In this episode hear an exclusive conversation, moderated by host Stephen Goldsmith, with Chao Guo, professor of nonprofit management at the University of Pennsylvania and G.T. Bynum, mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
At a recent event held at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University host Professor Stephen Goldsmith interviewed Chao Guo, professor of nonprofit management at the University of Pennsylvania and G.T. Bynum, mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma. They discussed how city leaders can work across sectoral boundaries to improve social outcomes for residents. Professor Guo presented scholarly research on cross-sector collaborations and Mayor Bynum shared real-world lessons in regards to forming partnerships, using data, and breaking down historic lines of division.
Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa
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Betsy Gardner:
Hi, and welcome to the Data-Smart City Pod. This is Betsy Gardner, senior editor at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University and producer of this podcast. We have a very special episode for you today. Professor Stephen Goldsmith recently hosted a conversation with Chao Guo, professor of nonprofit management at the University of Pennsylvania and G.T. Bynum, mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, about cross-sector collaboration. This episode is a recording of their talk. You may hear some background noise, but we hope you enjoy this exclusive content. Thanks for listening.
Jorrit de Jong:
Good afternoon everyone. How are you? Good. Welcome to the Bloomberg Center for Cities. It is my pleasure to introduce the moderator of the panel today, Professor Steve Goldsmith. This is the first of many events here at the center are dedicated to advancing governance, leadership, and management in cities. And today's conversation is a perfect kickoff event for that series, because it's about cross-sector collaboration in cities. We have the mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mayor Bynum, and we have a leading scholar from UPenn, Professor Guo. And the moderator for today is somebody, without whose efforts this center wouldn't even be here, is a real trailblazer both in the world of practice, as a two term mayor of Indianapolis, and then, vice mayor for New York City, in the Bloomberg administration, but also, professor of government here and really the most trailblazing advocate for innovation in government here at Harvard. So without further ado, I'd like to turn over to Steve Goldsmith, and thank you for attending.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Jorrit's introduced me a number of times over a number of years, and they just keep getting better and better. I like them more each time, right? Thanks for being with us. Chao's going to present some information about his book, and I'm going to conduct a conversation with Mayor and Chao. But Mayor, let me start with a totally unexpected question. So every day, your employees need to go out and make life better for someone, but there are overwhelming tragedies, either in your city or in the world, where we're witnessing, on television again today. So how do you draw attention to the importance of the day-to-day activities for the residents of Tulsa in the face of kind of, in this case, it might be terror, in your case, it may be a flood or a tornado? But how do you think about that? How do you use your voice to inspire? But as I was thinking about the quest for attention, then how do you use your voice in that regard?
G.T. Bynum:
I was elected mayor in June of 2016, but I wasn't sworn in until December. So I had six months. In Tulsa, we have what's called the strong mayor form of government. So the mayor is the CEO of the City day-to-day, and we have a billion dollar budget, 4,000 employees. No mayor that we've ever elected has ever run an organization that large. And so, I thought, "Well, I've got six months to go out and meet with people who actually run large enterprises and do a crash course on how you do this." And one of the best pieces of advice I received was from the then-president of the University of Tulsa, and he said being a mayor is very similar to being a university president, in that you have your really administrative duties, which is what, if you look in the Tulsa City Charter, it spells out everything that the mayor is supposed to do, put together budgets, manage employees, those sorts of things.
But then, you have, and the term he used was "your pastoral responsibilities." And these are much less formal, but it is the sense of community leadership that a mayor has, that people look to the mayor as a leader of a community, that you have to take care of the people in your community. And there have been many times in my time as mayor where I've thought about that. Pete Buttigieg writes, I think, really well in his memoir about being mayor of South Bend, about how this was one of the big surprises for him is he had thought all about all the responsibilities of being the mayor of South Bend, but then, when he came in, what he realizes, when the mayor of South Bend showed up at a funeral for somebody, for the family, that was like South Bend showing up. It showed that the community valued the person who had passed away.
