I also knew enough about local government to understand that no mayor moves the needle on longstanding problems by working alone. Buoyed by the voters’ mandate, mayors enter office with a sense of urgency and possibility. We want to act quickly, even when we’re not sure what the best path forward may be. But Birmingham’s families couldn’t afford for my administration to take us on untested paths while they continued to endure the fallout from challenges like chronic absenteeism and teacher shortages.
That’s why, far from operating in a Birmingham bubble, we made a point of searching for the best approaches, no matter where they might be found, and pairing collaborative insight and strategic investment from partners outside of our city with deep, ongoing community support.
That’s certainly true of our effort for Birmingham’s youngest learners, Birmingham Talks. The flagship initiative of a local nonprofit called Small Magic, Birmingham Talks is our free citywide partnership with parents of children as young as four months old. Together, we support them in fostering “responsive relationships” with infants and toddlers at a formative moment when these children’s agile brains can begin building a language foundation that will last throughout their lives. Launched five years ago in partnership with the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education, this program was developed hand-in-hand with Birmingham’s families. We conducted focus groups and one-on-one interviews for months before we enrolled the first participants.
We also adapted the evidence-based program in key ways to meet the unique needs of our city. That’s right: Birmingham Talks didn’t begin in Birmingham. It represents our local translation of a program pioneered in Providence, R.I., in 2013. Like our own iteration, Providence Talks employs the science of conversational turns — simple back-and-forth exchanges between a child and an adult that research has shown increase young children’s verbal and nonverbal abilities.
Both programs rely on technology pioneered by the national nonprofit LENA (Language Environment Analysis), which tracks how many conversational turns children hear and provides feedback so parents can make sustainable increases in line with the science. Both programs are also part of a global community of municipalities supported by former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and its diverse portfolio of investments and expert technical assistance to improve how local governments work, aptly named Government Innovation. Both Providence Talks and Birmingham Talks received initial seed funding from that portfolio — Providence’s effort as the winner of the global ideas competition called the Mayors Challenge and Birmingham’s work asone of five cities selected to replicate Providence Talks locally with tailored support. From Detroit, Mich., to Hartford, Conn., to Louisville, Ky., to Virginia Beach, Va., these “replication cities” continue to share resources and wisdom with each other. Each early childhood education partnership has taken hold in their local communities, attracting additional public and private investment because their impact on children’s learning has proven to be substantial.
In Birmingham, our effort quintupled from serving 93 children and two child-care centers in 2019, to serving 539 children and 11 child-care centers in just the program’s second year. Having participated in a number of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ efforts to bolster the governing hand of cities and city leaders — including the organization’s mayoral leadership development program, the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative — our team expected Birmingham Talks to work. Even so, this rapid growth — along with evidence that children who participated in Birmingham Talks were hearing many more words, which researchers say is needed for optimal brain development — inspired us and galvanized our early childhood education coalition. The following year, our administration worked with our partners on the City Council to make a historic, seven-figure investment in early literacy initiatives, beginning with Birmingham Talks.
This year, the initiative is serving more than 1,200 children. Besides its impact on the kids themselves, Birmingham Talks has fostered a community of parents who have become an engaged and vibrant support system for each other, reinforcing the language coaches’ work and being a sounding board for the issues nearly every parent of young children navigates, like “screen time.” What’s more, Birmingham Talks’ umbrella, Small Magic, has launched three additional efforts, including a program called Phonics Power, which connects parents with literacy experts and resources to ensure their 3- and 4-year-olds arrive in kindergarten prepared to learn to read. Just as exciting, our city has plans beyond early language development. In partnership with the nonprofit’s team, we’re also focused on ensuring that more of Birmingham’s children can understand and work with numbers before they enter school.
That’s the power of a good idea when it’s given a fighting chance: It can take root and blossom beyond what anyone — even its strongest advocates — originally imagined.
The challenge is that even when city leaders want to do what we did in Birmingham — namely, look to our peers for inspiration in implementing an evidence-based policy — the marketplace doesn’t have a readily accessible way for them to identify an appropriate solution, much less coordinate the resources within their city and beyond to successfully scale it. As part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ tailored replication effort, Birmingham had both. And now, any city can access similar support as part of the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange.
It’s a first-of-its-kind initiative that will allow local officials to source and learn about ideas to bring to their cities. They can also receive hands-on expert technical assistance to tailor and implement those ideas — from boosting early childhood development to improving air quality to reducing government corruption — something that’s vital for public trust, and which every policy needs to succeed.
Mayors enter office with a sense of urgency. Now, there’s a resource tailor-made to meet it. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel by going it alone or thinking that your coalition is limited by your city’s borders, my fellow mayors should recognize that the solutions to many of their most pressing challenges already exist, as does the support to adapt those solutions to their specific communities. The Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange will enable more leaders to do more good for more constituents. As mayors, we know the power of progress at the local level, and now we have a prime opportunity to expand that progress through collaboration — to quite literally change the world, together.
Randall Woodfin is the mayor of Birmingham, Ala.
