Community Values
What we ask of ourselves, and of one another — in service of the cities we serve.
The Global Mayors Academy is more than a program. It is a community of city leaders, faculty, advisors, partners, and contributors who have chosen to do this work together — to support each other in the slow, public, often demanding act of leading places.
The values below are how we show up for that work. They were not written by a marketing team. They emerged from years of practice across Living Cities Earth and its partner networks, refined by the leaders and educators who have helped to shape what GMA has become.
We share them publicly because they matter. They define the culture of our cohorts, the way our faculty teach, the way our team operates, and the standards we ask of every partner we work with. If they resonate with you — welcome. If they don't — we'd rather know now than after you've enrolled.
These are not abstract principles. They are a description of who we already try to be, and who we want to keep becoming.
The Seven Values
Leadership is something you do, not something you wear.
The work of a mayor, a council member, or any civic leader is fundamentally a work of service — to people, to place, to the systems that hold daily life together. We honour the title only because it carries the weight of that service. In our community, we measure each other not by what is announced on a business card but by what is offered to the cities and people in our care. Status is welcome at the door; what matters at the table is what you bring.
The shape of a city reflects the shape of its leaders.
We hold a conviction that has been tested across decades of regenerative practice: meaningful change in the outer world begins with corresponding development in the inner world of the leader. Strategy without self-awareness becomes brittle. Authority without humility becomes corrosive. Vision without integration becomes spectacle. Our work integrates inner and outer development across four domains — inner self, outer self, shared culture, shared systems — because cities are healed at all four levels at once or not at all.
We disagree often, and care for each other anyway.
Civic life suffers from two opposite failures: false harmony that buries difficult truths, and aggressive honesty that breaks relationships. We work towards a third way — disagreement that is real, said plainly, and offered in service of the work and of each other. This is not a soft stance. It asks more of us than either compliance or combat. It is also, in our experience, the only way that good decisions get made over time.
Every city is local. Every leader is a citizen of Earth.
The cities we serve are deeply particular — their histories, languages, economies, geographies, and people are not interchangeable. We resist any temptation to flatten that particularity into universal templates. At the same time, every city sits within the larger systems of climate, ecology, and global interdependence that no jurisdiction can opt out of. Our work holds both: the dignity of the particular and the responsibility of the planetary, without collapsing either into the other.
Equity in our community is something we build, fund, and defend — not a line in a brochure.
Access is something you build, not something you announce.
We believe that a program for city leaders should reach the leaders of all kinds of cities — not only the wealthy, the well-networked, or the geographically convenient. Our scholarship and equity-discount pathways exist because we mean this. Our faculty, our cohorts, and our case studies are deliberately drawn from across the global North and the global South because we mean this too. Equity in our community is something we build, fund, and defend — not a line in a brochure.
We would rather grow more slowly with people who do good work honestly than scale fast with people who don't.
The Global Mayors Academy is a growing program, and we want it to grow. But not at the cost of who we are. We choose participants, faculty, partners, and affiliates whose values fit ours — and we have turned away opportunities that would have brought money and reach but cost us coherence. This discipline is what makes the rest of these values possible. Without it, the others become decoration.
No leader leads alone. No city transforms in isolation.
The hardest moments in civic leadership are the lonely ones — the late-night decisions, the moments of public criticism, the slow grief of complex problems that don't yield to good intentions. Our community exists to soften that loneliness. Faculty support participants. Participants support each other. Alumni continue to support those who follow. The work of changing cities is too important and too hard to do alone, and in our community, no-one is asked to.
These values emerged from the lived practice of Living Cities Earth, whose mission is to inspire, connect, and empower a million leaders of positive change in ten thousand cities. They draw on the integral leadership tradition, on regenerative urban practice, on decades of work across the global North and South, and on the wisdom of mayors and civic leaders who have walked this road before us.
They are not exclusive to GMA. They are shared with partner organisations across the wider movement, and they will continue to evolve as our community grows.
What is exclusive to us is the responsibility to live them in the specific context of city leadership — in cohorts, in classrooms, in immersive experiences, in the relationships that form between participants and last well beyond the program itself.
If you are joining us as a participant, the values above describe the community you are entering. We also ask each participant to make a more specific set of commitments to one another for the duration of the program.
Read our Honour Code next. Reading both pages, in this order, is the best way to understand what GMA is — before you join.
The work ahead is large. We are glad you are part of it.