HomeMy WebLinkAboutMemo - Mail Packet - 5/8/2018 - Information From Darin Atteberry Re: Cities Of Service Article Dated April 20, 2018 - When Cities Are As Creative And Collaborative As StartupsPage 1 of 6
04.20.18
CITIES OF SERVICE
When Cities Are As
Creative And
Collaborative As Startups
The finalists for Cities of Service’s Engaged Cities Award
have a lot in common with today’s top companies. Just
look at these inventive approaches to local challenges
such as transparency and access to healthy food.
1/10 Bologna, Italy – An abandoned convent leads to grassroots activism and a
bureaucratic shift in one of Italy’s most ancient cities.
BY FAST CO WORKS 6 MINUTE READ
May 3, 2018
TO: Mayor & City Council
FROM: Darin Atteberry
FYI /sek
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Many cities are very much like a legacy company—rich in history and earned
reputation, but sometimes a little beholden to traditional processes and points
of view. Progress can be problematic. How do local leaders and agencies
keep up with today’s rapid change? With new technology and new problems?
Citizens may be a source of power and promise, but they have little influence
beyond election time to help their city make progress.
Cities of Service, a New York City–based independent nonprofit, sees a
pattern for cities that are succeeding. They not only address their citizens’
changing needs, but also engage them to work closely with elected officials
toward common goals. Founded in 2009, the coalition has grown to 235 cities
across the U.S. and U.K.
Last November, Cities of Service announced its first Engaged Cities Award,
created to recognize places that have implemented especially noteworthy
approaches to solving local problems by working together with their citizens.
Entries came from all over the world, with 10 finalists recently announced:
Boston; Fort Collins, Colorado; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Huntington, West Virginia;
and San Jose from the U.S., and Hamm, Germany; Helsinki, Mexico City,
Santiago de Cali, Colombia; and Bologna, Italy from overseas. In May, a
grand-prize-winning city will earn $100,000 and two additional winners will
claim $50,000 each.
The work being done in these cities closely mirrors trends seen in the most
progressive modern companies. These cities, in fact, function like urban think
tanks where collaboration is often facilitated by technology and rooted in the
belief that a good idea can come from anywhere.
ONE STEP LEADS TO ANOTHER
A fallacy of progress is that it’s possible to go from problem to solution in one
giant leap. The reality is that even though it can be achieved rapidly, often
because of technology, the path forward must still follow a necessary
progression of steps.
In the finalist city of Huntington, those steps led to powerful change when
elected officials and citizen volunteers worked hand in hand on adult obesity.
Home to Marshall University, this city on the southern bank of the Ohio River
sits within a metro area that faced an alarming epidemic just 10 years ago. In
2008, 49% of the metro area’s 360,000-person population was clinically
obese.
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In 2012, three Marshall University students joined forces with the nonprofit
Unlimited Futures Inc. to discuss a solution: reducing the barriers to healthy
food. “One idea was to have a healthy grocery store chain open in the area,”
says Huntington mayor Stephen T. Williams. “But our demographics weren’t
going to be able to support that kind of chain. Instead of lamenting the fact,
the community said, ‘Let’s create our own.’ ”
The Wild Ramp farmer’s market in West Virginia
They created the Wild Ramp farmers
market, which made fresh and
nutritious foods available to
vulnerable populations through
subsidies, while also growing jobs
and benefiting 145 local farmers.
Over the next year, the mayor’s
office built on what citizen leaders
had started by facilitating a land
swap that moved the market to Huntington’s distressed West End, sparking
much-needed economic development, job training, and neighborhood
stabilization.
Now, less than 10 years later, the metro area’s obesity rate has dropped to
35%. Huntington’s “hub and spoke” strategy of centrally supporting
community-driven initiatives through the mayor’s office is considered a model
that can be replicated for urban gardens, job initiatives for troubled youths,
and other challenges.
“I’ve learned that there are a lot of solutions hiding in plain sight,” says
Williams. “Neighborhood groups are very good at being innovative. They take
the resources at their disposal and find ways to step up and address the
issues.”
