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