Speaker: Eric Hubbard
In this presentation, senior advisor to the Mayor of Freetown Eric Hubbard will share the community-driven tree-planting revolution taking place in Sierra Leone's capital.
Against the backdrop of population expansion and rapid urbanization, the Freetown City Council co-designed with climate vulnerable communities across the city the #FreetownTheTreeTown campaign to plant, digitally track and grow 1 million trees by 2023—an effort that would increase the city's vegetation cover by 50%.
Having hit this goal, the city now has its sights set on scaling its ecosystem-based climate adaptation approach with a new target: an additional 5 to 10 million trees!
By using blended sources of finance and digital innovation, Freetown has developed a sustainable financing model for urban nature-based solutions that can be replicated in other under-resourced cities. Hubbard shares advice for peers in other cities to increase canopy cover, green infrastructure, and community-led climate action.
How can we make liberal democracies more resilient in meeting 21st century challenges? Could a new Global Centre for Democracy help us to enact such change at the necessary speed to address our current crises? This session dives into these questions and more. It explores the specific policy recommendations required to reshape our bureaucracies for 21st century needs, and reflects on how we could spark grassroots movements to exert pressure on policy makers to adopt and implement such changes faster.
Trust is vital for healthy relationships, especially between citizens and public institutions. It empowers citizens to participate in civic activities and access government services. It also drives innovation and progress. However, trust is scarce in today's world. So, how can we build trust in public institutions? This talk will explore the significance of trust in public institutions and the factors that contribute to its creation and preservation. We will analyze how trust influences innovation in public institutions and how its absence can hinder progress. Using real-world examples and case studies, we will assess the challenges of building trust in public institutions and provide actionable steps for citizens and government officials to promote a culture of trust.
Society celebrates leaders who promise fast, easy solutions to the world’s problems – but quick fixes are just mirages that fade, leaving us with the same broken systems. The truth is, effective social change happens through slow, intentional actions. As a special preview to his upcoming book launch, globally acclaimed social entrepreneur Sascha Haselmayer will share a 5-step process for taking the slow lane to change – the lane that gets you to the right place faster. Using examples of prison reform in England, urban development in Venezuela, early childhood education in New York, and others from around the world, Sascha will reveal to us the principles that create real, lasting change.
What can the public sector offer to people who have graduated from the world's best universities, worked in different countries, are specialised in niche areas, and who could easily choose to work where salaries are much higher? Lithuania’s value proposition is Create Lithuania – a programme that offers a year spent working on issues that these people really care about and where they can make a real difference. Now ten years old, the programme has numbers that speak for itself: after finishing the programme, 80% of the participants choose stay in Lithuania and 40% are still currently working directly in the public sector. What has made this programme a success? What attracts young talent to stay in Lituania and the public sector after the programme? What are the main challenges of this approach? Find out in this talk.
Sir Geoff Mulgan joins us to explore the crisis of imagination we face in the midst of Covid-19 and climate change.
In his latest two books – 'Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination' and 'Prophets at a Tangent: How Art Shapes Social Imagination' – he argues that while many are resigned to fatalism, people can use creative imagination to achieve a better future.
Drawing on social sciences, the arts, philosophy, and history, Mulgan provides a roadmap for the future and offers lessons we can learn from the past. His talk will discuss methods we can use now to open up thinking about the future and spark action, and ask if the arts can help us imagine a better future society and economy.
How do you catalyse action on today's most complex problems? In this presentation, you'll hear how Ayni – an initiative advancing collaborative systems innovation in 120+ cities across Latin America and Africa – has created a new organizational model for change where everyone has a role to play.
Ayni is a joint initiative of four organizations (RIL - Local Innovation Network, Ashoka, Vía educación, and Colab). Named after the Quechua word, ayni, which means reciprocity, the initiative seeks to unlock transformational change by convening and supporting city collaboratives via a new organizational model. Convinced that public challenges are not the exclusive responsibility of any single sector, Ayni builds change networks in cities, bringing together local governments, social entrepreneurs, citizens, and other actors to design collective strategies with long-term impact.
In this presentation, hear how Ayni's groundbreaking model approach supports local change actors to solve pressing challenges in their cities – to date, more than 600 social entrepreneurs and local government leaders in 30 countries.
In the context of a political environment characterised by polarisation and low trust in government institutions, LA-BORA! gov, a learning and innovation lab within the Brazilian government, aims to leverage the principles of behavioural science to enhance the public servant experience.
