The desire to do things differently is why the mayors in Riverside (CA), Kansas City (MO), and Nashville are among the most recent to appoint Chief Innovation Officers. It’s why Code for America, the San Francisco-based organization that connects young technologists with city halls to spur innovation, can barely keep up with demand from cities.

We know that all of you have a huge role to play in increasing the impact of all that we are learning through our work. Please join us in sharing some of these lessons and reflections by tweeting our report out to your followers and sharing on Facebook. Let’s start a conversation!

Thank you for being a part of our problem-solving network!

At a time when more and more Americans are struggling to get by, affordable housing has never been more important. It's what keeps more than one million American families sheltered in the face of unemployment and diminishing paychecks. But right now, rising utility bills are quietly creating a crisis that jeopardizes the future of housing for our most vulnerable citizens.

Today, much of our country's affordable housing stock is so decayed and inefficient that it hemorrhages precious -- and expensive -- electricity. In fact, affordable housing uses a whopping 38 percent more energy than the typical American home. And low-income Americans already spend nearly twice as much of their income on energy as other households -- the poorest sometime shell out as much as 78 percent of their money for utilities alone. Meanwhile, water and sewer bills are on the rise, too -- increasing at more than double the rate of inflation.

We desperately need to find a way to stabilize utility costs for Americans living in low-income housing.

There's a tremendous opportunity here, too. If we can stop energy from leaking out of affordable housing, we will also slash carbon pollution and make a big dent in our fight against global warming. Wasted energy from buildings accounts for roughly 40 percent of our carbon pollution.

Our country is making enormous gains on this front. Thanks to federal and state programs, we upgraded more than half a million buildings in 2011 alone. But by ignoring low-income housing, we ignore an enormous chunk of the building stock in our country. Locking low-income residents out of the growing clean energy and energy efficiency movement is a disservice to all of us.

The trouble is, until now, financing energy efficiency upgrades for affordable housing has been tricky. When a homeowner invests in better insulation or energy-smart appliances, they see their energy bills go down. Simple.

But until now, multi-family housing has been paralyzed by a "split incentive." Since residents usually pay their own utility bills, building owners are less motivated to invest in energy-saving upgrades.

That's why Green For All has launched MPower -- a new model that makes it easier to bring energy efficiency upgrades to affordable housing.

Here's how it works: MPower spreads the cost for the energy services across all of the meters in the property, and everyone contributes to paying for the energy efficiency improvements, according to how much they save. The cost is spread out over time so that utility bills don't increase; in fact, the average energy bill for residents will drop by at least 5 percent.

MPower contractors look at a building and evaluate its needs, then they manage construction of all of the upgrades, so there aren't any new headaches for building owners. Once the costs of the upgrades have been fully paid back, the surcharge is dropped from residents' energy bills and savings increase even more. And MPower contractors stay on the scene and continue to help troubleshoot potential problems or equipment failures, even after the initial upgrades are finished.

The program has advantages for all of the stakeholders -- not just a few:

Tenants get to live in healthier, more comfortable homes. Energy efficiency upgrades eliminate problems like drafts and inadequate heating and air conditioning systems. Under the MPower model, utility bills are projected to go down roughly 5 percent. And residents get to be a part of the solution to climate change.

Building owners get to make upgrades to their property with no upfront costs or project management costs. They can create security in the face of future increases in utility costs, and they preserve the affordability of their units.

Utilities create more financial certainty for the future. By helping shield low-income ratepayers from unpredictable cost increases, utilities help keep customers from falling behind on their bills -- which costs everyone.

Investors have an opportunity to unlock efficiency investments with little risk, and by reducing the operating expenses for building owners, they shore up the ability of those owners to make payments on their larger property loans.

Expanding energy efficiency to affordable housing is the smart thing to do. It's also the right thing to do. Just because you don't have a lot of money and just because you live in a housing project or a low-rent apartment doesn't mean you shouldn't have access to the benefits that come with 21st-century energy efficiency, like more comfortable and healthy living spaces and lower utility bills.

And when you consider that low-income Americans are among those hit hardest by climate change disasters and pollution-related illnesses, it makes sense that they should have a chance to be a part of the solution.

Two of the most daunting challenges we face today are climate change and poverty. Bringing energy efficiency to affordable housing is one small step we can take that will make a big difference on both fronts -- and we can create healthier, safer, more prosperous communities in the process.

We are deeply grateful for the support Green For All received from Living Cities, the Kresge Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation to develop the MPower model.

Jeremy Hays is Chief Strategist for State and Local Initiatives at Green For All.

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Look at Memphis, where cross-sector stakeholders have come together at both the city and neighborhood levels to address a historically scattered and inefficient community development field. In March, I visited the Frayser neighborhood as part of the second meeting of the PLACES Fellows and the annual Funders’ Network conference. Frayser is one of the Memphis neighborhoods hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis. With fewer than 100 mortgages awarded to its residents in 2012, it continues to struggle today. Revitalization efforts have taken their time in part because Memphis has a relatively young community development and affordable housing ecosystem when compared to places like Chicago or New York City. Even today, Memphis may be the largest U.S. city without a national affordable housing intermediary present.

In response to this need, local nonprofit, foundation, government and business leaders came together to establish Community LIFT, Memphis’ own - and only - housing and community development intermediary. LIFT is charged with implementing the Greater Memphis Neighborhood Plan, which itself resulted from a multi-year planning process between a cross-section of local leaders and focuses on 3 issue areas: economic development, human capacity building, and community development.

To further strengthen Memphis’ local capacity, LIFT also recently kicked off efforts to establish a local Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). The lack of a dedicated financing institution was another significant hurdle facing the comprehensive revitalization of the city’s neighborhoods. This emergent CDFI, River City Capital, provides banks an opportunity to meet their mandated community reinvestment goals through a central institution.

The story of Community LIFT and River City Capital in Memphis is an example of how one place is building their own affordable housing and community development capacity in a new and innovative way. While many other cities already have long established housing intermediaries and supportive CDFIs, the efforts behind Memphis’ emerging ecosystem show an alternative path. The Memphis example also points to the importance of cross-sector stakeholder collaboration in building a shared vision and working together in new ways to address stubbornly persistence problems. Unsurprisingly, this theme of collaboration can also be found at a more micro-level in Memphis’ community development ecosystem.

