Tag: problems

Bloomberg Is Giving $42 Million To U.S. Cities To Solve Problems In Smartest Ways Possible

Michael Bloomberg wants America to have smarter, problem-solving cities, and he’s banking on data to make it happen.

Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the launch of a $42 million initiative on Monday that will help 100 mid-sized U.S. cities better utilize data to serve their communities. The What Works Cities program partners with a handful of supportive organizations — such as Results for America and the Sunlight Foundation — to help local governments manage and analyze data to serve residents.

The initiative — which is now accepting applications from cities with populations between 100,000 and 1 million — will create open data programs that boost government transparency, help cities incorporate data into policy decision-making and fund efforts that best deliver positive results for citizens, among other functions, according to a press release from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“Technology has unleashed an explosion of new information for city halls to work with,” Bloomberg wrote in a blog posted on The Huffington Post on Monday. “The possibilities for how cities can use that data to improve lives — and improve the way services are provided to citizens — are limitless.”

As the businessman pointed out, utilizing data has helped a number of cities solve major problems. New Orleans has made its streets safer by keeping better track of abandoned properties, for example — the city reduced blighted residences by 10,000 between September 2010 and the first half of 2013, according to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority.

Louisville, Kentucky, has also used data made available through advancing technology to solve problems — the city is bettering its fight against air pollution by asking volunteers to attach GPS trackers to their asthma inhalers so officials can see where residents are having the most trouble breathing.

Technical support and guidance through What Works Cities — launched from within Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation portfolio — will strive to help other communities solve similar problems, according to the former mayor of New York City.

Empowering local leadership is no new feat for Bloomberg Philanthropies. The group also runs the Mayors Challenge — an ideas competition that inspires cities to push for progress on a number of public issues with out-of-the-box strategies.

Winners of the 2014 challenge were Barcelona, Spain; Athens, Greece; Kirklees in Yorkshire, U.K.; Stockholm, Sweden; and Warsaw, Poland.

Sean Parker Just Gave $600 Million To Help Solve The World’s Biggest Problems

While it’s not unusual for tech billionaires to commit to philanthropic efforts these days, it would be tricky to find an analog for the approach being taken by former Facebook President Sean Parker with his newly announced foundation.

That’s because Parker is aiming to bring a “go big or go home” Silicon Valley-informed approach to his San Francisco-based Parker Foundation, which has been established through a $600 million gift from the Napster cofounder and Spotify board member.

The foundation will focus on three core areas where Parker thinks real progress can be made: civic engagement, global public health and life sciences. When the foundation identifies a program that shows promise in one of these areas, rather than waiting for a grant application to roll in, it will dive right in and spend big on that program.

An example of that approach is a $4.5 million grant that the foundation gave to the Global Health Group’s Malaria Elimination Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco, in an effort to arrive at effective and innovative approaches against the malaria-transmitting Anopheles mosquito that go beyond current approaches like netting or vaccines. Since roughly 584,000 people worldwide died of malaria in 2013, according to World Health Organization estimates, this could have a big impact.

The ultimate goal of the program, Parker told the San Francisco Chronicle, is the worldwide eradication of malaria, but he added that a more specific target in the near future would be to eliminate the disease within 20 years within a specific geographic area. Having such a defined goal, he said, avoids what he described as a more wasteful approach by charitable groups taking a more traditional approach to giving.

“I’m trying to preserve an entrepreneurial approach, which is to only give when I feel that there’s a solution that’s fully complete,” Parker explained to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The “going big” doesn’t stop there. In addition, as Parker explained to Katie Couric in a Yahoo video on Wednesday, the Parker Foundation will also be focusing on funding for cancer immunotherapy and allergy research, two areas the venture capitalist has previously made significant donations toward.

Though TechCrunch noted Parker is only one of a few tech entrepreneurs giving at such a high level, Parker believes his foundation’s model of philanthropy, one more familiar to the startup world, could help attract others like him to follow in his footsteps.