About
The League
© Wei Zeng
The League of Puerto Rican Cities unites local governments in a nonpartisan effort to improve the quality of life of the Puerto Rican people.
It was born from a shared need among mayors and municipal governments of Puerto Rico to have an entity that unites them with the purpose of strengthening their capacity to provide services to the country's communities.
Vision
Unite local governments in a nonpartisan effort to improve the quality of life of the Puerto Rican people.
Mission
Strengthen the capacity of municipalities and communities in the country to better address social, structural, fiscal and governance challenges.
Our History
Following the passage of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017 in Puerto Rico, mayors from 78 municipalities mobilized to restore essential services and coordinate direct aid to affected communities. Recognizing the crucial role of mayors in providing immediate response, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and the Open Society Foundations launched the Mayors Exchange in February 2018. During this program, 24 visits were made to the 27 participating mayors and a technical assistance workshop was provided to 17 municipalities and more than 40 experts in disaster recovery, development, planning, and fiscal management.
The goals were to provide direct assistance to mayors to address fiscal and reconstruction challenges, as well as create advocates in the United States to support Puerto Rico’s recovery.
In June 2018, a group of Puerto Rican mayors who had participated in the Intercambio program formed a working group to create a nonpartisan coalition of municipalities, focused on long-term inter-municipal collaboration and dialogue with leaders in Puerto Rico and the US. The coalition received technical assistance, and in November 2018, they held the First Covening of Mayors (Primer Conversatorio de Alcaldes y Alcaldesas). After obtaining support from the Ford Foundation, together with the Open Society Foundations, they formally launched the League of Puerto Rican Cities on October 4, 2019, consolidating their effort to build a formal organization for the continued benefit of local communities.
© Cliff
© Wenhao Ryan
Initiatives
Municipal Innovation Laboratory
The Municipal Innovation Laboratory seeks to elevate Puerto Rican municipalities to the standard of model municipalities of good governance with a view to strengthening local government.
In the Lab, they assess their capabilities and needs, share lessons learned, and generate an innovation plan to act toward systemic change.
ICAMU
The Municipal Training Institute (ICAMU, for it's Spanish abbreviation) promotes best practices to ensure the well-being of local governments and their communities. This is achieved through professional development designed for the municipal ecosystem.
ICAMU serves as a municipal academy and provides specialized technical assistance to meet the current needs of municipalities.
The Solutions Table
The Solutions Table is a 9-step initiative that seeks to identify problems and co-design and co-create solutions from the municipal ecosystem.
The objective is to raise funds directly at the local level to strengthen municipalities and address the fiscal challenges they face.
© Tatiana Ilina
We are committed to systemic change to avoid perpetuating the stagnation of always enduring.
“whatever comes”.
Publications
Other Collaborations
Bandera Violeta
The Purple Flag Project (Proyecto Bandera Violeta), a collaboration between the Peace Coordinator for Women, the Puerto Rican Coalition against Domestic Violence, the National Network of Gender Violence Shelters and the League of Cities of Puerto Rico, aims to establish a municipal learning ecosystem to prevent gender violence.
Supported by the Municipality of Gurabo and its mayor Rosachely Rivera Santana, the objective of the project is to create a municipal learning ecosystem to prevent gender violence.
Through training for municipal government staff, the aim is to alert and raise awareness in municipalities about the problem, but above all, to provide them with basic prevention tools and evidence-based best practices. This way, they will be able to intervene in an empathetic and effective way with victims and survivors of gender violence who come to the municipalities to seek support.
Municipalities that meet the requirements will receive the Purple Flag as a symbol of their commitment. The project aims to be a transparent indicator of the municipal commitment to the sustainable eradication of gender violence.