Another side effect of Memphis’ historically scattered community development landscape is the strengthening of neighborhood community capacity. In the past few years, both the Frayser and South Memphis neighborhoods have formed local collaboratives to bring together the different actors working in each community. In Frayser, local leaders grew tired of national actors dropping disparate programs into the neighborhood without adjusting for their specific context. Out of this frustration, local leaders began convening as the Frayser Neighborhood Council to better coordinate all the work happening within the community. In this case, the absence of a strong city-wide intermediary led neighborhood leaders to come together to build up local capacity to address community-wide issues.

As a national funder, it can be tempting to measure cities along terms we are more familiar with. Yet as we think about how to expand our impact across the entire country, it’s important to recognize what innovation looks like in new places. Memphis’ example of city stakeholders coming together to address a systemic problem by forming a local intermediary and CDFI can serve as a model for other places facing similar challenges.

People in attendance were excited to hear about how we've shifted our focus to be a learning-oriented organization that tries to share the knowledge that we see bubbling up from the field. For those of you who missed out on coming, here is a Storify round-up of a lot of the #LeanImpact twitter action.

• 23.5 Million Americans do not have reasonable access to healthy and affordable food;
• 10 Million Americans are without bank accounts;
• and 21% of the population lives in medically underserved communities while only 12% of retail clinics serve those areas. $4.4 Billion is spent on avoidable emergency room visits.

UpLift Solutions believes innovative, sustainable supermarkets in underserved, urban areas have the unique ability to serve as an access point for fresh, affordable food as well as other essential services including affordable banking and convenient healthcare clinics.

Additionally, a new supermarket can create hundreds of quality jobs that provide opportunities for careers with upward mobility. These jobs come with a focus on workforce development to increase the likelihood of success for some of the hardest to employ populations including the structurally unemployed and ex-offenders. Supermarkets also provide communities with added benefits such as local tax revenue and the creation of satellite businesses as a result of the strong supermarket anchor business. Lastly, real estate values have been seen to increase an immediate four to seven percent with the opening of a supermarket in an inner-city area.

At UpLift Solutions, we have seen this model of supermarket serving as a holistic community hub become successful in places such as Philadelphia and Baltimore. We’ve provided technical assistance to grocery operators, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), nonprofits, and government in over 30 states to support supermarket development in low income areas.

To serve the over 20 million Americans currently without access to fresh affordable food, our country needs a combination of new supermarkets, small grocers, healthy corner stores and innovative food access projects. Through our national work, we have identified an opportunity to increase the capacity of the existing healthy food financing initiatives by addressing the communities where full service supermarkets can be the solution. These projects will have a large impact relative to their investment.

In order to support this effort, UpLift is in the planning stages of establishing a new CDFI that will specialize in grocery projects and contribute equity and technical assistance to the national food access effort.

As this work has evolved, we have responded to the following questions:

• Why Equity?

The equity component to healthy food financing is essential, because it allows undercapitalized entrepreneurs or projects to enter the space by helping to bridge the “Grocer’s Gap” often felt by supermarket operators attempting to open stores in urban food deserts. This equity would leverage the existing debt capital made available by local CDFIs who would be utilized as partners in the supermarket deals.

• Why Technical Assistance?

Many CDFIs currently developing healthy food financing initiatives need support to understand and underwrite grocery store projects. Many have expressed interest in fundraising to purchase UpLift’s development services. By bundling the financing products with technical assistance the fund would establish long term funding for UpLift’s development services supporting the most promising initiatives and projects.

In addition to supporting CDFIs, UpLift plans to provide rich technical assistance to grocery store operators. Without proper development and operational strategies, it is difficult for a grocery operator to successfully bridge the financial gap of operating in these challenging areas. UpLift will provide assistance with:

• Store Financing Strategies ( Smart Public Incentives, New Market Tax Credits, and Local Tax Abatement Programs)
• Site Selection & Acquisition
• Innovative In-Store Programing
• Community Engagement
• Hiring Assistance & Workforce Development

The fund will combine the expertise of Jeff Brown, a successful grocery operator and the financial expertise of Jeremy Nowak, founder of The Reinvestment Fund- one of the nation’s leading CDFIs focused on food access. We aim to take the successful features of the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI) and similar to the public/private partnership established in the PA FFFI, our model will leverage foundation grants and investments to attract additional investments in the fund that, partnered with smart public incentives, will provide flexible financing packages for grocery entrepreneurs.

To learn more, listen to Jeff Brown’s TED talk style presentation at the Council on Foundations Conference.

Living Cities, a two decades-old collaborative of 22 foundations and financial institutions working to improve outcomes for low-income people in US cities, believes firmly in the power of this type of ‘high stakes donor collaboration’. And, the Admiral Center, our initiative that is working to build a network of athletes and celebrities using their resources and influence to accelerate solutions, has been energetically working on these issues with its partners for the last 3 years. Now, we are excited and inspired to be joining this group of high-performing social change organizations in making this unprecedented commitment to collectively support and catalyze efforts to improve life chances for these boys and men. And, we are joining our voice to those of individuals and organizations already active in this space in asking other public, private and philanthropic organizations to join the movement as we begin to plan for concrete action.

Alliance members include: the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Boston Foundation, the California Community Foundation, the Denver Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Lumina Foundation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Sierra Health Foundation, the Skillman Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation; the Open Society Foundations; the California Endowment; Casey Family Programs; the Community Foundation of South Alabama; the Foundation for the Mid South; Headwaters Foundation for Justice, Living Cities; and the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

1. Focus on Cities. America’s cities are the engine for national prosperity and individual economic opportunity. Indeed, for generations, low-income people from around the country and the world viewed our cities as the best path to a better life. But, in recent decades, that has been less true as the systems that made it so have not adequately adapted to changing social, technological, and economic forces. In order to fix America, we must reinvigorate our cities and help them reinvent themselves for the 21st century. The Working Cities challenge aims to do just that, focusing on smaller cities that have to date received less attention and funding from traditional sources. This focus is of particular interest to Living Cities as a collaborative of 22 foundations and financial institutions that have been working together for over two decades on systems-level issues in US cities. Much of our work, including our signature Integration Initiative, has worked to understand how to catalyze large scale change in large cities—like Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark and the Twin Cities. We are eager to understand what this looks like for small cities. The learning will be extremely valuable for the field.