By fostering a new approach to public service, the lab strives to strengthen the connection between civil servants and redefine the relationship between government and employees, resulting in public value for society. Their reach since launching in 2020? 53,000 public servants – and counting.
Utilising techniques such as experimentation, human-centred design, and capacity building, the team at LA-BORA! gov works to build trust, promote positive emotions, and encourage collaboration in the workplace, ultimately leading to improved performance and accountability.
The session hosted by the BMW Foundation RISE Cities program brings together an innovative bureaucrat from Bogotá and Helsinki to discuss ways to create system-level change that starts from real people and their real needs. From the Public Innovation Lab of Bogotá (iBO), Angela Reyes is using human centered design to develop innovative digital mechanisms to collect personal information of women caregivers who attend Bogotá’s Care Blocks, aiming to have robust and good quality information that enables data-driven services and policies tailored to women's needs. The Care Blocks project is a first master plan that takes caregivers and their needs for services, community, and development as a starting point for urban planning and digitalization. Care Blocks address the inequality of the care burden from a cultural and social perspective. As Youth Director and Executive Director in Helsinki, Tommi Laitio has led multiple innovative programmes on everything from physical activity to integration of migrant youth, which all build on human-centered design and utilization of the city´s hundreds of thousands of touch points to people's lives for systemic change. He has spent the last year researching ways cities can create large-scale changes through partnerships.
Speakers: Tommi Laitio, Angela Reyes & Kerstin von Aretin
How can we make liberal democracies more resilient in meeting 21st century challenges?
Could a new Global Centre for Democracy help us to enact such change at the necessary speed to address our current crises?
This session dives into these questions and more. It explores the specific policy recommendations required to reshape our bureaucracies for 21st century needs, and reflects on how we could spark grassroots movements to exert pressure on policy makers to adopt and implement such changes faster.
Obesity is a problem in Chile. More than 50% of 10-year-old children are obese or overweight. While plenty of regulations exist to address this, they fail to access children's imagination and inspire them to adopt healthier lifestyles.
In 2017 Claudio Canales, a Risk Communication Advisor of the Chilean Agency for Food Safety and Quality (ACHIPIA), set out to change this reality. Together with actress and singer Gabriela Hidalgo Anaiz, he introduced a new world of ""nutritious music"" in which fruits and vegetables called Los Frutantes use various music genres to deliver a healthy message to children.
Today, the band has won two national music awards, garnered more than 50,000 followers, found a space on TV, and helped change children's perception of healthy eating.
Every day, we experience the consequences of outdated institutions and inadequate decision architectures incapable of coping with challenges that concern us all. And while these planetary-scale challenges continue to grow exponentially, we fail to adapt organisational structures and routines at speed and scope.
This talk argues that the coming years pose an ultimate chance to unlock the transformative capacity of public institutions for:
• leading by example – engage with uncertainty and dare to shift priorities
• changing direction – from minimising destruction to regenerating the future
• coordinating shifts – through cross-sectoral learning for large-scale interventions
Hear why the next 10x100 days provide a crucial moment for bureaucracy to move beyond new public management into a learning-centred organisational mode that triggers systemic creativity and supports multi-actor collaboration towards viable common futures.
Inauguration of the first EU Policy Club powered by the EIT Culture & Creativity.
Brazil is the 5th country in the world in the ranking of violence against women according to the UN. Minas Gerais was the state with the highest number of feminicide records in the entire country last year.
The pandemic of Covid 19 and the situation of women isolated living with their aggressors was a scenario that demanded the creation of the project. Frida is a virtual assistant who provides immediate police assistance to the victim. With the popularization of smartphones and a significant presence of internet access, it was realized that the only available help channels in cases of domestic violence tend to be digital.
More than 3500 calls have been made since the implementation of “Frida”. Among the people assisted were also women with physical disabilities who were able to record audio, as well as children who witnessed violence against their mother and asked for help by message preventing something worse from happening in their homes.
This presentation explores the success of South Africa's Presidential Employment Stimulus, which has reached one million South Africans. This initiative is a crucial step towards tackling unemployment and poverty in the country – where the unemployment rate among unskilled youth currently stands at a staggering 55%.
Through social employment, the government is providing opportunities for those who have been historically excluded from the labour market. By creating job opportunities in sectors such as education, health, and social services, the Presidential Employment Stimulus is addressing critical social needs while simultaneously providing employment and training opportunities.
Despite the success of the programme, it is not yet a priority for many. In this presentation, learn why this is the case, how such barriers could be removed, and the powerful of social employment in creating meaningful and sustainable employment opportunities for marginalized communities.