What does it take to be a full participant in your city’s civic life? To bring the full weight of your work and personal experience to city planning or policy? To lead a city, as its mayor?
This is what former Mayor Michael Nutter hopes to answer in The University of Pennsylvania’s new Impact Scholars Program, which he launched last month along with the School of Social Policy. Under Nutter’s guidance, Impact Scholars enlists former city leaders to mentor the next generation of civic talent. This first year, Nutter has recruited his How To Really Run A City co-host, former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and former Mayor Tulsa GT Bynum, as the inaugural scholars.
“I’m a public servant still, whether appointed or in my own head,” Nutter told the room with a smile. “The idea is to match young people who want to go into public service with those who have served but are not yet finished. We should not leave that knowledge and expertise on the bench.”
They kicked off their work last week with a live taping of the podcast, a rousing introduction to the ideas they hope will shape the future of urban leadership in the U.S.
“Cities are where hope meets the street,” Reed said. “They’re places where you can take serious problems and actually do something about them.”
In other words, a mayor’s job, said Bynum, is “making sure clean water comes out of the tap, or making sure the police show up at the right time. Or if your father is having a heart attack, the ambulance gets there in time to save his life. There’s an expectation of service delivery [at the local level].”
“There’s nothing like running a city,” Reed said. “The joy that you get from running a city — the power of reshaping a city where everywhere you go, there’s something you directly contributed to — don’t let anyone fool you, there’s nothing like it.”
Join us (and Penn Impact Scholars students) for a driving discussion about the power of today’s leaders to lift the innovators of tomorrow.
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As cities go, so goes the nation!
