Name and describe one state or local policy that should be tried across the country.

We are at risk of losing the progress our country has made against the opioid epidemic, and too many still die every year, leaving empty seats at dinner tables that devastate families and friends for lifetimes. We need to find alternative strategies to our current approaches to end the stigma of substance use disorder and help more people find treatment and aid. Overdose prevention centers, which allow people to use drugs under supervised conditions, currently operate only in Rhode Island and New York City. These programs have been proven to save lives and connect people in need to the aid that can help them. They reduce stigma and represent lifelines to those struggling. They prevent overdoses and public drug use. They reduce litter, provide partnerships with local law enforcement and lessen the burden on emergency resources. There are more than 200 in use around the world, but only three in our country. If we are committed as communities and as a society to help our family and friends at their lowest points, we must change that.

Saud Anwar is a physician and state senator in Connecticut. He is the deputy president pro tempore of the state senate and the Senate chair of the Public Health Committee.

Camp Rise is a Milwaukee program that reaches young people between the ages of 10 and 13 with guidance, mentoring and community service opportunities. It is certainly an effort that should be tried across the country.

What sets Camp Rise apart is its simulation of a work experience in which participation is rewarded with a modest stipend. Laws restrict employment of children, so this program does not offer a “wage.” Nevertheless, it introduces kids from challenged neighborhoods to a fundamental idea: Positive efforts can earn financial rewards.

I launched Camp Rise at a time when car thefts in my city were climbing precipitously. Our police were often arresting young teenagers who appeared to be aimless and disconnected from societal norms. It was clear we needed to reach this cohort of young people before their actions led to criminal activity.

While hundreds of young Milwaukee residents have participated in Camp Rise, it has not added costs to local government budgets. That’s because foundations, business interests and individual philanthropists have embraced the Camp Rise idea and provided support.

At a recent civic awards ceremony, Camp Rise was recognized for its innovation. Surveys of participants and their parents affirm the program’s success, and more comprehensive evaluations are underway.

Cavalier Johnson is the mayor of Milwaukee.

For more than a century, parents and teachers have been engaged in “reading wars” between those who favor phonics (teaching letter sounds and combinations) and cueing (using a picture paired with a word). Research has consistently found that phonics, paired with other techniques generally called the “science of reading,” is more effective than cueing. Yet cueing is still widely used in some areas — leaving many parents with no alternatives when schools persistently fail to help their children.

Enter Education Savings Accounts. States that have this program deposit a portion of a child’s spending from education funding formulas in a private account that parents use to buy education products and services. They can choose a new school for their child or customize their student’s educational experience by hiring tutors or purchasing learning materials such as textbooks and online resources. Lawmakers in 19 states have made accounts or account-style options available for children to apply statewide.

Such education solutions are attracting families: In Florida, a half-million students are using accounts or other private school scholarships. Arizona is approaching 100,000 students. Texas and Louisiana lawmakers just adopted new account options. With assigned schools proving painfully slow to change, Education Savings Accounts allow families to help their children today.

Jonathan Butcher is acting director of the Center for Education Policy and Will Skillman Senior Research Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Many American cities elect their mayors through a top-two system: A nonpartisan primary is open to all candidates and voters, and the two highest vote-getters then advance to the general election. These electoral systems have some variations, but generally possess two vital qualities: No. 1: All of the voters get to see all of the candidates, and No. 2: All of the candidates have to face all of the voters. As a result, city leaders are incentivized to build coalitions that include Democrats, Republicans and independents. These coalitions usually exist across the middle 70% of the electorate and reject the extremes. The outcomes in these cities generally represent compromise. The results are unifying and pragmatic.

This stands in stark contrast to the way most elections are conducted at the state and federal levels. There, closed partisan primaries give the 15% of voters who reside at one extreme or the other much of the influence over the outcome, and candidates and elected officials respond to that incentive structure accordingly. The outcomes are polarizing and generally unpopular. Actual policy results are elusive because no one is electorally incentivized to get anything done.

If America wants its democratic experiment to work again, state and federal elections have to emulate the way that many city elections are conducted.

