This year, our focus is on one of the City’s main challenges - as defined within the Major’s Strategy - Building an inclusive economy.
In its inception stage, between January and July 2023, the lab’s main activity was to define the challenge and the lab’s approach based on its four pillars: Mapping information and creating a data platform, assembling field experiments, analysing the outcomes and defining a long-term policy.
The term Inclusive economy defines a desired economic approach as enabling all its citizens to live in financial comfort. Some of our questions at this stage were:
- How can we support accessible, highly productive employment options?
- How can we create a stable economic prosperity adapted to all the City’s residents?
- What actions would create a broader impact? Where should the City invest?
- What actions should the City take to achieve its goal?
Through these questions, we opted to focus our efforts on the employment aspect as a continuation of a study conducted by the strategic team at the Jerusalem municipality. Their work focused on defining the City’s population groups, their financial productivity level, and the barriers holding each population group from reaching its highest earning potential or entering the job market.
The lab focuses on understanding the linkage between employment - to population group - to its physical local setup (neighbourhood or street). Over the past months, we’ve built a data platform where we are mapping the actors: Local business centres, profiles of employees, and job adverts. Our next step will encompass field experiments and observations.