Senior Associate, Public Sector Innovation
Living Cities, Inc.
Living Cities, a collaborative of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, supports bold and promising approaches to bring opportunities and the power of mainstream markets to urban neighborhoods and residents historically left behind. Living Cities executes its mission through strategic deployment of loans, grants, and the intellectual capital and convening power of its membership. Over the past 15 years, Living Cities’ members have collectively invested more than $1 billion in America’s cities, an investment that has resulted in over $16 billion in development and follow-on investments. Yet 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 the Living Cities agenda.
The Public Sector Innovation Cluster is responsible for the development and implementation of a diverse portfolio of Living Cities’ activities, focused on helping local governments transform the way they operate, better utilize resources, and collaborate in order to improve the lives of low-income residents. These activities include:
- the Project on Municipal Innovation, a national network of senior mayoral staff;
- the City Accelerator, a multiyear initiative to support cohorts of city officials working to transform particular aspects of their governmental practice;
- serving as network and knowledge lead on Bloomberg Philanthropies’ 14 city innovation team initiative
- work to harness the power of new tools and approaches in civic data and technology to change the way government and other local partners address problems facing low-income people;
- public sector aspects of cross-cutting Living Cities’ programs including the nine-site Integration Initiative;
- the generation of knowledge from these and other activities to influence the broader field of public sector innovation.
This an exciting opportunity for an individual committed to accelerating large-scale results for low-income populations by supporting, capturing and disseminating key lessons from public sector innovators across the country. Reporting to the Director of Public Sector Innovation (PSI) and partnering with an outstanding team of colleagues, associates, consultants and external partners, the Senior Associate will provide programmatic support to one or more major initiatives in the Living Cities’ Public Sector Innovation portfolio and will collect, analyze, synthesize and disseminate key findings from along the way.
Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Work with the Public Sector Innovation team to identify key issues and findings for further exploration and dissemination
- Provide research and analysis support for issues identified by partners and Living Cities staff
- All aspects of project development and management, including drafting a consistent flow of knowledge products like regular updates to members, semi-annual snapshots for the broader field, webinars, and case studies
- Assist in the development of curriculum and resource materials for Living Cities and Bloomberg Philanthropies’ bi-annual two-day innovation team learning communities, one-time convenings and webinars
- Develop a working knowledge of five to eight cities through various Living Cities programs and take initiative to bridge knowledge with other cities and colleagues
- Work with other Living Cities clusters to ensure lessons and opportunities are identified and shared appropriately
- Author regular PSI-related communications including summary documents, research papers, press releases, internal memoranda, reports, blogs, and white papers
- Create and maintain an initiative-level dashboard, tracking results and progress against core goals
- Collect data regarding Living Cities staff’s site-level support efforts, e.g., coaching, technical assistance, convening, and other non-financial transactions, to share with evaluation team
- Work on other programmatic areas, as identified by PSI Director