NLC Launches Mayors’ Institute on Children and Families, New Approach to Helping Cities
by Clifford M. Johnson
For the typical municipal leader, the chance to join a group of national experts for an in-depth problem-solving discussion — one focused specifically on a pressing challenge in his or her community — doesn’t come along very often.
With the launch of an exciting new NLC model for providing practical help and advice to individual cities, however, many more mayors may have that opportunity in the months and years to come.
On December 10-11, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay traveled with city teams to Chicago to participate in the inaugural Mayors’ Institute on Children and Families. The event was the first of two pilot sessions sponsored by NLC’s Institute for Youth, Education, and Families (YEF Institute) to test the effectiveness of a new approach to the provision of customized technical assistance in larger cities.
During the Mayors’ Institute, each participating mayor presented a carefully prepared case statement describing a specific local problem or challenge. These presentations were followed by an extensive discussion with a group of assembled experts, practitioners, academics and other participating city leaders aimed at identifying potential solutions.
NLC developed plans for this demonstration of the Mayors’ Institute on Children and Families in partnership with Chapin Hall, a policy and research center at the University of Chicago, and the Seattle-based Institute for Community Change led by former Seattle Mayor Charles Royer. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley welcomed participants to his city during a reception held on the first evening of this initial two-day session.
The Mayors’ Institute Model
As demonstrated in a recently published YEF Institute report on "The State of City Leadership for Children and Families," mayors are increasingly involved in improving outcomes for their cities’ children and families in education, health, safety and financial well-being. Moreover, they are turning their cities into the nation’s “learning laboratories” by developing innovative approaches that can inform the efforts of other communities as well as state and federal policies.
Since its inception in January 2000, the YEF Institute has been working to stimulate city innovation, providing site-level technical assistance to more than 100 cities across the nation and serving as the premier source of information and practical advice on municipal strategies for meeting the needs of children, youth and families. In the course of that work, it has become clear that the full understanding of and participation in an issue by a city’s mayor is perhaps the most critical factor in sustaining city-level progress.
The YEF Institute has been working for the past year to develop a new way of tailoring practical assistance to the needs of mayors and the communities they serve. The Mayors’ Institute on Children and Families is modeled on the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD), a partnership program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Architectural Foundation and the U.S. Conference of Mayors. For more than 20 years, the MICD has helped transform communities through design by preparing mayors to be the chief urban designers of their cities.
Building on the MICD model, the Mayors’ Institute on Children and Families sessions are organized around well-developed case study problems prepared and presented by mayors, who then engage their peers and city staff, as well as leading experts, academics and practitioners, to discuss solutions. These cases, developed with the input of mayoral staff and partner institutions in the targeted cities, include a concise overview of the problem, political challenges, issues of governance, funding and constraints and opportunities.
The case statements are distributed prior to the session to ensure that all participants begin the discussion with a baseline understanding of the key issues facing each city. Mayors go home with new ideas, better information on where to get help and strategies for moving forward.
Charleston, S.C., Mayor Joseph Riley Jr., the 2008 Chair of NLC’s Council on Youth, Education, and Families, was the driving force behind the MICD’s development. Mayor Riley is advising the YEF Institute in the establishment of this similar mechanism to assist mayors in areas related to children, youth and families.
The Mayors’ Action Challenge
Topics for the first demonstration session in Chicago were drawn from the goals established by the Mayors’ Action Challenge for Children and Families, a national initiative launched by Riley, Hickenlooper, Slay and 23 other mayors to promote city leadership and innovation on behalf of children and families. More than 100 mayors have joined the challenge since it was unveiled at NLC’s November 2008 Congress of Cities in Orlando, Fla.
The challenge calls on mayors to set at least one bold, measurable, locally defined goal or target in each of the following areas to ensure that every child has, at a minimum:
• Opportunities to learn and grow;
• A safe neighborhood to call home;
• A healthy lifestyle and environment; and
• A financially fit family in which to thrive.
To help mayors pursue the goals of providing “opportunities to learn and grow,” areas of focus at the first Mayors’ Institute included supporting the school readiness of young children and sharing local data to more effectively monitor and improve educational outcomes for children and youth.
Through its partnership with Chapin Hall, NLC’s YEF Institute sought to ensure that some of the best minds in academia as well as some of the leading practitioners in the country were at the table for an unusually rich and in-depth series of problem-solving discussions. Going forward, the YEF Institute plans to provide ongoing technical assistance and follow up to the mayors who participated in the Mayors’ Institute session, collect stories and best practices for publication and dissemination and measure progress and outcomes.
If the demonstration projects prove to be effective, the YEF Institute and its partners will explore the feasibility of replicating the model throughout the country to accelerate the pace of city innovation. A second pilot session focused on providing young people with opportunities to learn and grow by expanding access to high-quality out-of-school time programs is being planned for the spring of 2010.
Details: For more information about the Mayors’ Institute on Children and Families, contact Julie Bosland at (202) 626-3144 or bosland@nlc.org. To learn more about the Mayors’ Action Challenge for Children and Families, visit www.mayorsforkids.org.
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