Giving Compass' Take:

• Myung Lee from Cities at Service details what urban centers can do to empower their citizens and encourage more community activity.

• Collaboration is an important element of this effort. What roles might philanthropists play in developing more civic engagement overall?

• Here's how one tech platform helps communities develop better common spaces.

When the Cities of Service team first set out to create the Engaged Cities Award, we wanted to unearth and lift up the powerful work that cities around the world are doing to solve critical public problems. We had learned a lot in in our partnerships with cities all over the U.S. and several in the U.K., but we knew that there was more for us to learn and share with others  —  in hopes of inspiring cities around the world to tackle their own challenges in new and collaborative ways.

We received more than 100 applications from cities throughout the Americas and Europe and each one reinforced the importance of mayors and city leaders engaging citizens in effective leadership. These dynamic leaders were interested in collapsing barriers to citizen participation and building trust between leaders and citizens. But they didn’t want relationships in name only; they needed citizens to be engaged in order to develop the best solutions to shared challenges. And the relationships they forged have sustained their shared success. Most cities face a varied spectrum of challenges  —  and limited resources to tackle them. The ingenuity that comes with collaborative decision making was key in every instance.

Read the full article about engaged cities around the world by Myung Lee from Cities of Service at medium.com