Five Tips for City Innovators
March 25, 2015
By Tommy Pacello, Director, Mayor’s Innovation Team, Memphis
Innovation at the city level is vital for long-term growth and stability, but developing bold solutions to big urban challenges requires a devotion to process and partnership and strong leadership that is willing to try something new. I didn’t fully understand the difficulty of this until I had the opportunity to serve on a team dedicated to taking on tough city issues using a new approach.
Read moreA big week for our oceans
March 24, 2015
From the world’s tropical seas to the icy waters of the Arctic, and from the great salmon runs of the Pacific coast of North America to the rich waters of the Humboldt Current in the southern hemisphere and beyond, the world’s oceans provide people with food, livelihoods and strong cultural traditions. Today, nearly three billion people rely on the oceans for food and income, and that number is growing. Yet for much of our history, we have taken this bounty for granted, assuming the oceans had infinite capacity to absorb pollution and produce fish.
We know better now. Our critical ocean resources are being degraded through overfishing, mismanagement, and pollution.
But the tide is changing. Three events last week illustrate how committed individuals and organizations from government, the private sector, and NGOs are helping our oceans recover so that our growing human population will be able to depend on these resources long into the future.
Read moreCurating and Crowdsourcing: Digitizing the Museum Experience through Bloomberg Connects
March 20, 2015
On March 19, The New York Times Arts division published its annual Museum special section, highlighting the digital work of many leading cultural institutions around the world. In publishing the groundbreaking work of these institutions, they have identified a trend that Bloomberg Philanthropies is already funding and passionate about – using new methods and approaches to engage with the arts.
Read more2015 Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards for Global Tobacco Control: Meet the Winning Organizations
March 18, 2015
Congratulations to the winners of the third Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards for Global Tobacco Control. Each organization showed a strong commitment in the fight against this global epidemic, and we’re excited to celebrate their success at the World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Abu Dhabi this week. Each year, nearly 5 million people worldwide – 14,000 per day – are killed by tobacco use, mostly in developing nations. The 2015 winners highlight the incredible progress being made to control tobacco use and show the effectiveness of the MPOWER method, developed by Mike Bloomberg and Margaret Chan in 2008.
Read moreDr. Margaret Chan’s Remarks at the World Conference on Tobacco or Health
March 18, 2015
The following are the remarks as prepared for delivery of Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization at the 16th World Conference on Tobacco or Health in Abu Dhabi
Read moreThe Journey to Defeat the Global Tobacco Epidemic
March 16, 2015
The global tobacco epidemic kills more than six million people each year, mostly in developing countries. If left unchecked, tobacco use will kill more than one billion people this century alone. Through our Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, we aim to reduce the global demand for tobacco through a comprehensive, proven approach that combines policy change with increased public awareness. We’ve partnered with the World Health Organization to create MPOWER, a six-pronged approach to reduce tobacco use and demand. Key strategies of our work and the MPOWER approach that have been successful with our many partners around the world include creating smoke-free public spaces, advertising and sponsorship bans, increasing taxes on tobacco products and requiring graphic pack warnings—just to name a few.
Read moreTransforming the Availability of Professional Financial Counseling in America
March 13, 2015
City agency staff and nonprofit managers from across the country came together in Nashville, Tennessee to kick off the third year of the Financial Empowerment Center replication initiative. Financial Empowerment Centers provide one-on-one financial counseling as a free city service, helping local residents reduce debt, build assets and move towards financial stability.
The model was pioneered in 2008, under the Bloomberg administration in New York City, and then replicated in 2013 with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies to five cities (Denver, Lansing, Nashville, Philadelphia, and San Antonio).
The Financial Empowerment Center model began as a simple, yet ambitious idea: people in financial trouble need help, not just education. Financial counseling delivered by highly trained professionals could be successfully scaled into a measurable, high-quality public service. Through the Cities for Financial Empowerment (CFE) Fund’s replication initiative, each of the five initial cities demonstrated that this idea works, even across different geographic contexts and resident needs. The success of the model inspired new waves of city administrators to follow suit.
Read morePolice Enforcement: A Critical Component For Changing the Behavior of Road Users
March 11, 2015
Police officers from Australia, Ireland, Moldova, the United Kingdom and the United States convened at Bloomberg Philanthropies to help us strategize how to work effectively with road police to reduce road traffic fatalities and injuries. Eight experts in road policing, as well as Bloomberg Philanthropies’ road safety partners, shared experiences and lessons learned from their time supporting road policing efforts around the globe.
Read moreQ and A with Brett Jenks, CEO and President of Rare
March 10, 2015
In January 2014, we launched the Bloomberg Philanthropies Vibrant Oceans Initiative to promote reforms to restore fish populations and help meet the dietary needs of a growing global population. To meet this challenge, we selected three partners with distinct areas of expertise to carry out a comprehensive strategy: Rare to work with local communities and fishers to implement new management strategies; EKO Asset Management Partners to develop investment models where private capital can be used to support local and industrial fishers transitioning to sustainable fishing, and Oceana to reform industrial fishing by advocating for national policies such as setting and enforcing science-based catch-limits. Together, we are working in Brazil, the Philippines and Chile, to revitalize fish populations and demonstrate solutions that can be transferred to other places.
In a new series of blog posts featuring our Vibrant Oceans Initiative partners, we asked Brett Jenks, CEO and President of Rare, to share some of the progress and insights from the initiative.
Read moreImproving Care of the Injured in Kenya
February 26, 2015
Over the past three years, as part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety program, the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU) has been working in Kenya to address patient care from road crashes. Collaborating with the Ministry of Health, county governments, the World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control-Kenya, and local organizations such as the Kenya Council of Emergency Medical Technicians, we have begun to improve post-crash care – on site, en route, and in hospitals. We have trained emergency medical technicians, ambulance drivers, hospital-based care providers including physicians, surgeons and nurses, standardized the training curriculum, collected data to better define the burden of injury and identify gaps in care, and worked on national policies to bring change to patient care in Kenya.
Read more