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Boston City Leader Jacob to Join Living Cities

Expands capacity to support city government leaders, accelerate innovation

Boston City Leader Jacob to Join Living Cities

Expands capacity to support city government leaders, accelerate innovation

Published 01-28-14

Submitted by Living Cities

Living Cities has announced that municipal innovator Nigel Jacob will be joining its Public Sector Innovation team at the beginning of February 2014. Jacob, Co-Chair of the Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, will be serving as Living Cities’ Urban Technologist in Residence.  He will help to expand Living Cities’ engagement with municipal governments across the organization’s portfolio of activities, which are directed at improving the lives of low-income people in America’s cities.

Jacob’s arrival comes at a time of increasing attention to rising inequality in cities, as well as a growing interest among city governments in finding innovative solutions to the challenges they face.  Municipal governments are increasingly reimagining how they work and embracing more innovative ways of operating, collaborating, and aligning resources for results.

“Nigel has established himself as a national leader in municipal innovation,” said Arthur Burris, Living Cities’ Director of Public Sector Innovation.  “We are pleased that his work with Living Cities will allow us to partner more effectively with cities across the country to accelerate innovation and improve results for city residents.” 

Jacob will be engaged in a number of areas of Living Cities’ municipal innovation portfolio, including advising cities interested in embedding innovation into their municipal operations. He will also lead the next generation of Living Cities’ work to ensure that new tools in data and technology are aimed at making cities places of widespread opportunity.  Jacob is the founding Co-Chair of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, which incubates innovative experiments designed to transform and improve city services for residents. In recognition of his work, he was named a Public Official of the Year by Governing Magazine in 2011.  Jacob will continue to expand New Urban Mechanics under Boston’s recently elected Mayor Martin J. Walsh who is committed to making innovation in the service of the city a key priority.

“I’m looking forward to Nigel helping cities beyond Boston to harness the transformational powers of technology and innovation for good,” said Living Cities President and CEO Ben Hecht.

About Public Sector Innovation at Living Cities
Public Sector Innovation at Living Cities is built on the belief that, given its influence, authority, and resources, government has a critical role to play in building shared prosperity for all people.  Our work is also premised on the idea that that, in order to play this role as fully as possible, government must move beyond the one-off, programmatic approaches of the past and reinvent itself more fundamentally.  Local governments can drastically augment their ability to achieve ambitious results if they modernize their operations; align revenues and expenditures, and attract and leverage private and philanthropic capital, towards desired outcomes; and better collaborate across agencies, sectors, and geographies.

About Living Cities
Living Cities harnesses the collective power of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions to develop and scale new approaches for creating opportunities for low-income people and improving the cities where they live. Its investments, research, networks, and convenings catalyze fresh thinking and combine support for innovative, local approaches with real-time sharing of learning to accelerate adoption in more places.

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Living Cities

Living Cities

Who We Are Founded in 1991, Living Cities is an innovative philanthropic collaborative of 21 of the world's largest foundations and financial institutions. Our members are not simply funders. They participate at the senior management level on the Living Cities Board of Directors and contribute the time of 80+ expert staff toward crafting and implementing our agenda, which is focused on improving the lives of low-income people and the urban areas in which they live. What We Do Historically, challenges faced by our nation's cities have been addressed using a "squeaky wheel" approach—moving from one critical issue to another but never addressing the whole. Today there is a general recognition that we need to treat our cities’ problems comprehensively. We must take an integrative approach, simultaneously strengthening neighborhood institutions from the bottom up and reengineering, from the top down, the public systems that fail to create adequate opportunities. We must align local, state and federal policies to effectively address the issues surrounding jobs, housing, climate change, asset building and health care. We must leverage the collective power of the public, private and philanthropic sectors especially through new and innovative ways of aggregating capital. Over the past 18 years, Living Cities' members have collectively invested over $600 million which has, in turn, leveraged more than $16 billion in tangible community assets — a remarkable leverage ratio of 29:1. Our funding has helped build homes, stores, schools, child care, health care and job-training centers and other community assets.

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