David Holt is the mayor of Oklahoma City and the president of the United States Conference of Mayors.

As AI rapidly reshapes work and increases skill requirements, people with limited work experience are likely to have fewer opportunities to get their first job in a career path or profession. Apprenticeships could help fill the growing chasm between what education systems teach and what employers need.

But apprenticeships and other quality work-based learning models are hard to scale. It isn’t that employers aren’t interested — it’s that we make it too cumbersome for them to participate. There’s no clear “front door” for engaging with education ecosystems, which vary wildly across states, regions and funding streams. Employers face a cacophony of requests for input from different programs. Small and medium-sized businesses especially struggle with administrative burdens and upfront costs, despite long-term benefits for competitiveness, quality and retention.

Indiana is piloting a potential solution: statewide Industry Talent Associations that convene multiple employers within an industry to assess talent needs, co-develop occupation-specific competencies and curricula, create assessments and train workplace supervisors. Other states, inspired by this approach, are developing similar statewide, multi-employer entities.

It’s too early to know Indiana’s results, but the core insight matters: States need dedicated infrastructure to organize employer engagement — not one-off partnerships, but systematic ways for employers to shape hands-on pathways into professions.

Annelies Goger is a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

One policy that would be beneficial to promote at the state and local level is a multifaceted approach to public safety. Cities have experienced success when combining community-centered policing (connecting law enforcement officers to residents with public meetings, beat assignments, intentional nonenforcement interactions and group violence intervention); coordinated public works (light, street, sidewalk and vacant building maintenance); prevention (youth recreation and job opportunities and adult employment coordination); and block club activation. While the work seems labor-intensive, it can be coordinated with the help of local organizations working in partnership with a city’s 311 system and community policing efforts. Both the National Policing Institute and the University of Chicago Crime Lab provide great information on community policing. This multifaceted approach to public safety was successfully pursued in Gary, Indiana, and Chicago with positive results. The key is coordination among public and private service providers.

Karen Freeman-Wilson is president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Urban League and a former mayor of Gary, Indiana.

Two words: Omaha 360.

This comprehensive community-based effort aims to create safe and thriving communities.

One key aspect is a weekly meeting that has put everyone from grassroots activists to police chiefs to mayors together to discuss how to reduce violence.

Omaha 360 — so named for the various perspectives in that room — is more than a meeting. It weaves together violence prevention, intervention, enforcement, reentry and support services. For example, from these meetings grew employment programs for youth and young adults, an effort to address the built environment including affordable housing, and concrete programs to help those exiting prison.

The results speak for themselves. Since its 2008 launch, homicides have dropped by nearly 57%. In the past 5 years, nonfatal shootings have dropped by over 50%. Omaha 360 has won national recognition. Two hundred other cities have inquired about it, and some have started to replicate it.

Begun and run by the nonprofit Empowerment Network, Omaha 360 is a dedicated practice that became de facto public policy. Government’s role is to support: The job of elected officials, policymakers and law enforcement leaders in those weekly hour-long meetings is to listen, share information and provide follow-up.

The meetings are tightly structured and facilitated by a trusted adviser. In all candor, they can at times be raw. But they work. I have witnessed this personally over the years as a former Omaha police deputy chief and now as mayor.

Omaha 360 is holistic. To successfully replicate it, a city or state needs to embrace the simple but important idea that we are all in this together.

John W. Ewing Jr. is the mayor of Omaha, Nebraska.

As public fears about crime are met with outsized federal responses, lawmakers should remember that decades of research have shown that longer prison sentences do not make communities safer. Instead, extreme sentencing drains resources from proven safety strategies — leading to poor health and economic outcomes for justice-impacted people and their communities. States should take the first step in undoing the harms of mass incarceration by passing “second look” laws that allow judges to review sentences after a person has served a lengthy period of time.

New research by my organization, The Sentencing Project, has found that half the country has already enacted some version of second look. This year, Delaware expanded its sentence review process to rehabilitated individuals who have served at least 25 years in prison. For those over 60 years old, their sentence may now be reconsidered after 15 years. (Previously, only those convicted for crimes committed under the age of 18 who had served at least 20 years in prison could apply for sentence review.)

