A new organization was launched this month with the goal of providing free technical assistance to cities that are interested in applying for help with budget, procurement, staffing and innovation.

With support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Partners for Public Good (PPG) will now expand dramatically on work that was incubated for many years at the Government Performance Lab, part of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The four areas selected for focus target the key operating levers that exist in government for “moving the needle, regardless of what department you’re in,” says Kailey Burger, PPG’s chief executive.

The organization’s 33-person staff will ultimately grow to 40 individuals with a range of government management and performance expertise – about twice the size of the staff that had been involved at Harvard. The goal is to focus on a series of initiatives that will be publicly released in coming weeks and months. The first will focus on infrastructure initiatives to help local governments better utilize federal infrastructure dollars.

An important focus is on small governments that “don’t regularly have an investment of scale and don’t have the staff capacity or the teams who can handle getting these dollars out the door quickly,” Burger says. “It’s particularly exciting because cities of any size would be eligible for support.” 

A range of potential infrastructure projects are possible. For example, a city might be interested in the federal government’s safe streets initiative. These are “resident facing” improvements that could result in safer pedestrian crossings, new bike lanes or the implementation of smart sensors.

While the organization’s official launch was only made on November 5, an infrastructure page on the PPG website has already put a call out to support the drafting of Requests for Proposals (RFPs) and Requests for Quotations (RFQs) for capital and maintenance projects. The new organization also intends to provide market research to understand the landscape of vendors who can provide needed services.

A small number of governments have already been enrolled in the initial offerings and PPG is within days of starting to work with them. “But we’re going to be rolling out so many additional supports,” says Burger, adding that with a few weeks it will do a more public launch “so that we can cast a really wide net” that enrolls many other governments.”

Interested entities will be asked to apply for the free support, with PPG then able to share promising practices and lessons learned from helping one government to help many other governments, as well.  

What comes next for the new organization? The focal point of the work that was previously done at Harvard was in procurement. To read about some of the successes that emerged previously from the PPG and Harvard “Procurement Excellence Network”, see Procurement Efforts That Build Better Government, which we published in August 2025. Going forward, PPG will be working on many other procurement projects, including an effort, in collaboration with other organizations, to update the model procurement code.

As 2025 draws to a close, governments will also likely see more PPG activity around technology, as the staff is joined on December 1 by Denise Riedl, Chief Innovation Officer and CIO in South Bend, Indiana, who will become PPG’s head of Public Sector Technology.

More new PPG initiatives will be announced through the last part of 2025 and in 2026.

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