Chair Williams asks SIAP about lessons from Philadelphia and other cities

Thank you.

I just have a few questions, and I appreciate your testimony and your research.

Oh, you had testimony as well?

No, that was joint.

Okay, great.

So we understand you've worked in Philadelphia and other cities before your research in New York City.

Are there lessons you learned elsewhere that could be applied to New York?

And I always put a caveat because New York is such a large city.

You know, like Philly, it's like, I think Queens has more people than the whole city of Philly.

So I know it's like always a difficult conversation.

And, you know, but it's...

Sometimes as New Yorkers, we think we have all the answers, and we don't.

People are doing some things better in other places.

So just wondering in your research if you think there's anything that could be applied to New York City or that New York City could learn from other cities.

Well, it is true that Philadelphia and New York are very different cities, and especially their cultural ecology are notable.

In Philadelphia, one of our mayors, a couple of...

administrations ago just decided we didn't need an office on Odson culture and just close it down for eight years.

Fortunately, next month, the city's voting on a resolution to add the office to the city charter.

So that's...

One of the things when we were doing most of our original work was in Philadelphia and looking at the two cities together at one point it occurred to us that when we talk about social networks

in New York it seemed like we were always talking about what we thought of as vertical networks.

How did a local group connect up to his city council person?

To the cultural affairs department, what have you.

In Philadelphia, we don't have that amount of resources, so groups don't spend that much time looking about that.

What we found is that when they think about networks, they tend to be more horizontal networks, leading out to other groups in their neighborhood,

And that that's, and I guess what we realized is that would be something that we didn't see as much in New York.

And that it would be great if they could complement those vertical networks with horizontal networks.

Sue, did you want to add anything?

Just the horizontal networks.

I mean, I think the ways Philadelphia and New York are different.

different is the lower and moderate income neighborhoods are more the experience we have throughout Philadelphia.

I mean, we have a full class society, blue bloods, whatever, but still the in the and I would say city council really represents a lot of connection with

their districts and neighborhoods.

So we were thinking that one lesson might be cultivate DCLA or cultivating or working.

It's not just with other cultural groups.

It's neighborhood groups, community centers, rec centers, you know, business improvement.

We saw this happening of necessity in Philadelphia.

We're offering it to you like an idea, and it probably is happening, but we didn't pick it up in our research.

You know what I mean?

Because that's really at the qualitative level.

That's also field work, whatever.

And we're thinking, you know, you get out the door, you do some of this, you'll see it, you'll document it, and you'll...

Fund it, maybe more flexible types of funding than the CDF or, you know what I mean?

Because one of our things is flexible neighborhood funds, which means just small groups funding partnerships over just organizations.

So it's a combination of factors.

That may work in parts of New York.

not where New York is the world cultural capital.

We don't have that.

We're not doing that.

It's never where we were anyway.

We're city people.

We started in Philadelphia.

It's a dying city.

We're so excited to have cities revive and people move back to all of these neighborhoods.

It's a new

world and full of opportunity.