cities’ organizational evaluation is underway. I am overseeing this work and we have brought on Fourth Quadrant Partners, LLC, a firm versed in emergent learning principles, to help design and implement the evaluation and to make sure we are embedding evaluative inquiry and practice throughout the organization. We are taking a developmental approach—a relatively new, nontraditional approach to evaluation, but arguably the one best suited for complex systems-change work and a rapid-paced, innovative, organization like ours. Frankly, I am very excited.

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Our first Living Cities’ Trends in Focus on Technology for Civic Change, or ‘civic tech’ as its popularly referred to, was a pretty remarkable, three hour tutorial on the state of this emerging area, as Tracey Ross’ blog post reflects. One could minimize the importance of this work as typical technology-driven hype or a bunch of hackers trying to do good but the promise of civic tech is much more than that. The promise lies in its potential to harness the disruptive power of the Internet, accelerate the pace of innovation on multiple fronts in the usually sclerotic public sector and bring about permanent change because of pressure caused by wide-scale citizen adoption. Technology for civic change brings a totally unique set of assets together for the first time in the public sphere, including the:

• Creative, distributive and democratizing power of the Internet;
• Current ‘application’ writing craze that’s transformed the private sector;
• Ability to electronically associate public information and data in an historically single-function government setting;
• Possibility of introducing money-saving approaches in challenging economic times; and
• Potential of viral adoption by great numbers by citizens that would drive systems and culture change in the government.

What’s also great about this work is that there are simple and effective ways, as set out by Harvard Professor Archon Fung, of evaluating success:

• Was the application used by as many people as the off-line method? Were more people served because of additional choices;
• Did the application perform the same task better than the off-line method, so everyone uses it? Did it become the new standard way of doing business/task.
• Did the application allow people to accomplish their goal in ways that would have been impossible through non-digital methods? Did it create a completely new product/service that is broadly adopted?

To date, a lot of innovation in this space has focused on improving civic life generally, from real-time bus schedules to virtual land use planning. It’s not hard to imagine how civic tech, intentionally applied to the lives of low-income people and communities, could be transformational – from changing the relationship between police and neighborhoods and to enabling online appointment scheduling and enrollment for public benefits that now force people to take off work or suffer face-to-face humiliations. Kudos to organizations like Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Code for America and Civic Commons for blazing this trail for the rest of the country.