Jake Elder, Sustainability, Bloomberg Associates
During his time in office, former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had assembled a high performing team with a unique set of skills for effectively running a city. He later founded Bloomberg Associates in order to leverage the knowledge of that team to improve the quality of life for people around the world.
Bloomberg Associates provides pro bono consulting services to mayors and their staff in areas such as sustainability, transportation, urban planning, social services, cultural assets management, municipal integrity, communications & internal management, economic development, and media & digital strategies. Bloomberg Associates helps US cities such as Nashville, Detroit, Atlanta, and Houston as well as international cities such as Athens, Milan, Paris, and London.
Bloomberg Associates works in cities for approximately two years, in order to support both high-level strategic planning and prioritization as well as hands-on implementation. For example, Bloomberg Associates helped the city of Nashville to launch a program called Root Nashville which has a goal of planting 500,000 trees in the city by 2050. They’ve continued to support the effort through its first year of operations and the planting of its 5,000th tree just before Earth Day, 2019.
The sustainability team at Bloomberg Associates uses a broad definition of “sustainability” that incorporates environmental, social, and economic goals. Their past projects reflect this diversity; the team has tackled affordable housing, green infrastructure, economic revitalization, urban heat, and overall sustainability and climate planning.
Because the services provided come at no cost to the client, Bloomberg Associates consultants are able to truly serve as trusted advisors for everything from multi-year projects; shorter, more targeted efforts; and ad hoc questions or opportunities.
What do you actually do all day?
Every day varies. I’m the lead consultant for engagements in a number of cities, but I also support colleagues on engagements across disciplines and in different cities as well.
Some weeks I’m on the road spending time in person with my clients facilitating workshops or problem solving. Other times I’m in our New York offices on the phone checking up on project status, addressing client concerns, and talking with potential partner organizations. I also make time for actually doing the hard work of coming up with policy recommendations and strategies for rollouts.
Besides core consulting tools like Excel and PowerPoint, we leverage a range of other tools depending on the type of engagement. For example, our work with the City of Oakland on their long-term greenhouse gas planning required the use of modeling tools such as the World Bank’s CURB tool. In Athens, we’re working on heat island mitigation so we’re using GIS mapping tools to identify areas prone to urban heat islands that have high concentrations of vulnerable populations. We’re also using GIS in Nashville to find the best areas of opportunity to plant trees to meet our public health and stormwater management objectives.
What are some of the key skills for success in this role?
You have to be really comfortable with uncertainty. You frequently get questions about issues you might not know much about and you need to educate yourself quickly. Cities can’t always wait several weeks or months for you to do extensive research before helping them identify where the opportunities are.
Our work focuses on advising mayors, commissioners and senior policy advisors, so you also really need an understanding of how public policy is created. Many people don’t realize how consensus driven policy is, and that takes a lot of time and strategic thinking as well as the ability to understand and communicate the different interests of the various stakeholders.
You also need to be very comfortable operating at the highest levels of government; you need to know how to interact with a mayor or commissioner who might have a very broad world view but not necessarily a deep understanding of the issue you’re working on. These people are always being asked for money, resources, and time. You have to be able to quickly and effectively give them the confidence that your proposal is the right way to go.
We tend to hire more experienced professionals who are experts in a particular area such as economics and community driven development, or have specific skills such as data analytics, or relevant experience such as management consulting in the public sector.
What is your favorite part of your job?
I really love the flexibility that comes with being a pro bono organization. That gives us this amazing ability to constantly adjust our scope of work for maximum impact for our clients. We don’t have to push towards a milestone that may have been relevant six months ago when a contract was signed but is no longer a priority. We can pivot on a dime with the needs of our clients so that we can deliver on the things that are most important for the city and adjust with priorities. It allows us to be so much more honest, open, and frank with our clients than you can be in a traditional consulting setting.
What is the hardest part of your job?
The flip side of that flexibility is that we have to be diligent about how we allocate our time so that we’re not pulled in numerous competing directions. There are so many opportunities out there that we need to be good about knowing when we’ve done enough to move a project forward so that we can move on to another priority. Finding the right time to transition out of a project is difficult; we’d never step back from a client that still needed support, but knowing precisely when we’re no longer needed can sometimes be a tough call.
What is your proudest professional achievement?
I’m particularly proud of the impact our team has had in Athens, Greece. They were hit particularly hard by the debilitating financial crisis in Greece, and it’s been amazing to watch the city emerge from that first hand. It had been a city that lived in the past and I’ve enjoyed helping it move towards a more modern city with new economic investment and tourism; it really feels like a city that has emerged anew.
I helped lead a team that conceptualized, fundraised for, and launched an economic revitalization project for the historic commercial center of Athens, just outside the main tourist areas. It has some real charm – winding roads and beautiful old buildings, but it was falling apart. There was graffiti all over, the shops were run down, and cars were parked illegally everywhere. It was not a neighborhood that was moving forward economically despite its charm. We did some short-term interventions like graffiti cleanup and public art installations and we made some bigger investments such as closing the streets to cars, installing benches, and buying new street lights.
The cleanup cost two million euros and it’s made a huge impact on the area; there’s been over 30 million euros in private investment made in recent months for the development of 4-5 new hotels, new restaurants, and new shops. We just celebrated the opening of a new plaza in the heart of the neighborhood, which was one of the Mayor’s last public appearances before he stepped down to run for European Parliament.
What are the game changers in your world?