And so, on any number of things, whether it's tragedies related to violence, in Tulsa, we have a lot of natural disasters, or dealing with a global pandemic, that, where I've received a lot of positive feedback is, and maybe it just comes to me as a parent of a 16-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, there are times when you get in front of the podium and you speak to your citizens as sort of the parent of the city and provide reassurance. But also, one of the big things that I've found that's important is not just to blindly give people hope, but to be able to provide rational data-driven explanations as to why they should have that. And that's where I think data can play a huge part in reassuring people and giving them a greater sense of agency over their future.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So I want to come back to the issue of data with respect to cross-sector collaborations, because I know Chao, you've written a lot of books, and that's one of them you're an expert at. But you've got a pretty good audience here. Why don't you plug your current book, is a Quest for Attention? So we're giving you attention about your book.
Chao Guo:
Thank you. First of all, it's an honor to have this conversation with not one but two mayors. I have been following their work, and so, it's just so exciting to be part of this conversation. My most recent book, The Quest for Attention, is focused on nonprofit advocacy in the social media age, but it does have implications for cross-sector collaboration and many of the governance challenges. In fact, the inspiration for this book came many years ago, when I was on the faculty of the University of Georgia, when a friend of mine, his name is Wray Witten, and he passed away 10 years ago. He was a water rights lawyer, that worked over three decades in Africa, and in Ethiopia in particular. And one observation that he made, when it comes to cross-sector collaboration, was the issue of attention. And first, you wanted to grab attention of the public and the donors and supporters, in order to get your project going, but then, how do you sustain that attention?
How do you counter the negative consequences of that attention? He used one example that I remember to this day, that is there is this, everybody knows what a merry-go-round is. At that time, there was an innovative water pump project, that was popular in Africa, that combined the idea of clean water project with the idea of having fun and making kids play. So they built this merry-go-round, that also serves a function of a water pump. So you have to get clean water while kids are playing. It sound like a wonderful idea. Everybody was loving the idea, everybody was clapping their hands. You got a lot of media attention. But what people don't know is that, eventually, the project was sort of a failure, because over time, the water pump would break. And then, you wouldn't have this water pump function anymore, just the merry-go-round.
Another issue is, who is playing as a merry-go-round? It's the kids. Kids don't have a schedule. They don't want to work on the project when you need water. So that's a lot of issue that come into play, and when it comes to maintenance of the project is also an issue. So the ability to grab attention of your donors and supporter and the general public is different. There's a disconnect between that and the accountability of how to make it work. So that was the inspiration that brought me to the project.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I want you to continue to talk about your book, but let me ask you a question about one of the things you addressed in the book, which many of us are aware of, so that those with money get a disproportionate amount of attention in a city. They're more able to express themselves, they know people who know people, they can, whatever. So if the quest for attention is the first step in advocacy, how do you mitigate the inequities that come from resource people getting more attention?
Chao Guo:
That's a real challenge that many of the grassroots activists, organizations, leaders face when you try to work things out. The argument we're trying to make in this book is that the age of social media has helped change the rules of the playground. That is resource is not limited to money anymore. Yes, those with money still have a lot of power, and there's an inequity associated with that. But those who are good at using the power of social media and technology could actually turn the table around by getting people's attention and try to achieve your goals. So the idea is that we can use social media to engage your constituents and how there are strategies and techniques that you can use to get attention on social media from the supporters and donors and the like.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Let me ask you one more question, then I'll move to the mayor. We did a project here a couple years ago using social sentiment to look at vaccine hesitancy. So what language affected the likelihood of folks to get vaccinated? And it turns out, predictably, that it varies by the demography of the person who's listening to the mayor. So white males, older white males, may listen to the mayor. Younger white males, it turned out, really didn't care what the mayor said. They just wanted free baseball or concert tickets. Folks of color wanted to know what their community leaders said. So this is social sentiment. So how should you think about the clash of social media, as it relates to what's official from the mayor and what's from your advocacy groups? How do you think about the balance of that?
