1 Bringing Urban Leaders Together for Effective Change: What We Know Oct. 27, 2006 Hal Wolman Pamela Blumenthal Doug Hess Meghan Salas George Washington Institute of Public Policy Executive Summary Virtually every city has some form of organization that brings together civic leaders in an effort to address the city’s problems and have a positive impact upon them. What do we know about these organizations and how effective they are? In an effort to answer these questions, we undertook a systematic review of the literature, focusing on both who participates (i.e., who is at the table?) in these leadership organizations and how effective these organizations are. We were particularly concerned with whether the first question – who participates? – is related in a systematic way to the second – the effectiveness of these organizations in bringing about positive urban change. The results of our efforts were extremely disappointing. Despite the clear importance of the questions, little empirical literature addressed them, and even less produced generalizable results. The literature consists almost entirely of case studies, some of which described the sectors participating and others of which did not. The effectiveness of the efforts of these civic leadership collaborations was seldom addressed, and when it was, it was invariably in terms of outputs rather than outcomes. Variations in sectors participating were not linked to effectiveness of the collaboration. The research did provide us with the following information. Who is at the table? Traditional partnerships between the economic elite and the political elite are slowly giving way to more inclusive collaborations, involving certain non-profits, such as higher