We’re starting to find better ways to quantify the impact of our sustainability investments on things like economic competitiveness and public health outcomes. That’s helping us become better at telling the story for our work and selling these investments. We don’t ask mayors to make investments in sustainability because we want to tackle climate change or green the space in which people live, instead we talk about air quality, reductions in congestion for transit, economic competitiveness, workforce development, and livability. These factors really impact the ability of a city to attract residents and businesses. Increasingly, residents are demanding these services and businesses go to where the talent lives. This virtuous cycle is putting additional pressure on policy makers to invest in parks, trees, and better transit infrastructure that maybe weren’t appreciated in the same way twenty years ago.
Take Athens as an example. There was a study that looked at 571 European cities and it found that Athens faces the single greatest threat of heat waves of any major city in Europe. They’re especially likely to be bad in August, the peak of tourist season. Bond rating agencies like Moody’s take climate risks like this into account and will downgrade a city if they think there’s a potential for the city to start losing tourism dollars. A mayor may not care much about this abstract concept of “too much heat” in a city, but they really care about the potential of being downgraded.
The best part is that Moody’s hasn’t added a “climate change” box to their evaluations, they’ve simply started viewing climate change in terms of risks to their existing evaluation criteria. In this example, the tourism driven economy would be majorly impacted if heat waves increased from 100 to 110 degrees in August or went from lasting just a couple days to a week.
What are some of the big trends that cities are working on right now?
Heat is becoming an emerging area of concern for cities as it can have major impacts on tourism, livability, and public health.
Some cities are also starting to wrestle with the idea of taking the sustainability conversation beyond buildings, energy, and transit to the other “scope 3” activities that don’t take place within a city but are part of each individual citizen’s carbon footprint. This means taking a consumption-based world view on things like air travel, what we eat, and the products we consume. While across the U.S., 70% of emissions comes from buildings, transit, and electricity, the story is different in our cities. A recent study by C40 found that consumption-based emissions for their cities were 60% greater than those that just look at “core” (scope 1 and 2) emissions generated within the city limits. By focusing on this narrow subset, we are missing most of the story. Some cities are starting to change their approach. For example, Paris’ most recent climate action plan included an evaluation of its consumption footprint, which was six times that of their core emissions.
Clean energy is another emerging trend for our clients. Cities have historically been shy about tackling clean energy because utilities are governed at the state level and they didn’t feel like they had a seat at the table. Now you’re starting to see more cities not only making clean energy commitments, but reaching out to their utilities to talk about their energy mix and plans for the future.
Affordable housing is increasingly becoming a crisis in a lot of cities. Basic services such as energy, water, transit, and housing are getting more and more expensive and mayors are looking for ways to enable people to stay where they are to support the investments these cities are making.
There’s a lot going on in environmental justice and equity as well. Many sustainability investments disproportionately benefit those who are traditionally left behind. Clean energy lowers utility bills, not so much that the wealthy would notice, but enough to make a big impact for low income residents. Stormwater infrastructure such as flood walls and tree planting also tend to help low income communities which are often located in areas prone to flooding.
What was your path to this role?
I was raised in a socially oriented family. My dad was an environmental educator, my mom was a juvenile court judge, and I was raised to value service and the environment. After I graduated college, I joined Accenture’s public sector consulting group and developed a lot of important skills such as project management, stakeholder engagement, and how to solve messy problems on a quick timeframe with limited resources. Eventually I moved up to engagement management, selling work, and developing relationships with senior level management.
I’m really passionate about sustainability and when I became aware of this position, I jumped at the chance to do such impactful work. I didn’t have a lot of work experience in sustainability specifically, but my consulting background and experience with the public sector have been huge assets.
What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?
The most important thing for people who have been in the workforce and want to pivot is to look for opportunities to leverage your prior experience and transition them to a new domain. I had consulting skills that enabled me to move into sustainability consulting, I definitely would have had a harder time transitioning into a corporate sustainability or investment-oriented role. Be intentional about the skills you’ve built and how they will enable you to be successful in your new job.
It’s not important to stress about finding the perfect job, just focus on getting the experience that moves you along that pathway. If you’re breaking into the field, focus on find a job that you find interesting and will get you started on building a skill set. You can always leverage that experience to get closer to your end goal in the future. On the flip side, when you’re doing informational interviews, don’t just say you’re interested in sustainability, make sure you’re specific about what your interests are. Do you want to work on food policy? Urban agriculture? Expansion of rooftop solar? Just be directional about the skills you want to leverage and what you want to do so people can help connect you.
What are your favorite resources?
Axios has a good overall newsletter, as well as an energy-specific one.
I read Citylab and Next City to stay up to date on what’s happening in cities.
I subscribe to a digest service called Overhead Wire that aggregates ~20 articles a day across urban planning, transport, and sustainability.
We present at meetings for the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) and C40 which are both organizations for city leaders focused around sustainability. We also support the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge which provides funding for 25 American cities to help them reach their portion of the Paris Agreement.
On the energy side I love the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast, they do a good job of getting sharp people on the show to talk about trends in energy policy.
Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?
There are too many to count at this point. I greatly admire the pioneers from the 70’s and 80’s who were working on this stuff and putting their lives on the line decades before this became a larger conversation. I think about people like Dr. James Hansen standing on the floor of congress and talking about climate change as an existential threat or people like Jimmy Carter putting solar panels on the white house even though it looked foolish at the time. On a personal level, my heroes are my parents who have given me the opportunities and world view to do this kind of work, and Mayor Bloomberg for giving me the platform to do it on.
