“Frontline problem solvers” Mayors champion collaborative leadership at Harvard Kennedy School
Introduction
By Susan A. Hughes
November 20, 2025
Former NYC mayor Fiorello LaGuardia once said of mayors that there is no Democrat or Republican way of taking out the garbage.
To highlight that message, a recent panel organized by the Bloomberg Center for Cities a Harvard University and held at the Institute of Politics JFK Jr. Forum featured Mayor Cherelle Parker, a Democrat, who was inaugurated in 2024 as the 100th mayor in Philadelphia and the first woman to serve in the role, and Mayor Daniel Rickenmann, a Republican, who was inaugurated in 2022 in Columbia, South Carolina. The two addressed the challenges facing communities today, issues that require them to look beyond party differences for solutions.
The Forum came together as part of the first-ever International Urban Research Conference at the Bloomberg Center for Cities, Evidence for Problem-Solving, which was designed to advance scholarship on research-based approaches to the challenges cities face.
“We love mayors,” said moderator Jorrit de Jong in his introduction.
De Jong, the director of the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management, also said city leadership was much more than taking out the trash: “Mayors are the frontline problem solvers of the world.”
Both mayors are alumni of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, Rickenmann in 2023 and Parker in 2025. Both have also sent their staff to other executive education programs offered through the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. One course on procurement, taught by Professors led by Jeff Liebman and Kimberlyn Leary, stood out for them. “Cities can’t do it alone,” said Parker. “We can’t be afraid to embed you into our government because that means you can see that some of our systems like procurement are not as effective as they could be.”
Addressing national issues with local resources
The mayors agreed that communities are eager to see real solutions. The issues are often the same: affordable housing, safety, and economic development.
“People expect us to fix problems,” said Rickenmann. “I have to go to the grocery store; I have to go to church. I have to walk down Main Street. We can’t hide in our offices.”
Parker agreed: “That is the difference with mayors. “We don’t have the luxury of being what I refer to as AOPs, articulators of problems.”
The mayors also agreed that most urban communities lacked the resources they needed to address these issues. This is where both found value in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.
A collaboration between Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the initiative conducts peer-reviewed research and develops new curriculum and teaching tools to help city leaders solve real-world problems. In addition to the flagship initiative program, the Bloomberg Center for Cities, located on the HKS campus, offers a program for mayors in their first 100 days and executive-level courses for city leadership in areas including negotiation, procurement, civic engagement, talent management, and economic development. Two new programs, managing technology and AI and urban planning and design, will launch over the next two years.
With in-person and virtual sessions, taught by HKS and HBS faculty, and curricula informed by Harvard research, mayors and their senior leaders step back from day-to-day responsibilities and focus on leadership and organizational practices for tackling problems within their cities.
Whether the focus is on addressing infrastructure, climate, or housing issues, or improving governmental services like procurement, both mayors say their communities benefit from the resources available to them through the Bloomberg Harvard programs.
“I don’t have to think I know it all; the city of Philadelphia doesn’t have to know it all,” said Parker. “Thanks to our ability to connect with mayors across the globe [through this program] we can figure out what the best practices are.”
“I can pick up the phone and talk to two dozen mayors in a minute to share ideas and information,” said Rickenmann. “My team came back from this program fired up. It has changed the way we run government.”
Parker also noted the value of Harvard research made available to mayors through the initiative. “[Harvard professor and Center faculty affiliate] Raj Chetty’s research has brought local and state government and the philanthropic community together because we can’t deny his data-driven assessment that the Philadelphia metro area ranks 50 out of 50 in the nation for economic mobility. This is a huge discussion in Philadelphia right now, and his research has brought the region together.”
Finding trusted cohorts across the country has been invaluable, Rickenmann said. “I told [Mayor Hancock from Denver] that my efforts to work with the Department of Transportation on neighborhood safety had stalled, and he said, ‘We just did a study on that and found some innovative solutions. Let me share the study with you.’ And just like that, we had a $250,000 study to use,” Rickenmann said. “That’s the kind of relationships we are building.”
As both mayors noted, voters want their leaders to focus on what their communities need. “Democrat, Republican or Independent, if you want to get [constituents] excited about government again, let them see government working in their lives on a daily basis, in a way that they can see, touch and feel,” said Parker.
Preparing the next generation of urban leaders
Present in the Forum were 122 visiting scholars representing 15 different countries and six continents attending the academic convening. HKS Dean of Faculty Jeremy Weinstein began the conference by asking scholars to ensure that “research doesn’t stop at the moment of publication but continues in meaningful ways into the realm of practice.”
The conference comprised six workshops, led by faculty from HKS, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Department of Government in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences:
- Innovation and Leadership in Local Government
- Organizational Perspectives on Achieving Civic Purpose
- Resilience Amid Urban Violence: Citizenship, Agency, and Contestation
- Technology and the City
- The Politics of Urban Infrastructure
- Urban Health: Shifting the Paradigm for Evidence and Action
Over two days, conference sessions brought together invited researchers from disciplines including political science, urban economics, urban planning and design, public health, organizational theory, and public management to share and discuss research and plan future work of potential use for addressing city challenges.
In an effort to appeal to conference attendees with strengths in urban economics, public health, political science and public management to their communities, both mayors made their pitch to the scholars.
“When I think about how Philadelphia would best use your time, your talent and your treasure, it is by using your intellectual prowess and research to help us operationalize and implement our programs.
“Every strength these scholars represent is important to us because it represents every aspect of our community,” said Rickenmann.
This Forum was co-sponsored by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. Information on all Forums is available at the IOP website.
Russ Campell and Bethany Versoy