Featured speakers on the second day included Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, architect Lesley Lokko and singer-songwriter Elsa Carvajal Peralta.
Day two of of Bloomberg CityLab 2024, a summit for urban leaders in Mexico City hosted by Bloomberg Philanthropies with the Aspen Institute, featured mayors from Denver, Philadelphia, Helsinki and Nairobi; singer-songwriter Elsa Carvajal Peralta, and a number of renowned architects
Innovation and Care
Cities are centers for innovation, and key to providing services that residents need on a day-to-day basis, Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, said in remarks on day two of the conference.
Bloomberg pointed to a program to provide caregivers with government support in Bogotá, Colombia, as an example of an innovation that is now spreading to other cities. The so-called Care Block program is being replicated in China, the Dominican Republic and Sierra Leone.
“The more that national governments get bogged down in ideological fights, the more we need cities,” Bloomberg said.
Delivering on Treatment
Support from the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge has already helped the city of Paterson, New Jersey, to get 450 citizens with addiction issues into treatment programs, according to Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh. During a session where past Mayors Challenge recipients shared their experiences, Sayegh discussed how the city had set up emergency hotline to help people suffering from opioid addiction to get emergency treatment.
“The real fix for opioid-use disorder is medication-assisted treatment that’s proven to help heal the brain and to wean individuals off of whatever they’re addicted to,” Sayegh said. “So we piloted a program promising to deliver medication-assisted treatment within 90 minutes. But when we piloted it, we didn’t get it to them in 90 minutes. We got it to them in 76 minutes, so we under-promised and over-produced.”
The Mayors Challenge–assisted program proved not just effective in its target area but as a catalyst for other types of social uplift, as the city was able to get 30% of program participants experiencing homelessness into permanent housing.