2. Unexpected Leadership. Some say the definition of insanity is when you keep doing the same thing over and over and expect a different result. That's what we have been doing for decades around some of our nation's biggest problems. What we need to break the cycle are well-respected organizations willing to lead in new ways. That's what the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is doing here. While it has long conducted research on what it takes to rebuild communities, deciding to turn that research into action at this critical time for our country matters and should be applauded. Moreover, they have decided to take on this challenge in a really smart way: through a high stakes donor collaborative. In these collaboratives, like Living Cities itself, funders come together around a shared multiyear vision where they not only pool money but talent, knowledge, and decision making power. We're excited to be a part of this effort.

3. Prototype and share knowledge rapidly. New digital media platforms and social networks enable us to produce and share incredible amounts of knowledge with ever greater velocity. Today, there is no reason that what we learn from successful social innovations happening in one place can't be quickly adopted in other places. Yet they rarely are. Two years ago, Living Cities took on this challenge - a challenge we believe all those committed to social change must embrace. We began a concentrated effort to rapidly prototype and share what we are seeing and learning with a large problem-solving network of other high-performing organizations and individuals across the country. In fact, a large part of the design and approach adopted by the Working Cities Challenge, as highlighted below, are based on what we've learned about what does and doesn't work in similar initiatives taking place in our five-city Integration Initiative and in the 80+ city Strive Network.

4. Collaborate to achieve lasting change. Two of those real-time learnings are at the core of the Working Cities Challenge and critical to the change our country needs -- winners must exemplify and advance cross-sector collaboration and be committed to create deep and lasting change in their communities. Living Cities’ work tells us real change is only possible when local, ‘civic infrastructure’ exists or cross-sector decision-makers come together around one table to set ambitious goals, use data to transform systems, not build more programs, and achieve consistently better outcomes. Interestingly, our experience confirms what a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report concluded in 2009 about the key to rejuvenating cities: "Industry mix, demographic makeup, and geographic location made less difference to [successful rejuvenation of a city] than the presence of a community leader and collaboration around a vision for the future."

5. Disrupt the Status Quo through Challenges. In a stagnant economy, challenges can be an incredible catalyst for change. The Working Cities Challenge invites 20 cities to apply with the promise of making multiyear grants with awards ranging from $150,000-$700,000. Excitingly, all 20 cities have submitted letters of interest. Final applications will require them to bring cross-sector civic leaders together, agree on an ambitious systems-level outcome, collect data to support problem-solving, and propose likely solutions. Results from other challenges, such as the US Department of Education's Race to the Top, Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors' Challenge and our own Integration Initiative, suggest that the competition itself has beneficial effects, as many places will make significant regulatory or statutory changes needed in order to be eligible to apply, and others will pursue the innovations proposed in the applications even if they are not selected.

Systems in the US that we always thought were going to produce more opportunities for the next generation than they did for the last no longer do so. Many believe that our ability to solve complex problems and make hard choices is broken. Application of these five elements of the Working Cities Challenge really could fix all that ails us.

This was the big question that emerged from a recent convening of Philadelphia stakeholders from local businesses, workforce training providers, and city agencies. The specific question at hand was how to leverage Philadelphia’s planned $1.2 billion investment in green stormwater infrastructure to maximize job creation impacts for low-income communities. Intrigued by research on the job creation potential for the City of Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters plan, the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia (SBN) and the Philadelphia Water Department invited both ELP Advisors and Living Cities to share their recommendations at this convening to help turn the ideas into action. The conversation quickly turned to who held the responsibility to maximize the local economic impact of these government investments and who is responsible for maximizing the job creation benefits for low-income people.

It may seem that this job would fall to local government, but job creation is not their primary role. Having stepped out in front with a green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) plan that’s the most innovative in the nation, the Philadelphia Water Department is now working to put the plan into action and they don’t have time to identify the local businesses that could provide new jobs. Local government needs external partners to help connect the dots and build the local industry. They want their investment to lead to local job creation, sure, but their primary mission is to provide integrated water, wastewater, and stormwater services – which is a huge task in a city of over 1.5 million people with two-hundred-year-old pipes.

SBN has been hosting conversations like these for the past three years. A nonprofit network made up of over 400 local employers, SBN is one external partner that can help local government be successful at creating jobs through GSI investment. The impending huge public and private investments in GSI are going to drive market demand, but the local industry is immature. Without helping local businesses get ready for this work at this scale, they will lose bids to large companies from out-of-state that would import their workforces and export their profits. So we launched Business United for Conservation (BUC), an industry partnership that identifies and removes barriers to (GSI) local industry growth, uncovers workforce needs, and promotes industry best practices.

The industry partnership participants are mostly small businesses with fewer than 50 employees, a size that’s key for job creation. We’ve helped connect local businesses like Cedar Run Landscapes to new contract opportunities and are helping traditional contractors like Ultimate Concrete LLC get the training they need to work with sustainable products. We believe that the greatest potential for impacting future workforce growth and business development is continued community building among the cross-sector businesses involved with stormwater management so the cluster can “tackle multi-disciplinary problems that can’t be solved at the level of individual companies.”

This approach – convening and connecting multiple diverse stakeholders who are stronger together than they are apart – is not a new one for SBN. But it wasn’t until I met ELP Advisors that I had words to describe the academic theory behind our approach. In describing the role that SBN played in Philadelphia, ELP Advisors called us a backbone organization of a collective impact model: a connecting organization that provides structural, behind-the-scenes support to collaborating partners.[1] Learning about the collective impact model and the role of backbone organizations was an “a-ha” moment for me – as the leader of a network of local businesses seeking to transform their local community, I took a nontraditional approach to economic development and community building. Most traditional economic developers focus on business attraction as the primary strategy for job creation: attract a large company from another place, lure them to your city with tax breaks and they’ll promise to create thousands of new jobs. Research has repeatedly shown that it doesn’t work, but that hasn’t stopped the practice. Suddenly I had a theory of change for the role we were playing – backbone organization – and a body of research to validate it.

Part of the challenge of a collective impact model is getting stakeholders to agree to share responsibility for the common goal. At the end of our recent meeting at the Philadelphia Water Department, I got out a flip chart. We read through the list of ten recommendations from ELP Advisors’ research and asked who was already working on a related action. By the end of the meeting, nine different partners, including the Philadelphia Water Department, had signed up to move forward on one of the ten recommendations. Ultimately, it’s everyone’s job to maximize the local economic impact potential of government investments. As stakeholders in other cities consider how they can harness the momentum behind green infrastructure investments to create jobs for local residents, they’ll need to focus on collaborating with local government to maximize their impact.

