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If you hear “MVP” and the first things that come to mind are sports stars like LeBron James or Tom Brady — “most valuable players” — you’re not alone. But in a growing number of city halls, another kind of MVP is making its way into the conversation. It’s the…

The first phase of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Mayors Challenge wrapped up last week with more cities from more countries submitting more Mayors Challenge applications than ever before. These cities are now competing to be one of 15 that will win $1 million each to implement a breakthrough idea that…

When the pandemic hit, Fort Collins, Colo., was already on the way to building something many cities suddenly wished they had: a municipal broadband utility. City leaders were able to quickly leverage their growing fiber-optic network to bring WiFi to students who had no other way to get online for…

The Latinx neighborhoods Councilwoman Mary Zendejas represents in Long Beach, Calif., have been hit hard by COVID-19. So when Zendejas saw that residents in her district were getting vaccinated at much lower rates than people in other parts of the city, she got to work. She mobilized a task force…

By Sascha Haselmayer In 2012, Peter Moore was given an unpleasant task nobody working in local government wants. At the time, he ran social services in Sefton, a city of 275,000 in the U.K. near Liverpool. The city could no longer afford to provide its community meals service, which brought…

This week marks a full year since city lockdowns began proliferating to stop the spread of COVID-19. And that means this is also the one-year anniversary of the start of one of the most prolific periods of urban innovation in history. When seniors and others at risk couldn’t go out…

Over the past 10 months, Burlington, Vt., Mayor Miro Weinberger has repeated a motto that’s guided his city hall throughout the COVID-19 crisis: “In a global pandemic, local actions matter.” And his words have proven to be much more than lip service: Whether it was investing in local mask manufacturing…

Thanks to the race for COVID-19 vaccines, the results of “randomized control trials” are now dinner-table conversation around the world — even for people who aren’t scientists or data geeks. But the term has also been popping up more and more in city halls recently, and for a very different…

By James Anderson, Bloomberg Philanthropies Government Innovation program lead The past year has been like no other, placing mayors at the frontline of compounding crises the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Yet, as the surging pandemic, a plummeting economy, and cries for social justice tested them — and…