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The Receipts: Pete Buttigieg’s Policies Fail LGBTQ+ Communities

04.8.21

Though Pete Buttigieg is often cast as an LGBTQ+ icon, his tenure in South Bend and a close look at his platform say otherwise.

Building America’s Backbench: Electing Women to the State House

08.23.19

The 2016 elections dealt a crushing blow to women. But in its wake, a new urgency and optimism emerged. After the elections, over 26,000 women reached out to the pro-choice political action committee, EMILY’s List for help launching a campaign, about thirty times more women than in the previous cycle. A record number of women […]

Female Representation and US City Managers: The Stubborn 14.4 Percent

08.22.19

  In November 2018, Sheryl Sculley retired as San Antonio’s City Manager after 13 years in the position. Her replacement, chosen by San Antonio’s City Council, was Erik Walsh. The story was covered by local news with little fanfare – a 40-year management veteran to be replaced by a 24-year management veteran. But this event […]

The Dirty World of Ranking Cities

06.22.16

BY SAM SALKIN Cities differ vastly from one another. That’s probably too obvious of a statement. During the summer of 2015, I worked for a non-profit consulting firm advising cities around the world on how to solve the nasty issues plaguing their citizen’s quality of life. One of our clients, a major European city, came […]

Participatory Budgeting: Reimagining Civic Engagement in the City of Boston

04.2.14

BY CROSBY BURNS A preliminary version of this post originally appeared on the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy blog Last year the City of Boston unveiled its plans to devote a portion of its capital budget towards a participatory budget, a social innovation that aims to reimagine citizen engagement, the appropriations process, and democratic participation. […]

Should Cities Use Hackathons to Solve Social Problems? Lessons from America’s Datafest at Harvard

02.11.14

BY ALISON FLINT I first learned about hackathons when I saw an ad for an event called Datafest hosted at Stanford University three years ago. Like most people, I primarily associated ‘hacking’ with computer programming. However, this Datafest looked different. It turned out that Teresa Bouza, a Knight Fellow at Stanford, had organized the hackathon […]

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