Leanne Krueger-Braneky spent eight years as Executive Director of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, a membership network of local businesses building a just, green and thriving economy in the Philadelphia region. She became the Director of Fellowship and Alumni for Business Alliance for Local Living Economies in February 2013 and is designing a Local Community of Practice program for green infrastructure businesses in Philadelphia.

[1] This approach to large-scale systemic change called collective impact was first introduced in the winter 2011 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review and more recently discussed on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog.

At a time of fiscal constraint, we cannot expect government simply to write a check and make this funding gap disappear. However, four sensible strategies would go a long way towards helping the US address its urgent infrastructure needs:

1. Set the stage for investment
2. Leverage public sector dollars with private investment
3. Rethink procurement
4. “Dig once.”

Set the stage for investment: Infrastructure projects are complex endeavors; they come together only when multiple sources of financing, engineers and other experts, contractors and procurement officers and representatives of the public can agree on a course of action and execute a plan. The sources of expertise required to create and process a pipeline of infrastructure projects tend to be dispersed among departments and levels of government. Government can set the stage for investment by creating a center of expertise that can handle multiple projects efficiently and learn from experience. Centers of expertise can bring a level of stability and professionalism that helps insulate infrastructure projects from political pressures and gives investors confidence that the projects have been subjected to rigorous and disciplined analysis. For example, the State of Oregon is working on a statewide center of infrastructure planning that would help analyze and manage procurement for major capital spending projects. Living Cities is proud to have supported this effort.

Leverage public sector dollars with private investment: Only a combination of public and private resources will be enough to solve the infrastructure investment gap. Yet, not all jurisdictions make use of private investment. For example, every state has revolving loan funds for water, but only about half of the states blend public and private capital in these funds. Properly structured infrastructure deals can be attractive to private investors such as pension funds and insurance companies, which seek stable long-term returns with relatively low levels of risk.

Often, the best use of public dollars is not to pay directly for capital projects, but to incent and attract private dollars through risk reducing mechanisms such as “first loss” structures. Governments should consider how to leverage their precious resources to maximum effect.

Rethink procurement: Traditional methods of contracting for infrastructure tend to rely on choosing the lowest bidder for construction of a project, which distort decision-making by ignoring lifecycle and operating costs. Privatizing assets encourages owners to take these costs into consideration, but privatization sometimes fails to serve the public interest. An approach to contracting called “Performance-based Infrastructure” keeps infrastructure publicly owned, but ensures that private companies that win infrastructure contracts must perform according to agreed-upon standards in order to get paid. Approaches such as these, which have been successfully used in Canada and elsewhere, are now coming to the US through the work of Partnerships British Columbia.

Dig once: Infrastructure investments are often considered in isolation. Water authorities plan for drinking water and storm water treatment, power authorities worry about energy and transit authorities think about bus and rail. Yet, in many cases, an integrated approach to infrastructure—for example digging up streets one time to lay fiber for broadband, permeable pavers to improve absorption of storm water and tracks for streetcars, drastically changes the economics of a project and minimizes the disruptions to residents and businesses. Only by working across governmental silos and blending funding sources can we achieve this type of integration. Government at every level needs to find ways to facilitate and encourage integration. One promising example, the work done at the federal level by HUD, the EPA and the Department of Transportation on the “Sustainable Communities” initiative, points the way to what can be achieved through integration[1].

Living Cities, a collaborative of 22 foundations and financial institutions that is committed to ensuring that America’s cities serve as engines for national prosperity and gateways for economic opportunity, is particularly concerned that poor infrastructure has a disproportional impact on low-income communities[2]. Whether the issue is longer commute times, lack of access to broadband communications, or housing in flood-prone locations, low-income people are more exposed to the deleterious effects of poor infrastructure, and less able to insulate themselves from these effects by paying for private alternatives. As we move towards closing the infrastructure gap, it is critical that we consider explicitly how our work can contribute to equitable solutions for all our residents.

[1] http://www.livingcities.org/blog/?id=127

To learn more, Living Cities invites you to join a webinar about ICA’s growth model for business enterprises. The webinar will discuss how ICA is forging a new path for economic growth, proving that racial, gender and economic inclusion foster stronger economies. In this webinar, you will also learn about how ICA’s equity-driven model expands entrepreneurship among people of color and women while maximizing the growth returns of good jobs and equity for people with the highest barriers to employment.

The presentation will generate discussion about the following questions:

• How can we ensure that good jobs are being created for those who need them the most?
• How is scaling local businesses a key, yet under-valued and under-invested, economic development strategy for local governments?
• How can capital be used creatively to foster the creation of good jobs?
• What are the opportunities and challenges to bring this model to scale across the country?

The webinar will take place on Thursday, April 25th from 2:00 to 3:00 pm EST. Please register here to participate.

We will be tweeting about the event under the hashtag #LocalJobs and invite everyone to share their thoughts and questions

The public sector, with its unique combination of resources, authority and leadership, can play critical roles in supporting these integrative efforts. But too often specialized and poorly coordinated bureaucratic structures -- “silos” -- mean that different parts of government work at cross purposes.

Take the example of regional planning. A 2011 federal report states that “DOT and HUD both have statutorily required planning requirements for receipt of federal funds. These requirements are not well aligned with one another, having different eligibility, timeframe, content considerations, and approval processes.” As a result, these plans can conflict with one another, and their authors compete for resources when it comes time to implement.

At Living Cities, we are interested in how innovative structures, innovative uses of capital, and innovative approaches to collaboration can help the public sector to achieve better results. In a recent blog post, I wrote about some of the ways that local governments are experimenting with new structures to enable fresh approaches to tough problems. The federal government, for its part, has been working to help produce innovation by reducing silos at the local level.

The Partnership for Sustainable Communities is one especially prominent example of that work. Since 2009, the Partnership has worked to align funding streams and rules across the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, with many more agencies participating informally. They have helped localities to integrate significant sums of federal dollars to develop and implement plans that integrate a focus on housing, transportation, jobs, economic development and inclusion, and more.

We are pleased to release today a strategic assessment of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities and its impact in helping to break down silos, commissioned by Living Cities and conducted by the Urban Institute.

Click here to read the full assessment or here to read a shorter issue brief.

