Philadelphia moves closer to becoming the Next Great City by greening City Council

Philadelphia has made extraordinary progress since 2007, when PennFuture and 130 other community, faith, environmental, business, and union organizations declared that the City of Brotherly Love could be the Next Great City if everyone worked together to create cleaner, safer & healthier neighborhoods.

To do that, the Next Great City Coalition (NGC) challenged all candidates for Philadelphia mayor to commit to 10 commonsense action steps that would improve the city. Since then, the coalition and Mayor Michael Nutter have accomplished nearly all the action steps outlined.

On St. Patrick's Day 2011, the Coalition launched Next Great City 2 -- bringing candidates for Philadelphia City Council into the NGC fold. This time, all City Council candidates are being asked to commit to 5 additional action steps.

This video podcast features that Campaign launch, which was held at the Academy of Natural Sciences, which is home -- as you will plainly hear -- to an African parrot who added its two cents to the event.