Chao Guo:
That's a great question. I don't really have a good answer to that question, but in our book, we're trying to understand how organizations combine their online social media work with their offline advocacy and cross-sector collaboration work. People like mayor and powerful leaders in the community, they still matter a lot, and it's important to find a way to engage them into the conversation. In the book, we have a framework, where we identified a set of sectors that would help organizations gain attention to their cause, and one tactic is called celebrity phishing. Essentially, we try to, when we send out a social media message, we'll add Mayor Bynum, so that he's aware of the issue and he might become part of the conversation. The power of social media is that, in the past, if you are grassroots level leaders and you are trying to influence policymakers, you oftentimes do not have access to it. You don't really know the policymaker. You have no access to the policymakers. But now, with social media, with Twitter, now X, and Facebook and Instagram, you can actually gain direct access to the policymakers or influencers in the community.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Mayor competing voices, obviously, for attention, everybody wants the attention to the mayor, like everybody wants the attention to the mayor, but I want to think about attention as it relates to narrative, so how you use the social media described in the book to paint a picture. So you are interesting, I don't know if the audience knows, but you're interesting, you're a interesting personality, because you stand for moderation and pragmatism in an environment that's not always known for that, as a polite way as I can say that. So you have a one of your initiatives looking at the difference in life expectancies between folks of color and white folks. So talk to us a little bit about how you would use social media or your voice to create a narrative that brings your community together. So not just Black folks are concerned about that, but the community is concerned about that. How do you use social media and your voice to get attention towards that important goal?
G.T. Bynum:
That has been a really interesting one for us, because the utilization of social media allowed us to get data out there in the minds of people, who otherwise did not know about it. I think there had always been, in Tulsa, Tulsa for over a hundred years, is heavily segregated, predominantly African-American part of the city would be known as North Tulsa. And then, there's the rest of the city. And I think there had always been known that there was a gap and a disparity in quality of life, but there was a study done that showed there's actually an 11 year life expectancy gap between North Tulsa and the rest of the city. I ended up, that was when I decided to run for mayor, by the way, is learning that statistic and that the city really was doing nothing to address it. But one of the challenges for us in working on this issue is a lot of people hear that statistic and they think that it's just a public health issue. And public health impacts it, but there are social determinants of health that impact it to a heavy degree.
One of the things we've really tried to focus on in that space is economic empowerment. This is the part of our city that, it's not a coincidence, probably received the least economic investment over the last 50 years. And so, it shouldn't be a surprise that it has the worst health outcomes. And so, we've tried to focus on bringing more employers and more job training into that part of our city. I think I'll answer your question maybe from two different vantage points. One is, as a mayor, who people are trying to communicate to, the most important thing to me, and I do all my own social media, for good or for bad, the most important thing to me is, "Is somebody just yelling at you? Or are they bringing you a solution?" My proficiency as a public servant is not in coming up with good ideas. It's implementing the good ideas that other people bring to me.
I do have a proficiency in being able to use government to implement good ideas. So we've had a number of things that we've done in Tulsa, that people wrote in the comment section on Facebook or tagged me on X, and a lot of the time, it's pointing to another city that's doing something that's exciting that we should know about. And we go out and rip that idea off. So from an advocacy standpoint, I think the most important thing is bringing a solution to a problem, not just yelling, "You figure it out, it's your job." We get that all day anyway. Those are not going to be the most effective advocates when it comes to utilization and social media.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I want to switch to cross-sector collaboration and see if I can create a little tension between the two of you, but while we're on this, so I think mayors tend to end up living in a bubble, not in the way you would think, but in the sense that they disproportionately hear from the people they have appointed to be the directors of those agencies, which is how you would think it'd be. But that leaves out a lot of the community. So as a result of what Chao's done, now, we've got 50 nonprofits advocating, with their renewed quest for attention, they're now more effective, let's just say that. So how do you figure out who to listen to? How do you figure out where to go? How do you figure out how to underwrite, handicap the voices that you're hearing, in terms, so that, as it relates to what you just said, picking out the gem that could make a difference?
