Just announced: The 50 finalists for this year’s Mayors Challenge

Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced the 50 Champion Cities, representing the boldest urban innovations of the past year, that will advance to the finalist stage of the 2021 Global Mayors Challenge, a worldwide competition that encourages and spreads cities’ most promising ideas. This year’s Challenge focuses on elevating the most important innovations generated in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“These 50 finalists are showing the world that, in the face of the pandemic’s enormous challenges, cities are rising to meet them with bold, innovative, and ambitious ideas,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and 108th mayor of New York City. “By helping these cities test their ideas over the coming months, we will have a chance to identify cutting-edge policies and programs that can allow cities to rebuild in ways that make them stronger and healthier, and more equal and more just.” 

VIDEO: Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and 108th mayor of New York City, joins members of the Mayors Challenge selection committee in congratulating the 50 Champion Cities in this year’s Global Mayors Challenge. Watch here

MEET JULIANA BALDWIN-MUNOZ

Title: Learning and Innovation Director
City: El Paso, Texas Before last December, the planning and innovation teams for the city of El Paso worked together, but with different leadership. The lessons of innovation were not always getting embedded into the city’s perpetual learning systems so that El Paso’s 6,000 city workers were sharing in the growth of creative problem-solving.

Juliana Baldwin-Munoz, who became El Paso’s first Learning and Innovation Director at the end of 2020, aims to change that. In her new post, Baldwin-Munoz wants to make sure that the fruits of innovation are shared throughout the city workforce so that the evolution of a data-based and design-centered approach to problem-solving becomes one continual loop. “Learning plus innovation equals continual improvement,” she said.

With the city for 15 years, Baldwin-Munoz hopes her new position can effectively combine the work of the city’s learning team, a hub for continuous workforce improvement, with the innovation office that strives to connect and focus the work of El Paso’s 26 city departments in new and effective ways. She also tries to keep everything the city does anchored in its strategic plan, which charts specific priorities through 2025.

On the innovation side, El Paso is using an innovation training program with Bloomberg Philanthropies to build on previous work that both outlined how cross-functional departments should work together and ensured that proper reporting structures and leadership were in place to support that.  

That process helped El Paso meet the COVID-19 challenge with 10 cross-departmental teams that focus on topics that range from facilities management to creating hybrid workplaces to economic development.

Another recent priority has been developing new after-school opportunities for youth. Baldwin-Munoz and her team recently presented two prototypes to city leadership—the first for a Program Hub that serves as a single source for individualized programs and the second for a youth-engagement program that creates a one-stop “look and book” site to find community-service opportunities. 
 
Baldwin-Munoz’s dual role allows work such as the youth service initiative to immediately become part of the city’s training and career learning curriculum, keeping more city workers abreast of new techniques and innovations.

“If we need to pivot quickly to a new priority, my role helps ensure that we are also keeping that focus in all of our courses and curriculum,” she said.Pro tip: “We are tackling projects that are innovative but also making sure that people from across our organization are gaining those skills. We’re building organizational coaches.”

WHAT WE’RE READING

COVID-19: The State of the Cities 2021 report examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated critical issues facing municipalities, including infrastructure, affordable housing, and supports for small businesses. (National League of Cities) 
CYBERSECURITY: As more city infrastructure is connected digitally, city leaders identify the top priorities to thwart cybersecurity attacks. (Cities Today)
PUBLIC SPACE: The Chicago Monuments Project is leading a city-wide dialogue in search of ways to resolve its landscape of problematic statues and make room for a new kind of public memorial. (Bloomberg CityLab)
DATA: The Global Liveability Index examines 140 cities worldwide to quantify the challenges presented to an individual’s lifestyle in the past year across five categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. (The Economist)

NETWORK NEWS

LEARNING OPPORTUNITY: During TOPcities’ Demo Day, cities will showcase tech solutions that aim to alleviate housing challenges. They’ll share what they learned in the process of working with their communities to understand, design, and launch a product that meets residents’ needs. The event takes place on Friday, June 18 at 2 p.m. ET. Register here.
RESOURCE: How can city leaders move from response to the fiscal crisis to recovery, and eventually to transformation? City leaders, faced with the economic fallout of the pandemic, have to radically rethink their budgets and make tough decisions. The City Leader Guide on Fiscal Resilience, from the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, is an interactive website designed to help city leaders diagnose and address fiscal challenges, access relevant resources, and move cities out of crisis and towards fiscal resiliency. Check out this website here.
JOB OPPORTUNITIES: The city of San Antonio is hiring a Smart City Specialist and Smart Cities Special Projects Manager.
JOB OPPORTUNITIES: The recently announced Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University is hiring two positions to grow and strengthen the center’s commitment to equipping mayors and city officials with the skills, tools, and techniques to tackle the leadership and management challenges they face in their cities. These positions are: Senior Director of Communications and Data Analyst, Impact Assessment.