June 3, 2018 Snippets: More from 100RC, including from the Mayors of Paris and Pittsburgh
As always, thanks for reading. Want Snippets delivered to your inbox, a whole day earlier? Subscribe here.
This week’s theme: more about 100 Resilient Cities and the role of the Chief Resilience Officer, plus Guild Education partners with Walmart to make $1 per day college education a reality.
In last week’s Snippets, we introduced our new partnership between Social Capital and 100 Resilient Cities, the global organization founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2013. 100RC was founded to address the fundamental, global challenges facing cities around the world over the next fifty years: the challenge and opportunity that lies at the intersection between globalization, urbanization and climate change. Cities already have the ingredients, the tools and the knowledge to step boldly into the future in a strong and resilient way, yet far too often, those cities cannot learn from their peers or even between internal stakeholders about what initiatives are working and how others can be improved. 100RC’s vision to solves this problem centers around the Chief Resilience Officer: city appointees whose job is to steer resources, knowledge, learning and initiative in the right right direction both between and across cities and who form the nodes of a global network. CROs are now working directly with their mayors, along with their CRO network peers, in 84 cities around the world.
5 years: a growing and evolving resilience movement | Michael Berkowitz, 100RC
To date, 40 of these cities have published roadmaps towards their next 50 years of resilience, comprising well over 2,000 individual projects, $230 million in partner pledges, and $1.7 billion of municipal funding to get those projects started. These published strategies are beginning to have their desired effects: real projects have shovels in the ground, and peer cities are eagerly learning, copying and implementing those strategies in their own countries. This week, we’ll highlight two of those cities, Paris and Pittsburgh, whose mayors and CROs are fully aligned behind the 100RC mission and who have already begun the hard work of the next 50 years:
Paris and 100RC: The city of light embraces resilience | Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris
She writes: “In October 2017, Paris released its Resilience Strategy, which lays out a vision for a city that relies on its residents, adapts its infrastructure, mobilizes its collective intelligence and the territories that surround it to turn the challenges of the next century into opportunities. The Strategy will have a tangible impact on the lives of Parisians for decades to come, but will also have a very real impact on our city in the short-term.
One initiative exemplifies this new resilience mindset. Beginning in 2018, Paris launched a new program to transform school courtyards into green oases — as part of an effort to both address climate risks and bolster social inclusion efforts, while providing educational benefits to children and families in Paris. In order to make use of the 800,000m2 of school courtyard space in our control, currently covered with impermeable asphalt, these pilots will create green space in the school courtyards — providing much needed greening and shade structures in communities to assist in cooling efforts during heat waves, retain water in the event of rain to assist in flood mitigation, and be open as a community asset to foster a more cohesive, inclusive society.
With few Parisians living more than 200m from a school courtyard, the scale of this project has the potential to impact nearly every resident in every Arrondissement of Paris. This project exemplifies our resilience mindset — extracting multiple benefits from a single investment and seeking to address multiple risks simultaneously.
The Resilience Strategy lays out a number of ambitious, necessary initiatives like this project — each with the potential to not just alter the future of our city, but serve as a model as other cities seek to tackle similar challenges in the decades ahead. The resilience approach and partnership with 100RC have provided invaluable partnerships across sectors, built connections and learning opportunities with other cities around the world, and have provided us with the support to embed resilience into how we operate as a city.”
Pittsburgh and 100RC: from Steel City to Resilient City | William Peduto, Mayor of Pittsburgh
He writes: “By 2030, we want to show measurable success in tackling our environmental stresses, retaining our cultural assets and maintaining our natural assets, and eradicating hunger and homelessness. We envision safe and complete streets that don’t just offer physical mobility, but ensure social mobility and access to opportunity in each of our unique neighborhoods. By 2030, our housing will be affordable and Pre-K available for all Pittsburghers, our stormwater will be an asset and we will have a world class water system.
How do we achieve this vision of Pittsburgh in 2030? We need the agility to work across sectors: public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic, to create efficiencies and targeted outcomes by reducing fragmentation in the city. We need the resources to innovate, experiment, and not fear failure, but use it as a tool to create better projects and programs. We need reserves to rebound from the shocks and disasters that take us by surprise.
As a follow-up to the ONEPGH Resilience Strategy and to implement this vision, the City has assembled more than 125 partners into working groups to put our deep shelves of plans and analyses into action, and identify the most critical projects ready for implementation. …
Fundamentally, our ability to achieve this vision of resilience is about our ability to make these necessary investments. To do this, Pittsburgh is creating a Social Benefits Fund: a new entity to mobilize the public, private, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors to work together and make the targeted investments needed to improve the quality of life for all Pittsburghers.
We’ve identified a need for approximately $3 billion in the next 12 years to implement ambitious projects including:
- Creating 1,500 seats to ensure Pre-K for all
- Expanding access to affordable housing doubling our Housing Opportunity Fund and making over 7,000 vacant, distressed properties available for affordable housing
- Removing 2 billion gallons of stormwater from our sewers by investing in 27 green infrastructure projects
Already, we’ve identified $1.4 billion toward these projects. By having the framework of the ONEPGH Resilience Strategy and partners like 100RC, we’re well on our way to closing this ambitious gap.”
You can also find more comments from CROs and mayors both reflecting on the past 5 years as well as sharing their hopes for the next 5 years, which include perspectives from Toyama, Japan; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mexico City; Norfolk, Virginia; Santa Fe, Argentina; Accra, Ghana; Chennai, India; New York City; Cape Town, South Africa, and Athens, Greece.
At Social Capital we’re thrilled to be able to partner with such an important global organization whose mission will impact our lives in very real, up-close and personal ways over the next half-century. We have $150 million in capital commitments to invest in startups that are building tools and solutions to cities’ most pressing problems, and look forward to a partnership that will create positive change for people all around the world, for many years to come.
This year’s annual State of the Internet deck from Mary Meeker is out, and it’s as good as always:
Internet Trends 2018 | Mary Meeker, KPCB
The first week of GDPR confirmed some suspicions that it might be very good for Google:
Ad industry fear of Google briefly confirmed as GDPR starts | Mark Bergen, Bloomberg
Google emerges as early winner from Europe’s new data privacy law | Nick Kostov & Sam Schechner, WSJ
Companies worry that spending on GDPR may not be over | Nina Trentmann, WSJ
Ribbonfarm’s Refactor Camp for cryptoeconomics featured several good talks, including:
Belief Dynamics, by Joseph Kelly | Slides | Video
The Heretics Guide to Global Finance by Brett Scott | Slides | Video
Transaction Costs, Social Scalability, and the Blockchain Individual by Taylor Pearson | Slides | Video
The Mutable Mythology of Money, by Harry Pottash | Slides | Video
Real news, fake news:
Truth, lies and literature | Salman Rushdie, The New Yorker
Follow the capex: separating the clowns from the clouds | Charles Fitzgerald, Platformnomics
Bad news for the planet:
Other reading from around the Internet:
As rental cars fade away, Avis will try anything to survive | Alex Davies, Wired
Why the future of Tesla may depend on knowing what happened to Billy Durant | Steve Blank
Greening the future of outer space development | Ramin Skibba, Smithsonian Magazine
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, we have a story to share that is good news for Americans everywhere who are looking to go to college. Guild Education has partnered with Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer with 1.5 million workers, to offer a college education to any Walmart employee for $1 a day.
Walmart unveils a new employee perk: College tuition | Lauren Thomas, CNBC
Walmart offers employees new perk: cheap access to college | Anne D’Innocenzio, AP Washington Post
Higher education has been a path to upward mobility for Americans for a century. But over the last few decades, the American dream of going to college to create new career paths and opportunities have been hit by a horribly escalating cost cycle that puts debt-free higher education out of reach for most Americans. The average class of 2016 graduate finished school with $35,000 in debt, while total outstanding US student loans reached $1.4 trillion, with the pile growing 17% a year on average since 2004. Student loans, grants and assistance programs are available but hard to navigate, particularly for those who are balancing their education with one or more jobs to pay the bills.
What’s missing from this picture is somebody to work for the aspiring student, and not only help them navigate their options, tuition and degree paths, but also fight for newer, more affordable paths to education that do not yet exist. One such path goes through partnerships with employers, who want to offer their employees access to cheaper education as a benefit. The potential for a true win-win-win situation exists: one that’s good for students, good for their employers, and good for educators. What’s needed is someone to help make this work on all three sides, and that’s where Guild comes into the picture.
Guild, which was founded in 2015 by Rachel Carlson and Brittany Stich, has already been working with companies around the United States like Chipotle, Lowe’s and Taco Bell to help make affordable college education a reality for their employees. They currently offer bachelor’s degrees at institutions like the University of Denver and Wilmington University, in areas like nursing, cybersecurity, and the liberal arts. As Frank Tucker, the Global Chief People Officer at Taco Bell, put it: “When we surveyed our employees, education support was one of the top three things they asked for. The barriers to achieving their education goals were time, money and support… Guild delivers on all of these needs through access to online classes, financial aid guidance, tuition assistance and a personal counsellor to support each student in real time.” And this past week, Guild has announced their biggest partner yet: Walmart.
In Guild’s new partnership with Walmart, employees who opt-in will contribute $1 each day of the year, and Walmart will cover the rest. It includes education, textbooks, and fees, and starts with programs at the University of Florida, Brandman University and Bellevue University. With 1.5 million employees, Walmart may be the largest private employer in the United States, but it’s only the start: Guild’s mission is to create a new path to affordable higher education to all 64 million of America’s frontline workers without a degree.
Guild Education is currently hiring for many different positions, including in engineering, enrollment services, product, marketing, university and academic partnerships, and business development. They also offer a host of benefits, including education benefits and student loan reimbursement (of course), health benefits, and company equity for every employee. If you’re interested or know someone who might be, please get in touch. It matters to millions of people around the company, looking to improve their lives through the American dream of higher education, and at Guild you’ll be able to help make it possible.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
