Mike Klowden

Published July 25, 2022

 
From the CEO

The Institute is well known for world-leading events, especially our Global Conference. We recently held the 25th annual Global Conference — which proved a remarkable success — and are looking forward to the roster of robust in-person meetings scheduled for the near future.

Our convenings are key contributors to the Institute’s mission of helping to build meaningful lives, but the programmatic work organized by our eight Centers is no less important. Their efforts are too diverse and far-reaching to encapsulate in a short letter, though I’ll note that through the pandemic, I’ve shared highlights of our work in the fields of public health, advancing medical research, and addressing issues of mental health with new urgency. Here, I’ll highlight the work of our Center for Regional Economics and our Center for Financial Markets — groups with different focus areas that nonetheless work synergistically.

From long experience, we know that regional economies succeed or fail on their adaptability and responsiveness to change. Perhaps the best-known example of our work in this area is our annual report on America’s Best-Performing Cities, in which our specialists analyze the trends contributing to economic opportunity across the country and draw upon this knowledge in working with community leaders throughout the year. (The No. 1 city in this year’s ranking? Provo, Utah, which has held the top spot for two years in a row.) The Center also works to promote understanding of the strong link between innovation on one hand, and job and wage growth on the other, especially through the analysis and policy outreach associated with our semi-annual State Technology and Science Index.

Another significant component of this work, advanced in part by our Center for Financial Markets, focuses on improving public finance outcomes. The Covid-19 crisis exposed the critical role of essential services like public health and the need to ensure that systemic inequities and inefficiencies in this $4 trillion public-private sector are better addressed. To that end, we bring together leaders from across the sector to address the challenges facing municipal bond issuers and to help strengthen public finance workforce skills. The timing of our current efforts, incidentally, could hardly be more propitious: states and localities now face the (welcome) challenge of maximizing the value of the recently legislated increases in infrastructure spending.

These initiatives, as well as the Centers’ work in improving capital access for underserved communities, may not be headline-grabbers. But they do address the critical need to strengthen the fabric of our communities and to support our public sphere.

 

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Michael Klowden, CEO