Carol Coletta - Ceos For Cities

Carol Coletta is vice president of Community and National Initiatives for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, a national foundation with deep local roots in 26 cities across the U.S. At Knight she manages a portfolio of more than $50 million annually in grants and a team of 18 in 10 cities to drive success in cities. She was recruited to the foundation to lead a new portfolio created from a merger of two departments.

Her strategic focus at Knight has been to understand how robust public life can accelerate talent, opportunity and engagement. To do that, she has deployed grants, challenges, research, local leadership development, and national and local convenings of academics, policymakers and practitioners (with special emphasis on practitioners). In particular, she has led a national inquiry into the value of economic integration on America’s cities and how to achieve it.

While at Knight Foundation, she has championed support for the creation of City Observatory, Gehl Institute, Theaster Gates’ PlaceLab, Better Block Foundation, and Lean Urbanism.

Carol led the two-year start-up of ArtPlace, a unique public-private collaboration to accelerate creative placemaking in communities across the U.S. The collaboration includes 13 of the nation’s leading foundations, eight federal agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts, and six of the nation’s largest banks.

Prior to being recruited to start ArtPlace, Carol was president and CEO of CEOs for Cities for seven years. The organization under her leadership was a Chicago-based national network of urban leaders in 45 of the nation’s top metro areas who are building and sustaining the next generation of great American cities.

Previously, she served as executive director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a partnership of the National Endowment for the Arts, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. She also ran a Memphis-based public affairs consulting firm, Coletta & Company, where she served business, foundations, nonprofits and government on the broadest range of civic issues. For nine years, she was host and producer of the nationally syndicated weekly public radio show Smart City, where she interviewed more than 900 international leaders in business, the arts, and cities. At Knight, she revived a version of the show via podcast called Knight Cities.

Work and publications

Carol was the host and executive producer of Smart City Radio, a nationally syndicated public radio talk show in which she talks with national and international public policy experts, elected officials, economists, business leaders, artists, developers, planners and others for a discussion of urban issues.

Awards

Carol was a Knight Fellow in Community Building for 2003 at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Her paper on the Future of Cities, produced for the University of Houstonâ€"Clear Lake’s Future Studies program, was selected for presentation to the World Future Society annual meeting. She is a candidate for a Master of Design Methods at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology IIT. She is frequently interviewed as an expert on urban issues by national media and is an active speaker on the success formula for cities and creative communities. In 2010, she was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. She was named one of the world’s 50 most important urban experts by a leading European think tank.

References

External links

• Knight Foundation
• ArtPlace
• CEOS For Cities
• Smart City Radio
• Restless Young Coletta's research reports on young, creative and mobile people .
• Michigan Municipal League Coletta's stint as a guest blogger for the Michigan Municipal League
• New York Times Coletta quoted in NYT story on young jobseekers.
• Smart City Consulting