Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance

The Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance works with mayors and cities across the Americas to provide executive education and coaching on how to leverage data to strengthen local 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. 

Over the past decade, local leaders have made incredible progress toward improving residents’ lives by using data to make decisions, shape policy, understand challenges, design and pursue solutions, and evaluate progress.  

Now, city leaders are exceptionally well positioned to take their data expertise to the next level — to advance equity, to better engage, inform, and inspire residents, and to think outside of the box to solve tough problems.

Downloadable Program Descriptions

Program Description Descrição do Programa Descripción del Programa

What is the Opportunity?

The Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance is helping mayors across North, Central, and South America who are the most sophisticated, ambitious, and advanced at harnessing data to use data to power better results for residents. The City Data Alliance will support mayors to:

  • Become ever more confident consumers and users of data to understand progress and challenges;
  • Leverage data to enhance equity, performance, and other key goals through foundational city processes like HR, procurement, and budgeting;
  • Engage residents around data that matters in their lives; and
  • Deliver high-impact services. 

What Does the Program Offer?

The suite of supports provided to cities in the City Data Alliance helps mayors and their senior teams:

  • Make a shared, public commitment to use data to better understand and more effectively deliver on community needs;
  • Deepen their use of data to inform decisions, transform systems, understand impact, and communicate results; and
  • Set targets so cities have a comprehensive plan and process to ask tough questions, invest in proven practices, innovate their approaches, evaluate progress, and establish new policies and standards to ensure the work is sustained.

The program is designed for those mayors that are already committed to using data to improve lives and want to go to the next level. 

  • The program begins with an in-person convening of mayors beginning the evening of Wednesday, June 26, 2024, and concluding the afternoon of Friday, June 28, 2024, where they will hone their vision to advance their city’s use of data and improve resident outcomes.
  • Senior teams will then receive a six-month acceleration program including executive education and individualized city coaching and consultation. This includes individual coaching sessions, workshops with peer cities from across North, Central, and South America, and keynote instruction from leading international experts. This suite of support will enable cities to launch a Citywide Data Strategy and a demonstration project with resident impact. 
  • Cities may also receive up to nine months of customized technical assistance, inclusive of both structured classroom sessions and individualized city coaching, to improve a critical data practice such as evaluation, artificial intelligence, or data as a service – an approach for cities to design or present data that bolsters cross-government decision-making or resident engagement.

Read More About the City Data Alliance Accelerator

Acceleration Program Description Descrição do Programa de Aceleração Descripción del programa de aceleración

What is a Citywide Data Strategy?

A Citywide Data Strategy is a three-year vision and actionable plan designed to advance your city's use of data and improve city outcomes. The Citywide Data Strategy will serve as the central tool to activate change within your city and the core components include the following: 

  • Governance: establish a data governance process that sets and enforces data standards and practices for the enterprise with engagement from senior leadership.   
  • Quality: increase the completeness, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness of city data and mitigate risks of bias in data collection or use. 
  • Use: develop or improve plans for how to use the data to regularly inform city management and day-to-day decision-making.
  • Capacity: designate or elevate a senior leader (Chief Data Officer) and team responsible for expanding the use of data. 
  • Transparency: determine how data will be shared with internal and  external stakeholders.

What are the critical data practices?

Evaluation

Understanding what works through evaluations allows leaders to test new ideas, invest in the most effective programs, and maximize results for residents. Through this track, cities will create a citywide evaluation strategy to routinely perform evaluations that answer the most pressing questions and inform better policy decisions. Expert advisors will help cities upskill an evaluation team to conduct evaluations that generate meaningful evidence and support high-profile mayoral efforts, showing the public and city staff how evaluation can lead to learning, course correction, and stronger results.

Artificial Intelligence

AI will fundamentally change how the public sector operates over the next decade – this track will help cities prepare. Johns Hopkins University experts will combine AI knowledge building with the hands-on application of these lessons with a city-specific AI project. With expert coaching support, the city team will responsibly explore the adoption of AI. City projects will focus on optimizing city services to better predict needs and risks to improve the lives of residents in selected cities.

Data as a Service

Data as a Service is an approach to governments stewarding and providing sustainable and equitable access to data that supports decision makers and innovators inside and outside the public sector. This track will teach city leaders how to move beyond a strategy focused on open data portals to a strategy focused on channeling data to solve problems. It will develop your city’s data practices, policies, and people to enable a consistent way of designing and running high quality, end-to-end data services at scale that serve city teams and the public.

What types of cities qualify?

Cities best suited for this program will meet the following qualifications:

  • Mid-sized to large city (>100,000 residents);
  • Bold mayoral ambition for how data can drive better results for residents;
  • A mayor with at least two years left in office;  
  • Strong foundations of data use already in place across city hall and agencies; and 
  • It is a requirement of the program that the mayors of all accepted cities participate in an in-person convening, beginning the evening of Wednesday, June 26, 2024, and concluding the afternoon of Friday, June 28, 2024. No surrogates will be accepted.

 

Have questions? Contact DataAlliance [at] bloomberg.org (DataAlliance[at]bloomberg[dot]org)