Finding the opportunities that are nestled between data points is crucial to any
organization’s success. The same was true in Tulsa, one of the 50 most
populous cities in the U.S. and a leading player in the oil industry that
somehow lost sight of the significance—and volume—of the information it was
collecting every day.
UNLOCKING THE VALUE OF VOLUNTEERS
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If you think private companies miss opportunities hidden within the data they
generate, imagine the valuable information that goes overlooked by a city. In
Tulsa, various city departments spent years yearning to see what insights
could be mined for the greater good. But opening access to municipal data
stalled as a political issue. In 2016, newly elected mayor G.T. Bynum decided
that those barriers needed to be removed.
“There was a time when we were known as the oil capital of the world,” he
says. “[But] I felt that we had lost our momentum and our high ambition.” Once
Bynum opened access, he faced another challenge: finding skilled data
analysts without a budget to pay for them.
Tulsa’s Office of Performance Strategy and Innovation decided to tap into the
community for volunteers—both citizens and city staffers. After issuing a press
release, local officials were thrilled to see more than 60 people turn out for the
kickoff meeting. They were briefed on key priorities and divided into five
working teams assigned to specific projects. They were also given a name:
Urban Data Pioneers.
Tulsa’s Urban Data Pioneers program has since doubled, and about a third of
those 120 people are unpaid volunteers. Their work includes finding ways to
increase the city’s per capita income and optimize its capital improvements
budget.
“We recognized that there are people who know a tremendous amount more
than we do about how to analyze an issue or problem,” says Bynum. “We’ve
been able to harness the collective knowledge that’s beyond the doors of city
hall.”
The fact that Tulsa was able to tap citizen volunteers without creating
additional budget underscores the value of progressive, out-of-the-box
thinking. But can that thinking be applied to budget making at an even greater
scale? That’s precisely the idea being tested in Fort Collins.
BRINGING FAIRNESS TO FUNDING
Anyone who has ever complained about paying local taxes because you can’t
tell where the money goes can relate to the problem identified by Fort Collins,
a midsize college town that’s home to Colorado State University.
“I refer to our old budgeting system as ‘Whining for Dollars,’ ” says city
manager Darin Atteberry. “People would come in and give us a list of things
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they needed. We’d go back, turn the crank, and say ‘Okay, of your 22 items,
three are going to get funded.’ It was mostly about inputs and outputs, not
outcomes and results.”
Around the recession of 2008, when money tightened and budgets shrank,
Fort Collins decided to approach its budget in a new way. The result was a
program called Budgeting for Outcomes (BFO) that reached out to the
community at large and invited them to become active participants in building
the budget.
Fort Collins’s city manager, Darin Atteberry,
addressing city staff
Through civic board meetings
and wide-reaching
communication efforts, the Fort
Collins budget process became
transparent. It’s now open to
anyone. “It was this new idea of
cocreating a community,” says
Atteberry.
Highly organized and plugged in (materials were designed as mobile friendly
and included an interactive budgeting tool), the BFO process established the
expectation of community involvement—whole community involvement. This
led to a 5% increase in Spanish-speaking respondents, representation of
responders that better matched the demographic makeup of the community,
and clear parallels between community priorities and budget allocation.
THE TAKEAWAY
By 2030, a United Nations report projects that 60% of the world’s population
will live in urban areas. In an era of rapid disruption, cities can easily lose their
edge—and their human capital—if they aren’t aggressive about staying
relevant. Conversely, even cities that have faced decades of hardship can
suddenly rise to renewed prominence if they empower their citizens toward
progress.
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The most competitive cities moving forward are going to be the ones having
rich and authentic conversations with their residents,” says Fort Collins’s
Atteberry. “Telling citizens to just ‘trust us’ doesn’t really work anymore.”
If the old organizational model relied on centralizing power with a leader and
hoping for the best, the new model of success is about sharing power with the
people and working together toward what’s best for all. That’s the dynamic
that Cities of Service is fostering.
“If you create partnerships,” says Huntington’s Williams, “you establish trust
and create hope.”
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This story was created with and commissioned by Cities of Service.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40561035/when-cities-are-as-creative-and-collaborative-
as-startups