The assessment focuses in particular on what can be learned from the Partnership’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program, which has awarded $195 million since 2010 supporting the development and implementation of regional plans addressing issues across the focus areas of the partner agencies.

The study finds that the Planning Grant Program helped its local grantees to break down barriers to collaboration within government and across sectors by incentivizing them to:

• Create new collaborative structures, which intensified the representation of stakeholders typically left out of decision-making processes and supported deeper community engagement
• Broaden the range of substantive areas actively considered in regional plans, including affordable housing, economic development, transit access, public health, and the environment
• Expand the resources devoted to collaborative regional planning processes, and
• Diversify participation across jurisdictional boundaries (e.g., by promoting engagement between city, suburban and exurban governments).

The Partnership created a supportive enabling environment for programs like the Regional Planning Grants to take root. Agency leadership developed a set of Livability Principles to guide collaboration among their staffs; agency staff then used these principles to frame programs like the Regional Planning Grants, and have also integrated them into existing funding streams where possible. Many agency officials had experience working together before coming to the federal government, which paved the way for productive collaboration when they arrived. And as they developed new programs and sought to align existing ones, HUD, DOT and EPA engaged with current and would-be local users of the funds to ensure that these programs and reforms would respond to their needs and concerns.

Enduring Change?

In addition to the findings above, the study also finds that the extent to which the changes produced by this program endure over the longer term remains an open question. The study points to a number of factors that will help determine whether the increased coordination becomes institutionalized or not, such as whether the “connective tissue” enabling regional collaboration can be sustained once Planning Grant funds are spent.

Even at this stage, though, the findings in the study provide some very interesting food for thought in considering the role that federal policy can play in reducing governmental silos – an issue of considerable interest across a number of policy areas. We invite you to share your insights and experiences, either below or in the Twittersphere (tweet your comments @Living_Cities).

Equitable transit-oriented development, the practice of prioritizing social equity alongside transit-oriented development, has been gaining attention and traction in recent years. Some of the key goals of this work include:

• creating more livable communities where individuals of all income levels have access to the jobs, housing and community amenities and facilities that they require while also minimizing the burden of housing;
• lowering transportation costs for everyone, especially low-income residents.

In Filling the Financing Gap for Equitable Transit-Oriented Development, Living Cities partnered with the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF) and Enterprise Community Partners (Enterprise) to learn how to make TOD projects that contribute to equitable outcomes easier to finance and build. The writers studied four regions - Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul and the San Francisco Bay Area – to help identify systematic financing gaps as well as recommend capital and policy solutions to address the issues. The following are some highlights from the report:

Equitable TOD Needs New Forms of Collaboration and Partnerships Between Unlikely Bedfellows: Achieving equitable TOD requires processes that bridge traditional gaps between housing agencies, transit planners, economic development offices and other interested stakeholders. Planning processes also require that employers, community based organizations, developers and financial institutions find new ways of working together. For example, in the Bay Area, the Metropolitan Planning Commission worked with nonprofits and financial institutions to develop a $50MM fund to finance affordable housing and community facilities near transit in communities that the public sector had prioritized for development.

Conventional Financing Products Need to Evolve to Support Equitable TOD: Over the last decade, innovation and thinking in the field of TOD has advanced considerably. Advocates of equitable TOD have come to understand the value of corridor-level planning, as well as the importance of preserving housing affordability as the value of land near transit rises. However, many real estate projects continue to be built without consideration for the larger regional transit plans or implications for low-income individuals. This is due in part to limited coordination but also the limitations of current financing products available to support equitable TOD goals. For example, many real estate developers seeking loans to acquire land near oncoming transit have difficulty obtaining the loan amounts that they require because traditional lenders base their lending on historical land values, not on land values that reflect potential increased values due to oncoming transit. As such, there is a potential to develop loan products that take subordinate positions on the land and provide the patience for land values to increase with oncoming transit.

Clarity of Intent is Critical: Regions with the leadership to conduct the public and private process to reach “clarity of intent” among critical stakeholders are able to execute more quickly and efficiently on their Equitable TOD goals. By prioritizing and aligning resources and efforts, these regions are able to move from planning to implementation more smoothly than regions that lack these attributes.

Through this latest paper and other work on equitable TOD we’ve been doing at Living Cities, we are learning more about what can be done to advance equitable TOD and the capital, policy and implementation challenges. We are excited to share these lessons from our partners from LIIF and Enterprise. We invite you to read the paper and join in the discussion. Please contact me at achung@livingcities.org to join the dialogue.

Ronald Heifetz kicked off the three-day session. He spoke about his latest book, co-authored with Marty Linksy, “Leadership on the Line, Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading.” Among other topics, Heifetz spoke to UPAG about the risks of leadership, technical and adaptive challenges, and the importance of recognizing the differences between allies and confidants.

“However gentle your style, however careful your strategy, however sure you may be that you are on the right track, leading is risky business.”

Leaders pose difficult questions, expecting and demanding change from their followers. Change isn’t easy because of the associated risk of the unknown; someone needs to carry the responsibility for that risk. At home, school, or work, many of us want to lead, but need to be able to balance the risks that come along with the rewards.
It’s no mystery that people like change when it’s good. Heifetz provided an example of a husband and wife team finishing a budgeting exercise the night before they win $1M. Are the husband and wife team likely to say, “Thanks, but no thanks. We just got our budget in line and the extra $1M might require some tweaks to the finished product?” Would you?

“If leadership were about giving people good news, the job would be easy.”

Heifetz spoke about other leadership challenges, more specifically understanding the difference between what he calls technical and adaptive issues. Technical issues can be solved by changing processes. In Heifetz’s example, a doctor can work on a person’s heart to reconstruct arteries or valves. For the most part, it is a known procedure that can solve a mechanical problem. This happens on a daily basis around the world. Adaptive issues, on the other hand, can be resolved by overhauling priorities. These issues are often tougher to overcome. The adaptive issue applies to the heart patient’s recovery, their lifestyle moving forward, and their ability to reprioritize. In a number of cases, the patient must restructure their lifestyle to avoid returning to the same, or even a worse, state of health. Identifying the proper issue type is tough, but necessary, to lead successfully.

