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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.

Saudi Prince Says He Will Donate $32 Billion To Charity

Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, an investor and business magnate who is also a member of the Saudi royal family, announced Wednesday that he will donate all of his $32 billion fortune to charity in the coming years.

“It is a commitment without boundaries. A commitment to all humankind,” Alwaleed, 60, said in a press release announcing his intentions.

Alwaleed, who holds degrees from Menlo College and Syracuse University, is CEO of the Saudi investment conglomerate Kingdom Holding Company and has large stakes in Citigroup, Apple, Twitter, General Motors, 21st Century Fox, Euro Disney and other companies. He also heads Alwaleed Philanthropies, which has already donated $3.5 billion to charity.

The $32 billion commitment will reportedly be funneled to Alwaleed Philanthropies to be used for a wide variety of causes, including intercultural understanding, disease and poverty eradication, rural electrification, empowering women and disaster relief. The prince and his team will develop a “well-devised plan” to allocate the gift, Alwaleed said.

“It will be based on a strategy that is supervised and managed by a board of trustees headed by me to ensure that it will be used after my death for humanitarian projects and initiatives,” he said. He said philanthropy is an intrinsic part of his Islamic faith.

Gender, race or religious affiliation will not factor into which humanitarian issues are addressed, the announcement stated.

Alwaleed is part of the Saudi royal family, but he does not hold an official position in the government. He gives frank interviews on political matters and employs many women in his organization, according to The New York Times, contributing to his image as an outsider.

He settled a libel lawsuit against Forbes magazine group last month after claiming that the magazine’s $20 billion estimate of his net worth was undervalued. Forbes now lists Alwaleed’s net worth as $28.1 billion, several billion shy of his $32 billion pledge, and ranks him as the 34th richest person in the world.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Alwaleed offered $10 million to a charity for families of uniformed workers killed in the terrorist attacks. But then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected the money because of a press release accompanying the gift that explicitly criticized Israel and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. “At times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack,” the statement, attributed to the prince, read. “Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.”

After Guiliani rejected the funds, the prince told a Saudi newspaper, “The whole issue is that I spoke about their position [on the Middle East conflict] and they didn’t like it because there are Jewish pressures and they were afraid of them.”

Bill Gates’ Foundation Gives Its Largest Gift Ever To Combat Ebola Crisis

The fight against Ebola has found a deep-pocketed ally in Bill Gates.

The billionaire philanthropist’s foundation has pledged $50 million to fight the viral outbreak in West Africa, according to a statement by the organization. The Associated Press noted the donation is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s largest ever toward a humanitarian cause.

The foundation’s statement specified funds would immediately benefit United Nations agencies and international organizations involved in containing and treating the virus, allowing them to purchase necessary medical supplies and increase emergency operations. From the foundation’s total pledge, $5 million has already gone toward the World Health Organization (WHO), while another $5 million has been allocated for UNICEF efforts in some of the hardest hit regions of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The historic pledge comes a week after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said “the world can no longer afford to short-change global public health,” urging international organizations to help WHO raise the approximate $600 million needed for supplies in West Africa.

In a report released Sept. 5, WHO reported the overall death rate of the disease stood at 53 percent. The total number of cases reached 3,944, while 2,079 had died from infection in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — countries identified as “those with widespread and intense transmission.”