4 ways to turn city procurement into a force for change

Talk to mayors about how their city halls buy goods and services, and you are likely to hear a litany of complaints. Yet procurement is one of the most important and powerful tools local leaders have at their disposal. There is a big opportunity for local leaders to deliver better results with local spending and turn procurement from a back-office administrative annoyance into a real force for transformational change. Here, Jeffrey Liebman, director of the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab, unpacks the "four pillars of procurement excellence."

MEET NNEKA ONWUZURIKE

Title: Community Wealth Building Lead
City: Chicago

After starting in Chicago as a Bloomberg Harvard Summer Fellow and then consultant, Nneka Onwuzurike joined the city in April as its full-time lead for community wealth building. Her chief responsibility is to promote models of local, democratic, and shared ownership and control of community assets.

WHAT WE'RE READING

PARTNERSHIPS: A new United States Conference of Mayors taskforce will assist mayors in identifying opportunities, challenges, and best practices for using public-private partnerships. (Cities Today)

PUBLIC HEALTH: Mayors—including those in Austin, Texas, Cincinnati, Durham, N.C., and Phoenix—are leading a local charge to push back on laws criminalizing abortion. (Vox)

LEADERSHIP: Mayors and other local officials, especially women and people of color, face growing harassment and threats. (Bloomberg CityLab)

WORKFORCE: From New York City to Seattle, a growing number of cities are taking action to protect workers and advance their rights. (Route Fifty)

CO-CREATION: Dusseldorf, Germany, Oulu, Finland, and Zaragoza, Spain, are part of a project that is training local leaders in the co-creation of integration strategies for migrants. (Eurocities)

NETWORK NEWS

FEDERAL FUNDS: The Federal Assistance e311 Program, a partnership between Bloomberg Philanthropies and the United States Conference of Mayors, will be hosting a 90-minute webinar on strategies for municipalities to navigate federal grants. Click here to join the webinar on Thursday, July 14 at 2:00pm-3:30 EDT (Meeting ID 831 8575 7539, Passcode 787632).

ASPHALT ART: The Asphalt Art Initiative grant program is supporting projects in the U.S. and Europe to demonstrate the impact of asphalt art projects and encourage cities to develop their own processes for implementing these low-cost activations effectively. The first two rounds of the Asphalt Art Initiative grant program supported 42 projects in U.S. cities and 3 pilot projects in Europe, installing from 2020-2022. The Initiative is now accepting applications from European cities with populations greater than 100,000 for projects to be installed in 2023. The application deadline is July 11. Learn more and apply here.

JOB OPPORTUNITIES: The Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University is searching for a Communications Coordinator and a Project Manager for Operations and Technology to join the team.

JOB OPPORTUNITIES: The Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University is hiring for the following roles: