Summer Series of National Innovation Labs to Advance Public-Private Partnerships within Cities

October 2023 - This summer our office had the opportunity to work with cities nationwide as they explored different funding challenges and allowed us to get an up to date pulse on what it would take to effect public-private partnerships in todays market.

We traveled to New Orleans, LA; Atlanta, GA; and Durham, NC, in partnership with Fuse Corp and worked with leaders in each city’s Mayor’s Office discussing goals related to advancing clean energy and sustainability, fostering inclusive economic development including stakeholder engagement, and catalyzing pre-development funds from federal and foundational sources that would lead to greater private sector involvement.

We saw firsthand the long arc of economic development projects and the challenges that varying language, processes, and timeframes can pose at the local level while trying to align for federal and private funding. We applaud the cities for attempting to work through some of these challenges by partnering with us on one to two-day innovation labs and we are grateful for the learnings and plan to incorporate them into future program design.

We returned to our home state of California and facilitated a conversation on Funding Economic Development at the SoCal Ecosystem Leadership Forum hosted by the Alliance for SoCal Innovation in Irvine. Panelists included members from the Economic Development Administration, the California Community Foundation, the California Governor’s Office of Economic Development, the Los Angeles County Department of Economic Opportunity, and the USC Center for Economic Development. Key takeaways from a portion of that discussion can be seen in the leave-behind presentation attached here.

We concluded the summer by co-facilitating a pre-summit innovation lab at CAFWD in Indian Wells for the California Office of the Small Business Advocate and the Entrepreneurship and Economic Mobility Task Force on legislative feedback among the task force, entrepreneurs, and entrepreneur support organizations across the state with key discussion points documented by our visual facilitator.