CEOs for Cities to Launch VELOCITY

Posted by Sheila Redick on September 09, 2009

CHICAGO – In a push to accelerate solutions to tackle our nation’s most pressing challenges while delivering a much-sought after new American dream for citizens, CEOs for Cities will launch VELOCITY, a national movement to re-imagine, reinvent and revitalize American cities.

"Its purpose is to create an energizing agenda for next generation cities and nurture the initiatives needed to advance that agenda.  We want to pull it all together in a way that defines a new aspirational lifestyle for Americans, one that eventually becomes the ‘new normal,’” said Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban leaders from the philanthropic, business, education, civic and public sectors dedicated to building and sustaining the next generation of great American cities.

The VELOCITY movement begins with a two-day creative salon of 40 select national experts from a variety of fields and hosted by community and business leaders in Grand Rapids on Sept. 14-15. 

The VELOCITY salon, which is invitation only, will produce a compelling narrative with a set of clear, shared principles for the next generation of great American cities along with ideas and support for a series of existing and emerging experiments that will deliver a desirable future to be shared and extended through the broader VELOCITY community

The VELOCITY salon is not just an isolated event. The outcomes of the salon work will extend to the broader community through crowd-sourcing and be broadcast across media platforms including Twitter, blogs and other traditional channels, engaging citizens in creating a new reality and desire for city-living. The salon work will also be published in the VELOCITY book, distributed globally to urban leaders, as well as presented at the CEOs for Cities National Urban Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. on September 29-30 for mayors and other urban leaders to discuss how to urgently execute these ideas locally.