What’s next?
This is the question we heard most often as people left last week’s Ideas We Should Steal Festival, the Citizen’s second annual day of presenting solutions to problems that afflict Philadelphia and cities around the country.
What’s next? I’m glad you asked. Thanks to the generous support of Spring Point Partners, for the second year in a row, The Citizen is awarding a $50,000 Jeremy Nowak Urban Innovation Award—named for our brilliant late chairman—to a local organization to launch a solution in Philly inspired by an idea we heard at the Festival. And we want you to help us decide which idea that should be.
Here’s how it works: At the bottom of this post are videos of several ideas presented at the Festival. After you watch them, you can rate each from one to five lightning bolts. We’ll close the voting in a couple of weeks and issue a Request for Proposal based on the top-rated solutions from readers like you. Sometime in February we’ll announce the winner of this year’s grant. (Last year’s award went to the Women’s Community Revitalization Project.)
Like our attendees at the Ideas We Should Festival, we here at The Citizen are impatient with just listening and talking—though, sure, both of those have value. We want positive change, and we want it now. We want to see problems being solved by people in our community who have the drive, the wherewithal, and the ideas to solve them. We want to be part of the solution, not just a megaphone for Philly’s multitude of problems. And we know that you do, too.
Check out the ideas here. And don’t forget to rate them!
Give Citizens a Say in How to Spend Money
Shari Davis, Co-Executive Director, Participatory Budgeting Project
Lead an Effort to Impose Term Limits on City Council
Zack Maxwell, Publisher, Arlington Voice
Help Grow Businesses in Underserved Communities
La Shon Walker, Director, Community Affairs, FivePoint Holdings; Andrea Zopp, CEO of World Business Chicago; and Drexel’s Metro Finance Lab Director Bruce Katz
Reduce Gun Violence Through a Community-Wide Effort
David Muhammad, Executive Director, National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform
Empower Public Servants to be Problem-Solvers
Brian Elms, Innovation Practice Lead, Change & Innovation Agency
Use Evidence-Based Approach for Poverty Reduction
Carson Hicks, Deputy Executive Director, NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity; Bill Golderer, President/CEO, United Way of Greater Philadelphia & Southern New Jersey
Use Basketball to Keep People Out of Prison
Taylor Paul, Co-Founder, RVA League for Safer Streets
Also, we couldn’t have put on the Ideas We Should Steal Festival without the help of our generous sponsors, including Brandywine Realty Trust, our Break Sponsor. Check out some of the great work Brandywine is doing here: