America’s cities have been places of opportunity for many since the days of our founding fathers. Migrants from Europe, Asia, Africa, and even the post-Civil War south, have long been attracted to places like New York, Miami, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles because there they could find a decent place to live, make a living, and know that their children could get a life-changing education. Key systems, such as public schools, highways and job training programs, were built to harness these population shifts and promote economic growth. These responses were innovative and best-in-class when created, but many of the assumptions upon which they were based are now outdated, such as the imperative of a nine-month school year to accommodate summer harvests and an endless supply of oil.

Today, the attraction of cities remains. More than 50 percent of the U.S. population lives in major metropolitan areas, yet the systems that once supported opportunities now frequently do not. As Matt Miller says in his book, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, “Americans are in a grip of a set of ideas that are not only dubious or dead wrong—they’re on a collision course with social and economic developments now irreversible.” This reality, together with the fundamental restructuring taking place in our economy, makes business as usual unacceptable.

Living Cities, a collaborative of 22 foundations and financial institutions that have invested almost $1 billion of their own funds in cities since 1991, is seeking to demonstrate how philanthropy and the key players in the United States’ cities can create game-changing innovations to attack broken systems and solve problems long considered intractable. We are bringing together leaders from sectors that often don’t work together and addressing multiple issues simultaneously. We are working to move innovation from the periphery to the mainstream, where it is so desperately needed.

On October 28, we launched the Living Cities’ Integration Initiative, which will provide a bundle of grants, loans, and program-related investments totaling $80 million to five metropolitan regions—Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. In each, government, business, philanthropic, and nonprofit organizations have agreed to take on some of the greatest barriers to opportunity for low income people, including business creation, housing, health care, transit, employment, and education.

Building on Living Cities’ lessons learned over almost 20 years of investing in cities, we’re seeking to:

• Create a new framework for solving complex problems. Leaders often do not work together across sectors, and issues are addressed in silos created as a result of both policy and tradition. For example, governments often design and fund workforce training programs without first identifying the skills most needed by local employers. Similarly, few communities intentionally marry training, child care, and housing policies together to insure success, despite the obvious need to do so. The Integration Initiative brings together multiple issues affecting low-income residents and all the partners required to tackle the challenges that impede progress toward solutions. This includes decision-makers from government, philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and the business community.
• Challenge obsolete conventional wisdom. The Integration Initiative makes space for innovation, supporting bold new approaches for breaking through critical impasses and disrupting antiquated systems and processes, whether it be education or transportation.
• Drive the private market to work on behalf of low-income people. The Integration Initiative attracts private sector capital, structures investments to balance risk and reward, and brings mainstream market goods and services, such as grocery stores and financial services, to underserved people and communities.
• Create a “new normal.” In the past, innovative work to improve the lives of low-income people has often consisted of a series of pilots; as the pilot ended, so did the work. The Integration Initiative creates new ways of doing business. It permanently drives public and private sector funding streams away from obsolete approaches and applies them to these new solutions. It also sets new policy priorities; uses data to track, ensure and communicate accountability for results; and institutionalizes these changes.
Fundamentally, we are supporting those urban leaders who believe that we have put the hard choices off for too long—and those solutions to complex problems that have the greatest chance of building a new foundation for lasting prosperity for all.

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Ben Hecht is president and CEO of Living Cities. A lawyer and CPA, he co-founded the global nonprofit One Economy Corporation in 2000, and is the author of Developing Affordable Housing and ManagingNonprofits.org. Hecht has taught at Georgetown University Law Center for 25 years, receiving the Charles Fahy Distinguished Adjunct Professor Award in 1996.