States should also strengthen their second look policies by implementing an automatic sentence review process within 10 years of imprisonment — a step that has yet to be taken by any state. This recommendation is grounded in research that finds most recidivism rates fall measurably after a decade in prison. Imprisoning older people after they age out of crime is a wasteful use of public resources that would be better spent on violence interruption, mental health, education and other proven crime prevention programs. States interested in community safety should take a second look at long sentences.

Kara Gotsch is executive director of The Sentencing Project.

In 2023, the city of Atlanta partnered with the Atlanta Housing Authority to establish a development corporation to use publicly owned land and buildings to expand the supply of mixed-income housing. The creation of the Atlanta Urban Development Corporation adapted a public asset corporate model used by Copenhagen. The new corporation was given a small portfolio of land, the power to provide tax exemptions and access to a $38 million construction financing fund. Two years after launch, the corporation is one of the leading edges of housing innovation in Atlanta, with initial projects that include one of the first office-to-residential conversions in the city and the redevelopment of a fire station in Midtown Atlanta, with mixed-income housing on top of the firehouse. The Atlanta initiative is part of a broader effort by Mayor Andre Dickens to create 20,000 units of affordable housing over eight years.

Cities across the United States possess extensive but underutilized land and property assets that hold immense potential for addressing pressing housing challenges. The leveraging of public assets can make individual affordable housing projects economical by lowering the cost of production. In addition, engaging public sector entities as true equity partners in housing production can generate revenues for the long term, which can then support more housing. Unlocking this potential could be part of broader initiatives to produce hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units.

Bruce Katz is a senior adviser to the National Housing Crisis Task Force.

To improve responsiveness and rebuild public trust, city and state governments should make profound changes to how they operate, redesigning service delivery around residents’ needs and measurable outcomes. Success requires robust data literacy training for employees that increases their ability to use generative AI. When paired with civil service reforms, frontline workers will have the tools and discretion to replace bureaucracy with problem-solving.

Timely problem-solving rests on high-quality, actionable data. To get there, cities should mandate and support a secure, interoperable data infrastructure across departments. Linking key service departments — including health, public safety, social services and capital investments — will provide frontline staff and leaders with integrated, visualized data, facilitating better service delivery, greater trust and a culture of continuous improvement.

This summer, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu combined a culture of innovation with a “Technology Modernization” executive order, which aims to make it “easier for people to do business with the city.” Responsiveness will be unleashed by joining technology modernization with process improvement efforts. When employees are empowered and given authority, they deliver a better experience for residents.

When officials regularly measure citizen satisfaction, transparently publish performance results and reward excellence, trust will follow.

Stephen Goldsmith is the Derek Bok Professor of Urban Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is a former mayor of Indianapolis and a former deputy mayor of New York City.

One of the best reforms states and local jurisdictions should consider is to eliminate parking minimums: codes that mandate the number of parking spots required when a building is constructed.

Parking minimums make every project more expensive. If, for example, a builder wants to construct a grocery store, they either need a bigger parcel of land or a construction budget to build parking underground. Of course, these costs are passed along to the people who use the final construction, whether that’s in a commercial setting, like a grocery store, or in a housing situation, like townhouses, condos or apartments.

These minimums were, in many cases, developed decades ago without much scrutiny. They were written without solid data and evidence.

The good news is that these requirements can be changed at the local level, if citizens lobby their representatives to update local building codes. The bad news is that most people don’t realize that parking minimums are one cause of many affordability problems.

Fortunately, many localities are getting rid of parking minimums. To date, 3,000 cities worldwide have changed their building codes to reduce or eliminate specific parking requirements and encourage better land use. You can see a map of cities that have done this at the Parking Reform Network or read about the costs associated with parking minimums at the website of the nonprofit group Strong Towns.

Revisiting and revising parking minimums are policy changes people can enact in their local communities to make lasting improvements.

Kate Garman Burns is director of state and local innovation at the Federation of American Scientists.