Successful leadership also includes being able to differentiate between allies and confidants. Heifetz explained that allies are those stakeholders that are able to advance your work or your organization’s work. Those people that you can depend on to support your professional efforts. He warned leaders to be careful about backing these allies into a corner. Leaders need to be able to balance particular conversations with specific people to achieve success. Allies and confidants are different, very different. Confidants are your friends, your pals, those people you can call up at the end of a tough day to talk about the tough problems and challenges that occurred, said Heifetz. These are the people that are active listeners, lending an ear at a weak moment in time. They help you get “up to the balcony,” as Heifetz refers to it, see things from a different perspective, help you to view the risks and rewards of specific decisions that your allies might not be able to see, or be willing to tell you.

“The only way you can gain both a clearer view of reality and some perspective on the bigger picture is by distancing yourself from the fray.”

Throughout our three-day UPAG session, participants consistently returned back to Heifetz’s talk. During discussions about challenges, successes and best practices, related to everything from education to homelessness to big data in cities, the themes of leadership and the tools to work through leadership application were mentioned. The UPAG session was a great success and Heifetz set the right tone during the Thursday dinner: Leadership has risks, know your challenges, recognize the players, get up to the balcony regularly and don’t forget, at the end of each day, to recognize the fruits of your labor.

“But putting yourself on the line is difficult work, for the dangers are real. Yet the work has nobility and the benefits, for you and for those around you, are beyond measure.”

Jessica Casey is the Associate Director of the Urban Policy Advisory Group

Digital Divide ≠ Civic Divide

Young African-American men are among those likely to face a digital divide in urban cities, but are also among the leading mobile device users in the country.

In our research on civic tech, we heard a lot of criticism that civic app developers are designing apps in ways that ignore the “digital divide,” which runs the risk of undercutting civic tech’s potential equalizing power. Some have advised us to design our tech solution for “least common denominator” technologies – namely “feature phones,” which have calling and text capabilities but no internet access. But a review of existing research by OpenPlans and discussions at our kickoff suggest that the situation is more complex. In short, the digital divide does not in and of itself create a civic divide.

OpenPlans’ research review suggests that young adults, at a rate almost unaffected by income, use mobile devices including smartphones in their daily lives. In fact, OpenPlans found that, nationally, low-income young adults actually use mobile devices at a higher rate than higher-income older adults. However, participants at our kickoff weren’t so sure that these statistics play out the same way in Louisville as they do elsewhere, and pointed out that mobile devices aren’t necessarily used by everyone under the same conditions. We heard that many young people use public parks and other “hotspots” to access the internet in lieu of paying for data plans, while others use feature phones instead of smartphones. These differences both present potential challenges to reaching a broader audience, but also present new opportunities for engagement – for example, are there ways to promote engagement at existing Wi-Fi hotspots like parks or coffee shops? Could we find a way to get feature phone users to partner with smartphone users as they use our tech solution?

More concerning for our purposes is research that suggests that low-income Millennials are far less likely to engage in civic life than their higher-income counterparts for reasons including mistrust of government, smaller networks, and a feeling that they lack opportunities to put their skills to use. It will be critical for us to find ways to build potential users’ trust and address other such “soft” barriers.

We will be engaging directly with young adults in Louisville and the organizations that serve them in order to reality-test our assumptions and to find the “right” ways to design and deploy our tech solution.

Awesome Technology for the Problems behind the Problem

To some critics, leading with technology without at least a hypothesis about factors underlying the problem you’re trying to solve is like…well, you get the idea.

We went into this project determined to lead with a focus on the problem we are trying to solve before deciding on the form a tech solution might take. This approach came in response to a common criticism of civic tech tools, which we and OpenPlans reported in our Field Scan late last year: that they focus on “awesome technology” ahead of the outcomes cities and their residents seek to achieve. There are a lot of great civic tech tools out there, and it can be valuable to take these platforms and look for as many ways as possible to apply their capabilities to civic issues. And yet, leading with technology can at times obscure deeper, systemic issues that inhibit civic engagement.

We are still in the process of defining the barriers that inhibit engagement between city governments and low-income young adults, and I expect problem definition to be an iterative process. But one potential dimension of the problem is a “vicious cycle” feedback loop between long-term planning and engagement in which:

• Organizations engage with communities around “grand visions” or ambitious long-term plans
• These plans generate few visible, near-term results, undermining community trust in planning processes
• Future planning efforts start with a “credibility deficit” before engagement even begins, further disconnecting planning efforts from community needs and priorities

A visual representation of the “Cycle of Disengagement” in neighborhood and city planning

This cycle makes it important to build meaningful and motivating near-term rewards into an engagement process focused on a long-term vision. We’re currently developing “straw dog” product concepts to help get us there.

Now the key question for us is: will this approach lead us to materially different results than the “typical” approach? We’ll find out in the coming months.

This blog post is part of our ongoing commitment to “open source” our work on this project. Stay tuned for more, and let us know what you think below, via email (tnovotny@livingcities.org) or via Twitter (@tamirnovotny, @living_cities).

Photo Credits: The Grio; The 'Daly' Planet Blog

We're working with the City of Louisville to develop technology to engage low-income young adults in the city's long-term planning. Here's what we're learning

We recently kicked off in earnest a project in Louisville to develop a piece of technology aimed at engaging low-income Millennials (young adults ages 18-30) in city planning processes. This project comes as part of a broader Living Cities effort to better understand the potential for tech to deepen civic engagement and improve the lives of low-income people, and to help us explore roles we might play in maximizing this potential in the future.

We came into this process with a few questions in our minds:

• Who exactly are Millennials and what does it take to engage them in civic process?
• How might a new technology solution aid us in this work in a way that is meaningfully different than what existing tech does?
• What are the deeper issues underlying the “presenting problem” of engaging low-income young adults?

Here are some things we are learning.

Millennials and Traditional Civic Participation: Out of sync

The relationship between Millennials, technology and civic participation is not as straightforward as one might think

The verdict on Millennials (a group to which I belong) is mixed. Some hail Millennials as pioneers of disruptive technologies (Mark Zuckerberg is 29) and new ways of organizing that have enabled a whole new, hyperconnected approach to social change. Others deride Millennials as a self-absorbed and entitled “worst generation.” But OpenPlans’ review of research by groups like Circle and the National Committee on Citizenship suggests that the situation is less clear-cut than the discourse indicates. Millennials may be less likely than other generations to participate in traditional political or civic organizations, but may actively engage around civic issues online (for instance, more than half of Millennials use social networking sites for some form of civic purpose). Furthermore, Millennials are blurring the lines between work life and civic life (for example, by pursuing careers in social enterprise), challenging traditionally-recognized forms of civic engagement like volunteering.

