The City of Helsinki’s Executive Director for Culture and Leisure Tommi Laitio has been appointed for a fellowship at the newly launched Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the United States. Laitio will be taking a two-year leave of absence from early 2022.
Executive Director Tommi Laitio is the first public sector leader in the world to be offered a two-year fellowship by the new Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University. The two-year fellowship offers Laitio the opportunity to reflect and share his learnings on public sector leadership and develop his thinking on a specific public innovation challenge. The opportunity is offered to a public sector director with a strong track record for leading with data and innovation in mind and a reputation for delivering forward thinking policies and programs in public sector context.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is one of world´s leading universities especially in the fields of medicine and public health. The Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation is a research and development organization focused on public sector innovation, government transformation, and civic engagement. The Center is supported by a partnership between Johns Hopkins University and the Bloomberg Philanthropies Foundation.
Laitio is scheduled to start in Baltimore in the beginning of 2022. His exact start date depends on US immigration authorities. Laitio will apply for a two-year leave of absence. The Culture and Leisure Committee will make a decision on the Deputy Executive Director.
Tommi Laitio acted as the City of Helsinki’s Director of Youth Affairs between 2012 and 2016 and he has worked as Executive Director for Culture and Leisure since 2016. Laitio led the build-up of Helsinki’s citizen engagement model, chairs Helsinki’s health and wellbeing steering group and is a recognized leader and speaker on youth politics, arts and culture, social innovations and diversity, to name but a few. Laitio is also a member of the Board of the University of Helsinki.
Bloomberg Philanthropies a familiar partner to the City of Helsinki
The City of Helsinki has cooperated with the Bloomberg Philanthropies Foundation, among other things, in the Partnership for Healthy Cities project, the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative and the Innovation Programme.
The participating cities of the international Partnership for Healthy Cities network are committed to preventing non-communicable diseases, such as cancer and diabetes, by influencing lifestyles and environments. In its own project, Helsinki promotes the health of children and young people by creating safe routes to school to encourage an increasing number of pupils to walk or cycle to school on a daily basis.
The Innovation Programme (2019), on the other hand, focused on promoting the daily activity of senior citizens. The programme provided concrete tools for solving problems and testing promising new innovations.