G.T. Bynum:
One thing, I would agree that you're in a bubble when you're in the office and you hear from the same people over and over again. I also think that that's one of the values of being out in the community, and it's something that a mayor has, I think, an ability to do, that a lot of other elected leaders do not. Members of Congress, I don't think get exposed to the public as much as a mayor does. Even governors, I don't think do. And so, that's very helpful, because you get a feel for not what is the hot thing that's blowing up on Twitter that day, but what do normal people, who aren't maybe angry enough to reach out to you, but if you're at their business opening or you're at their rotary lunch talking with them, what do they really care about? And that gives you a better sense.
I think that's probably the most important thing. The other thing that I try to look toward are I always try to keep the humility that, in almost all of the things that we're going to work on, we are not the subject matter experts. The big one right now that we're trying to deal with is homelessness. City of Tulsa is not the expert on addressing homelessness, but we have access to financial resources that those experts don't have. And so, identifying, in the community, who are the people that are most networked to have access to the people who are those experts, and then, drawing on their expertise to help make decisions about where we can be most helpful, not just jumping in and pretending that we know best and erasing all the expertise of these other groups, that has been very important for us. And I always try to find, on any given issue that we're going to work on, who in the community are the experts, and then, how can we help them, rather than trying to replicate or override the work that they are doing?
Stephen Goldsmith:
So Chao, let's use the mayor's comment to go back to your book here. So let me see if I can create a little trouble. So let's say that the mayor gave a $500,000 grant to X, Y, Z nonprofit. Are they really going to use their voice to oppose him? Or has he just kind of bought their cooperation?
G.T. Bynum:
I can tell you what I would hope, but...
Stephen Goldsmith:
So you get to go first. We'll give the mayor a rebuttal time.
Chao Guo:
Okay, well, $50,000 are $50,000, right? For organizations, we are working on the cause and I wouldn't ignore that, but I wanted to find a way back to the narratives idea. I think the idea of narratives is an idea of storytelling. It's an idea of how to frame the issue to promote the cost that he wanted to promote. I wouldn't just push the mayor away when he has good resources to offer, but I wanted to use this opportunity to really tell a story, to share a narrative that can help build the coalition with a lot of stakeholders. And I think the art of telling a narrative is essentially an art of reading the room.
When you walk into this room, you see some important players in the room, some important stakeholders, and you want to find ways to bring them to work with you. When I see Professor Moore in the audience and Professor Lee in the back, I want to find ways to incorporate their voices into mine to become a collective voice. I also want to have a fear of change. I want to have something that can really tell a simple but powerful message, just like the strategic triangle that Professor Moore has developed. You can really help leave a strong message or plant a seed somewhere.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Speaking of voices, we're going to go to the audience voices in a second, but before I give the mayor a chance to respond, you referenced in your book Pablo Eisenberg on the comment that nonprofits are less influential today in setting the agenda than they used to. Do you agree with that? And if not, why?
Chao Guo:
Unfortunately, I do. In my book, I identified the two challenges that nonprofit organizations in general and nonprofit advocacy organizations particular face. One is what I call the resource challenge. That is we have increasing number of nonprofits competing for limited resources, especially when the resources are concentrated within a small number of large nonprofit organizations. The second is what I call the relevance challenge is, despite all the good work that we do as nonprofit leaders and even public leaders, is the world becoming a better place, because of our efforts? The inequality has becoming so severe these days, that, compared to 20, 30 years ago.
So we are doing all this good work, but we're not seeing a difference. We're not seeing a change here. This is not to say that the work we're doing is not important. I want to make sure that we are clear about this message. It's, at the macro level, every person we help is a better condition. We are making a difference at macro level, but at the macro level, at the policymaking level, we have to be aware of this grand challenge that we all face, that is we are not turning the table yet. The situation is still there. The issue is still there.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I've gone a half an hour, I haven't told any political story, so I got to pretend to ask you a question, while telling a story. But I'll tell you the issue first, then I'll tell you the story, then I'll ask you the question. The issue is there's a lot of good deeds done in the city, that don't produce value, that people earnestly doing good things, that don't change the outcomes much. So the question I'm going to ask you, then I'm going to tell my story, is your role in driving change or the role of philanthropy, because you have a really large philanthropy, really large foundation in Tulsa, in driving change. So I get elected mayor of Indianapolis like a hundred years ago. I went to a meeting, and I met these folks who did for-profit job training. So they take somebody who's on TANF or ANDC, and then, they would place him in a job and then, there would be a fee negotiated.