The reasons for these differences – and even the way I’ve characterized the differences here – are hotly debated. But perhaps most relevant for our purposes: To a generation that takes it for granted that they can do (and should be able to do) most things easily and immediately online, the traditional structures of civic participation can feel byzantine, and the potential impacts of participation can feel too distant and too small given the effort and time required to produce them. But that doesn’t mean we don’t care.

If “the establishment” wants to tap into Millennials’ tremendous energy, it needs to explore approaches to engage Millennials that reflect a legitimate expectation for user-friendliness and meaningful near-term results, but that don’t reduce their participation to “clicktivism” either.

This blog post is part of our ongoing commitment to “open source” our work on this project. Stay tuned for part two of this post tomorrow and for more beyond that, and let us know what you think below, via email (tnovotny@livingcities.org) or via Twitter (@tamirnovotny, @living_cities).

Photo Credits: http://louisville.umclubs.com/; Supri Sunarjoto / Shutterstock, from The Atlantic Monthly;

"Data! Data! Data!" cried Sherlock Holmes in theAdventure of the Copper Beeches, "I can't make bricks without clay."

Data is central to the most effective "collective impact" initiatives across the country. Collective impact is a strategy in which partners come together across sectors, targeting the same set of measurable outcomes, and coordinating their actions to make progress on those outcomes. Living Cities, a collaborative of 22 of the world's largest foundations and financial institutions, is supporting a number of such initiatives to achieve transformational gains in low-income communities in educational achievement, economic competitiveness, and other areas.

One interesting example of the power of data comes from the Road Map Project in South Seattle and South King County. The Road Map Project is a cradle-to-career partnership in the Strive Network that is trying to close student achievement gaps and double the number of students who are on track to graduate from college or earn a career credential by 2020. This is an ambitious goal, and the 2020 time horizon gives the partnership an objective to work towards. The paradox of collective impact is that a great deal of time must be spent working collectively before much visible impact can be achieved. Some shorter-term wins may be needed to build momentum and keep the partners at the table. We believe that the process of working together is the new action!

In 2011, soon after the Road Map Project's public launch, Mary Jean Ryan, the executive director of its coordinating organization, saw the sign-up deadline for a state scholarship program as a chance for an early victory for the new partnership.

Washington's College Bound Scholarship Program promises tuition (at public tuition rates) and a small book allowance for low-income students who work hard in school, stay out of legal trouble, and successfully enroll in an in-state, higher education institution when they graduate. Students must apply for the scholarship program by the end of eighth grade.

The Road Map Project encompasses seven school districts. "In the past," said Ryan, "a couple of the school districts made an effort to get the kids to sign up for the scholarship. But in most of the districts there wasn't much of an effort. We started by putting out data weekly on sign-up rates by district and school. There hadn't been a tradition of putting comparative data out. Some were saying, 'You can't do that. You're not allowed to do that -- it will ruffle feathers,' but we did it."

As the weekly data began appearing, school districts within the area, some of whom barely had the scholarship on their radar, took notice. And it wasn't just school officials. Community activists, nonprofit leaders, mayors, and housing authorities were now paying attention to the sign-up numbers and were jumping in to get more kids signed up.

Peter Bylsma, director of Assessment and Student Information Services for the Renton School District, explained that "we were seeing how other districts around us were doing. There's a sense of competition -- we don't want to look worse than them. We contacted our academic liaisons and middle schools -- we were putting out Excel spread sheets with student names and sending them to area schools... it was phenomenal."

By the time the 2011 effort ended on June 30, a record 91 percent of eligible students signed up across the Road Map Project's seven school districts, compared with 74 percent the previous year. As Mary Jean Ryan explained, the process for achieving success in the campaign was fairly simple. The districts "that had low sign-up rates either figured it out themselves or called up someone who was good at it and asked advice."

This visible success of the scholarship sign-up campaign helped provide the momentum that the Road Map Project would need over the long haul to achieve its ambitious goals. As a leader from one school district said, the campaign helped create "clarity about those benchmarks and how we move to action." It also modeled for Road Map Project participants some of the essential elements outlined in the Strive Framework for Building Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure.

What made the data used in the sign-up campaign so powerful? For one thing, the numbers were simple and easy to understand -- how many eighth graders were eligible for the scholarship, how many were signing up, and how that compared to the previous year. For another, they were public, allowing comparison and encouraging competition. The Road Map Project purposely encompassed multiple school districts to encourage just this kind of positive competition. And finally, the numbers were tied to specific action-identifying eligible students and getting them and their families to complete the applications.

Political data superstar Nate Silver has observed that, "Numbers have no way of speaking for themselves." Which is why leaders who use data to spark change must, as the Road Map Project and the National Strive Network sites are doing, find creative and highly-focused ways to let the numbers be heard.

Jeff Edmondson is the managing director of the Strive Network. Ben Hecht is the president & CEO of Living Cities. Willa Seldon is a partner with The Bridgespan Group.

What will it take to link the billions of federal dollars used for transportation investments to domestic job creation?

To begin addressing these questions, Living Cities invites you to join a webinar on April 10th about the Transportation and American Jobs Project, a national effort to ensure that transportation investments using federal funds create quality jobs for American workers. Specifically, the webinar will provide an overview of the US Employment Plan (USEP), a model transit procurement program which incentivizes investments in domestic manufacturing jobs. This innovative model has the potential to have significant economic impact in the rebuilding of the U.S. manufacturing sector. Speakers will include Professor Manuel Pastor, from the Program for Environmental & Regional Equity (PERE) at USC, and Madeline Janis, from Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE).

As infrastructure investments become a national priority, this innovative procurement model is one low-cost approach to leveraging government spending for maximum benefit. In this way, transit agency purchases are able go beyond just buying buses or train cars, but also strengthening our domestic economy.

The webinar will take place on Wednesday, April 10th from 2:00 to 3:00 pm EST. Please register here to participate.

We will be tweeting about the event under the hashtag #Transit4Jobs and invite everyone to share their thoughts and questions

At their best, cities are the engine for national prosperity and individual economic opportunity for all people. However, increasingly, the systems designed to make this so are failing as they were built in a different era on now outdated assumptions. The failure of these systems to adapt to changing social, technological, economic, and political forces has led to unprecedented growth in economic disparity. Now, digital technologies and social networks seem to be transforming every aspect of our lives—profoundly reshaping notions of connection and community. These developments have boundless promise for addressing inequality. But, fulfilling this promise will require an intentional and sustained focus on ensuring that transformational technology is applied to address our seemingly intractable social and economic problems.

