Image by Cath Virginia for Bloomberg Philanthropies
Last summer, 33 municipal leaders from 11 cities across the world traveled to São Paulo, Brazil, to learn about how a solution could spread quickly across very different local contexts. Their case study: São Paulo’s successful approach to making school meals more sustainable, an idea they were eager to bring home and put into practice.
Within only a few weeks of the visit, several of those cities were well on their way to replicating São Paulo’s solution. Yet what emerged as a result of these efforts is more than a clearer understanding of how to adopt one successful school-meal program, but a broader playbook for rapidly recreating almost any idea.
Demystifying the work by seeing it up close.
Enacting another city’s solution can seem daunting in the abstract. But when visiting leaders met São Paulo officials who had already navigated everything from procurement challenges to stakeholder engagement, the effort suddenly felt far more doable.
“One reason these cities are implementing so fast here is because they’ve realized they can move fast here,” explains Ryan Pierce, who leads the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange, which helps spread proven and promising solutions around the world and organized the learning tour. “When they saw an on-the-ground example of how one idea worked, they realized adapting that idea didn’t have to be a drawn-out process.”