Glendale Mayor Daniel Brotman was named this week as just one of 20 mayors from across the United States and Latin America to join the second cohort of the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance, which empowers mayors to lead with data in service of improving city residents’ lives.
As part of the Alliance, the mayors will receive executive education and coaching on how to leverage data to strengthen city government operations, innovate public services and produce better outcomes for residents including improving access to health care, reimagining waste management systems, expanding affordable housing or combatting homelessness.
Brotman will join notable figures including Mike Bloomberg, Denice Ross, chief Data Scientists for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Amy Edwards Holmes, executive director of the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University, and alumni mayors of the first City Data Alliance cohort at the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University. There, the 20 mayors will make a shared, public commitment to use data to effectively deliver on community needs.
This comes at a time when today’s cities face an onslaught of challenges, from ensuring residents have easy access to housing and health care, to policing and racial equity. Yet cities — where half the world’s population now lives, expected to be 80 percent by 2050 — provide the necessary scale, reach and resources to bridge the gap between small experiments and big problems.
To solve these challenges, the City Data Alliance is empowering cities to change the culture of how they do business. Establishing strong data standards encourages cities to work cross-functionally across departments to identify different elements of a problem and facilitates tough conversations, such as how they’re addressing the needs of marginalized or vulnerable groups.
“These 20 mayors were selected because of their leadership using data to inform decision-making and respond to challenges, and this program will help them take that work to the next level,” Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and 108th mayor of New York City, said in a statement. “The Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance provides tools, support and peer networking to help mayors achieve their goals by using data even more effectively.”
The addition of the 20 new cities brings the total number of those accepted into the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance to 42 cities across seven countries.
First published in the May 20 print issue of the Glendale News-Press.