Here are three ways that, if harnessed effectively, technology can be the great equalizer in cities:

Connecting People to Opportunity and Services. Today, there is a new ‘social operating system’ that is in stark contrast to the one that was built on geography and small tight-knit groups. People—connected by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and online discussion forums are now part of broad, loose and complex networks that readily share information and mobilize. And, as the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project states, because of the mobile phone, information is increasingly portable, participatory and personal. Scores of businesses are innovating on mobile technology. Over 600,000 apps have been developed in the last three years alone. Similarly, the proliferation of the online economy is creating new marketplaces that connect people to everything from transportation (Zipcar) to accommodation (AirBnB). We have seen how these technologies can be used to drive social movements and democratize the creation and dissemination of information, from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring. But, much work remains in terms of leaders adopting them to drive large scale social change. The vast majority of apps have little to no overt social impact, yet one can imagine myriad ways that social and mobile technologies can be used to better connect people to child care, social services, and jobs in new ways.

There are, to be sure, some promising examples of how this could work. Txt2Wrk helps connect disadvantaged jobseekers with timely employment opportunities via SMS. The project emerged from a participatory design process at an Oakland hackathon in which a formerly incarcerated participant described the challenges of job search for those with limited resources and no home computer or broadband connection. And, Castlight Health works like the popular travel site Kayak to compare healthcare costs at different facilities, taking your insurance coverage into account. However, in order to meet the immense promise inherent in these technologies, innovations such as these must become the norm rather than the exception.

Transforming Education. Every day we are confronted with more evidence of the grand-scale failings of the US education system in preparing our citizens to meet the opportunity of the future. And, for low-income students, the outlook is especially grim. With poverty on the rise, these realities have potentially devastating consequences for our nation’s ability to compete in an increasingly globalized economy. But, now, there is a hunger to re-think education beyond brick and mortar schools, towards a focus on lifetime learning. In addition, disruptive technology-driven education trends like distance learning, and MOOCs, interactive and game-based learning, personalized education software, instructional games, and creative techniques to blend technology with traditional teaching can combine to create a system that will better prepare our young people for the future while leveling the socioeconomic playing field. Indeed, if these tools are driven to do so, we might finally be able to create a system that is more open, distributed, adaptable, and equitable.

With the rise of distance learning, any internet-enabled device can become a classroom on demand. This can be especially transformative for students in underserved communities. In “flipped classrooms,” for example, passive activities like lectures are reserved for homework, while in-class time is used for collaborative and personal interactions between teachers and students. Teachers can post their own lectures online and direct students to other online resources, such as those provided by Khan Academy, which offers more than 2800 educational videos covering a multitude of disciplines. This model greatly benefits children of lower socio-economic backgrounds as students in flipped classrooms don't have to miss lectures when they can't physically attend school, a problem that disproportionately correlates with low-income families.

In terms of higher education, the trend towards MOOCs means that online higher education is no longer being dismissed as being low-quality. In fact, the movement was launched when two Stanford professors made their popular Artificial Intelligence class open to the public. And, although students learning through MOOCs often don’t receive credit, this is starting to change, opening up a path from MOOCs to a degree program.

Investors and innovators are paying attention and taking bets on the technologies driving these trends, and we must seize this moment to produce ‘equalizing’ outcomes in terms of educational attainment.

Revolutionizing the Relationship between Government and Citizen. The future of decision-making is all about data. Today, all levels of government, from small cities to the White House, are sharing, communicating, and co-producing with citizens in new ways through technology. These are all steps towards Government 2.0-- a fundamental change in the relationship between government and citizen, making information and services more broadly available and replacing the expertise of bureaucracy with that of the citizen.

By opening up information historically kept under lock and key, the public sector is making a commitment to transparency, which is extremely important in a democracy where citizens should know both what a government is doing and how they are doing. Information about school test scores and crime reports, available online, increase understanding of how education and law enforcement policies are working. This can help people to make more informed personal decisions about what neighborhood they choose to move to, and who they vote for in the next election.

As people have become accustomed to the user-centric experiences of commercial online platforms, from Facebook to Amazon, it is no surprise that many are advocating for the idea of ‘government as platform’—a democratization of the exchange of information and services. This model has ‘self-service’ elements that streamline engagement and make it more cost-effective. Cities, such as Boston are empowering residents to be their ‘eyes and ears’ by enabling people to report potholes and graffiti via text message, twitter, or through a mobile app that detects potholes without the user having to do anything at all. And, New York’s comprehensive 311 platform has become the nerve center for this new relationship. 311 enables residents to efficiently connect with city agencies, receive information, file complaints, and resolve issues. Where people might previously have had to make 10 calls or more before reaching the appropriate agency, now 85% of 311 customers have their inquiry resolved over one call. In addition, analysis of 311 call patterns allows the City to respond proactively to issues, such as dispatching extra workers to fix roads, to appropriately concentrate resources, and to get a clear picture of city agency performance measures.

Technology alone cannot fundamentally change the relationship between government and citizen, but as the possibilities become more apparent, it is fair to expect people to use it to do so.

We cannot continue to build services on outdated paradigms, and the advances in technology that are bringing enormous benefits to the lives of many are signs of great progress. But, given the pace of change, we will have to ensure that the digital divide that is largely drawn across socioeconomic lines is effectively addressed so that all citizens can access the opportunities and services created. And, we must continue to seek ways to harness technology for good.

Jeff Brown is renowned for building a chain of successful urban grocery stores that leverage additional social and economic benefit for their surrounding neighborhoods, such as jobs for people with significant barriers to employment.

This brief video describes how Jeff’s commitment to operating grocery stores as community anchors led him to establish UpLift Solutions, a national nonprofit organization. UpLift helps food businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits open sustainable full-service grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods.

To hear about UpLift Solution’s model and opportunities for replication at scale, please join our upcoming webinar on Wednesday, April 3rd from 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm EST. Interested funders, food access advocates, and community development stakeholders are invited to join. Please register here to participate.

We will be tweeting about the event using the hashtag #UrbanFood and invite everyone to share their thoughts and questions.