If they kept the job for six months, we'd pay them. So I contracted with them. Then the president of Goodwill came, Goodwill was highly respected in Indianapolis, and said, "How could you bring a for-profit outside company into our community, when we're an esteemed nonprofit? And by the way, half our board contributed to your campaign. So why are you doing this sort of thing?" So my question is, I won't tell you what the answer was, but my question to you is, how do you think about using your contracting authority and your rhetoric to drive change for social good?
G.T. Bynum:
That's a great question, and I think one of the benefits we have is you're correct, philanthropy is very strong in Tulsa, our nonprofit community is very strong. Because we're the oil capital of the world for much of the 20th century. And those folks who generated that wealth, most of the companies have been sold off. But the wealth was left in philanthropic foundations that still reside in our city. And so, that drives a lot of the nonprofit work that's done in Tulsa. I think there's probably two things. One, on the philanthropic and nonprofit side, you can be much more nimble in testing out ideas and seeing what works and what doesn't. Whereas, from a governmental side, we can usually bring much more, much greater financial resources, once an approach has been identified. The challenge is finding where those shared goals are between the two. So I'll give you a couple examples.
Like, when I came in as mayor, we did an analysis to look at how was our fire department spending their time. What we found was we had a group of what were called super users, where these were people that were calling the fire department more than 15 times a year for assistance. A lot of the time, it was people who lived at home by themselves, that would fall down, call the fire department. If somebody in Tulsa calls the fire department, says, "I fell down and I can't get up," the fire department goes and responds. Well, we would have a lot of people that do this over and over and over again, some of them calling hundreds of times a year. And so, instead, we created a program where the fire department went out with caseworkers from nonprofits to interview these folks and find out, "What do you really need from a nonprofit support standpoint?"
And by doing just that, just meeting with people, not just reacting, but being proactive, we cut the calls of super users by 70% in a year. Right now, we're going through a great challenge, in that we have, in our hospitals, all of our hospitals in Tulsa, I think, at this point, are nonprofit hospitals, and they are just sieged with people experiencing homelessness, that need hospitalization. And then, once they're in the hospital, like if you or I has had surgery and we want to go home and recuperate, we have a place to go. If you're homeless, you don't have a place to go. And so, they stay in the hospital, which incurs far greater costs for the hospital than for the individual. And so, what we're doing, we're getting ready, we've issued an RFP just two weeks ago, to open up a shelter in Tulsa, that will be basically respite care for Tulsans experiencing homelessness, that need wound care, oxygen, IV medication, just those three things, which represent the majority of people who are in this state.
And then, the hospitals are going to track how we do in a year in reducing the incidence of these patients returning to the ER to get further assistance. And if we can demonstrate that we're reducing that, the hospitals will take over funding the program. So this is one where we've identified a mutual challenge that we face, both from a public standpoint and a hospital administration standpoint, that we can work together on, but use data to track how we're doing and addressing it. And if we can prove that it works, then they will take on the funding for it, and we can free up those funds from a public standpoint to do other things.
Stephen Goldsmith:
That's a great answer. Excellent. Let me ask Jorrit to close this, and thank our panelists at the same time.
Jorrit de Jong:
Thank you so much, Steve, and thank you, Professor Guo. Thank you, Mayor. The fascinating conversation. For those interested in more resources on cross-sector collaboration in cities, go to cities.harvard.edu. We have teaching cases about it. We also have what we call action insights, research-based articles that really try to tease out the most relevant findings for practice. Again, thank you so much to our guests, and thank you, Steve. Thank you.
Betsy Gardner:
If you liked this podcast, please visit us@datassmartcities.org. Find us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast was hosted by Steven Goldsmith and produced by me, Betsy Gardner. Thanks for listening.