America's cities are the engine for national prosperity and individual economic opportunity. Their rich history, cultural vibrancy, and environmental sustainability are qualities that have attracted people to them throughout our nation’s history. At their best, cities develop the best talent, provide convenient access to quality health care, housing, education, and transportation and harness the power of local and global markets.

Too often, however, this is not the case. In many cities, 50% of students who enter high school do not graduate; 20% of residents live on the edge of poverty. A significant number of individuals are unprepared for today’s workforce and geographically isolated from their region’s economy. These realities negatively affect an entire region, strain public systems, and limit job creation and business expansion.

For decades, government and philanthropy have attempted to disrupt these trends, but they have yielded little success. Instead of fundamentally re-engineering long-broken systems like education, workforce development and transportation, their approaches have been piecemeal and work-arounds.

Living Cities believes that transforming long-broken systems is imperative and the opportunity to make enduring change is now. Government, philanthropy, nonprofits and private industry are undergoing enormous shifts and experiencing dramatic fiscal constraints. Today we have the chance to work together differently, to make changes that have too long been delayed, and to innovate for the good of our nation's cities and their residents.

Living Cities designed The Integration Initiative to support cities that are harnessing existing momentum and leadership for change, overhauling long obsolete systems and fundamentally reshaping their communities and policies to meet the needs of low-income residents.

Each site participating in The Integration Initiative is required to incorporate four high-impact strategies into its work. Based on 20 years of work in the field, Living Cities believes these strategies are necessary to drive systems transformation and make enduring change:

1. Building a resilient civic infrastructure, one table where decision-makers from across sectors and jurisdictions can formally convene and work together to define and address complex social problems;
2. Moving beyond delivering programs and instead focus on transforming systems such as transportation, health, housing and jobs;
3. Bringing disruptive innovations into the mainstream and redirecting funds away from obsolete approaches toward what works; and
4. Supplementing traditional government and philanthropic funding streams by driving the private market to work on behalf of low-income people.

Living Cities maintains that urban innovation will come from the local level. We also recognize that to strengthen all cities, we must build on local innovations to drive transformation across our nation. To this end, we will capture lessons we’re learning from on-the-ground efforts in The Integration Initiative sites and share them with key stakeholders in philanthropy, finance and government. By working with these influential stakeholders—who are members and key partners of Living Cities--we aim to make the funding and policy environments supportive of systems transformation and drive expansion and adaption of innovative practices to cities across the country.