February: Advice for the Next Mayor

By Chris Satullo and Eileen Kenna

If you had the ear of Philadelphia's next mayor for five minutes - and five minutes only - what are the three or four best and most vital pieces of advice you'd offer?

 That was the prompt driving the Sunday Breakfast Club's February program, held last Wednesday at the Fitler Club.   The 80-plus people in attendance dove eagerly into the evening's interactive format.

 First up with their nuggets of advice were four people deeply engaged in the areas of neighborhood development, civic engagement, education, and public safety?

 Vaughn Ross is a former deputy chief of staff to Mayor James Kenney, who now runs an economic and community development firm called Rvesta.  Here was his advice:

 Dream big:  "I would say, first, build a subway. By that I mean, not necessarily a subway, but something big, so monumentally big that Philadelphians feel they are living in a city that they don't live in now."  New mayors, he observed, never have more political capital than when they take office; they have a limited time to spend it.  "Do not limit your imagination" in deciding what big goal to tackle in year one, Ross advised.

 Second, he said, "make every Philadelphia neighborhood a neighborhood of choice."  The city has some neighborhoods that people choose to move to from all over the nation, he said, but it also has other neighborhoods where people have chosen to live for 50 years, but which the city government mostly ignores.  Show residents of those areas that they are also valued and appreciated, Ross said.

 Finally, he said he would tell the new mayor: "Embrace and enjoy the really fun and inspiring moments as mayor. Because the lows are way lower than you can imagine, no matter how much going in you think you know what the job is. They're worse, much worse, so you have to work to savor and remember the things that made you want to have this job in the first place."

 Kelsey DeMerlis, chair of Philadelphia's New Leaders Council and a city employee who works on community engagement, talked about what the city should do to attract and retain the young people who come here for college and professional schools.

 "What brought some like me back to Philly from New York City is the community," Demerlis said. "It’s about the people who are so passionate about this place."

 When your appeal is based on being a city of real neighborhoods, where people know each other and work to defend their quality of life, a mayor, she said, has to constantly ask, "What are we doing to bring jobs and businesses to these neighborhoods, to help the people here thrive?"

 It's also important to train young leaders in the city's systems of power, she said, so that they can be effective as agents of change in service of their values.

 Kate Callahan, executive director of Research for Action, which studies education reforms, echoed the calls for the next mayor to think big and think systemically.

 "I would say to this mayor: Of course, the issue is gun violence but that is a crisis and not a cause. The cause has been decades of disinvestment in communities, infrastructure and specifically schools, especially in those ZIP codes where there is the most violence."

  Tops on her to-do list was "invest in schools."  Requested aid increases for public schools that some dismiss as "exorbitant" really are designed only to get city schools up to "adequacy," she said.

 Callahan wants the next mayor not only to bring the dollars, but to make sure they are invested strategically in collaborative efforts with scale. She lamented that philanthropies in town were launching an anti-violence initiative with local hospitals that she saw as tragically disconnected from the city's own initiatives.

 Reinforcing a comment from Ross, she said city schools must do a much better job of being savvy about the sectors of the local economy that are rich in family-supporting jobs - and get much more adept at promoting those careers to students while making sure they get precisely the skills those jobs require.

 John MacDonald, a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, also dove into the issue of gun violence.

 "Switch your focus from root causes to proximal causes," MacDonald said he would advise the next mayor.

 The big picture, he said, is to "keep the city clean, safe and ready for reinvestment."  But, he said, a mayor needs to realize that violent crime in the city is highly concentrated by place and by cohorts of people - and to base strategy upon that realization.

 "Only 11 percent of city blocks account for 90 percent of the shootings that occur in the city.  You know what those places are. So, concentrate on them," he said.  "Also, a very small fraction of people are committing most of the severe offenses.  They don't specialize. They're doing lots of things. The guy who is shooting people is also stealing; he’s breaking into cars. Young men commit the bulk of crimes. Realize that people age out of crime."

 Being honest about such facts is the foundation of effective strategy, MacDonald advised:

 "What you see in these {high-crime} places is that the streets are full of trash, physical neglect, abandoned cars, abandoned lots. We know from research that if you clean things up, if for example you work with the Horticultural Society to turn a vacant lot into a garden, that reduces violence.  Just get trash off the street. Hire kids to pick it up, because a summer job for a teenager reduces crimes by 30 percent."

 Finally, MacDonald indicated, don't indulge in pipe dreams about emptying prisons.

 "We have to hold shooters accountable. If someone shoots someone they need to be arrested, convicted, sent away. It’s a small fraction of people. If you let them go unchecked, the spiral of gun violence will be out of control. We already know how to do this. I'm not talking about a dragnet, not advocating stop and frisk, but just know who the most high-rate offenders are and focus on them."

 One potential panelist, Marisa Denker of Connect the Dots Insights, was under the weather and could not attend, but shared some of her ideas beforehand via text to moderator Chris Satullo.

 Summarizing, he said that Denker believes the people of the city have rightfully grown skeptical and tired of superficial, insincere, check-the-box community engagement, where the goal is just to get support for what's already been decided, rather than to get timely input into what should be decided.  She also shared that too much of the authentic engagement that occurs is disorganized, stuck in silos. The result: Money and residents' time gets wasted asking the same people the same questions six months apart, with no communication among silos.

 Also, Denker stressed, do not mouth buzzwords about inclusion unless you are serious about identifying the obstacles that keep marginalized groups from fully participating in the process; next, do something real to lessen or remove those obstacles.

 Once the panelists had shared their ideas, the action moved to the tables, where club members and guests spent 30 minutes discussing what they'd heard from the panelists, while adding ideas of their own to the mix.  SBC board members acted as table leaders for those discussions.

 At some tables, MacDonald's stress on the basics of keeping streets clean and green resonated deeply.  At others, the panelist's recommendation about linking public education more effectively to job-rich sectors generated much discussion.  

 The table discussions got so deep, passionate  and prolonged that the group ended up with little time to harvest insights during a concluding plenary session.