Sixth Global Summit: Key Takeaways and Recommendations

Strong Cities Network
Sixth Global Summit

Key Takeaways and Recommendations

In December 2025, the Strong Cities Network held its Sixth Global Summit in Toronto (Canada). The Summit convened more than 350 participants, including 58 mayors, governors and other city leaders, as well as local officials, practitioners and partners from more than 83 cities and 42 countries to showcase how cities are preventing and responding to rising levels of hate, extremism and polarisation amid consecutive global crises.

This page sets out the Summit’s key takeaways and recommendations, capturing the collective insights of participating cities and translating shared lessons into practical, actionable guidance to strengthen efforts at the local level.

1. Cities, Communities and Connection

Connection, trust, belonging and safety are not guaranteed. Instead, they are civic achievements built through daily interactions and local decisions. While the forces pulling people apart are global, the work of bringing people back together will always be local.
Disconnection is a preventable risk factor. People are stepping back from community life, with residents of many cities reporting that they feel disconnected and isolated and experience an absence of a sense of community. Social isolation as such can increase the odds that someone will radicalise to violence. As a starting point, local governments can help mitigate this by creating platforms for inter-community engagement, investing in community-based social activities and more, recognising that connected cities are safe cities.
However, the epidemics of loneliness and mental health crisis require systemic, multi-sector responses that go beyond city resources alone. While there is much that local governments can do to help those who have no one to depend on, cities also need national strategies, additional funding sources, non-traditional service locations and partnerships to meet the scale of the challenge and provide a sustainable response.

2. Hate and Harassment Against Local Officials Threatens Local Democracy

Hate and harassment targeting city officials affects all types of municipalities, regardless of size. Seemingly non-controversial issues can result in flare-ups of community tension, and officials from marginalised backgrounds are more at risk of experiencing this hate.
The consequences are serious and threaten the functioning of local government. Experienced officials are choosing not to seek re-election, public servants are stepping down and, in some cases, local government operations have been disrupted.
Local leaders and officials need dedicated, practical tools (see the new Association of Manitoba Municipalities – Strong Cities Toolkit) and training to prevent, counter and respond to this hate and harassment. More training is needed on these topics, including not just for officials but also for their staff. Trainings should include how to protect physical safety (like varying daily routines, coordinating with plain-clothes officers and home security considerations), how to protect mental health and to familiarise everyone with standard response procedures.
Local governments should consider deploying creative solutions to allow for community participation and feedback to create more productive and less contentious interactions with the public. These can include innovative uses of WhatsApp to manage direct online harassment, as well as non-traditional council meeting layouts that structure comment sessions in a less public and less confrontational way.

3. What Can Mayors Do?

Mayors are first responders to social cohesion challenges. Regardless of national politics, mayors are on the frontline against the offline impacts of misinformation, hate incidents, demographic change and overlapping crises. Their proximity to residents enables them to recognise emerging risks early and tailor responses based on lived community realities rather than abstract or generalised national narratives.

Mayors have an essential role to play in addressing hate and division before it becomes a security issue and/or manifests in violence. They can be at the forefront of efforts to restore foundational democratic norms, pluralism, civility and truth, and to reject dehumanisation.

Mayors can drive prevention through trusted and community-centred engagement. Whether through youth engagement, neighbourhood-based dialogue, trauma-informed mobilisation teams or investment in inclusive public spaces, mayors are strengthening cohesion by convening diverse actors and rebuilding trust where it has eroded. These efforts demonstrate that preventing extremism and hate begins with connecting people to services, opportunities and each other.

Mayors can lead efforts to (re)build trust in government, one of the best ways to inoculate residents from online and offline harms and hate. Mayors and other local leaders can do this by: i) participating in local digital town squares (e.g., local Facebook groups); ii) launching Together Against Hate or campaigns driven by community needs and priorities; iii) developing anti-hate curriculum to educate youths in schools and creating partnerships to reach the hard-to-reach within communities.

Mayors can leverage their position of being closest to their communities to raise awareness about online harms and how the city is working to prevent them. Consistency is key. Local leaders must meet residents where they are, show up and listen to their perspectives. Prevention efforts must be co-created with community members and partners to be effective, and local leaders need to be models of civility and respect to encourage the same behaviour among their residents.

Delivery and collaboration, not rhetoric, shape public confidence. Mayors should avoid engaging in polarising national debates, instead focusing on tangible improvements such as housing access, reintegration services, sports initiatives and hate-crime/incident response units. By consistently showing results and partnering across sectors, municipalities build resilience to divisive narratives and ensure that communities see themselves reflected in and protected by their local institutions.

4. What Can Cities Do?

Help increase their residents’ sense of belonging. This includes making participation accessible and repeated, strengthening bridging networks and activating public space and social infrastructure.

Prioritise engagement with the most affected community members. Community engagement efforts should be accessible not just to those easiest to reach. Community members should also be consulted in the design of the programmes meant to benefit them.

Adopt systems-wide thinking that incorporates all aspects of care for communities. This should include but is not limited to housing, food access and mental health in order to address isolation and other drivers of hate and division.

Look internally as well as externally. Train staff and officials in identifying how racism, misogyny, transphobia and other forms of hate can manifest across different communities. Work with community members to unpack colonial structures and systems.

Recognise the valuable contributions and histories of different groups. Elevate the role of local communities and civil society organisations and inspire belonging, all as part of an effort to mitigate the impact of authoritarianism and hate propagated by other levels of government.

Proactively engage faith leaders, organisations and communities in whole-of-city approaches to prevention. This recognises that a Strong City requires principled leadership and engagement from both civic and faith-based institutions and leaders and contributions from all in the city who are motivated by service to others and a desire to bring about collective thriving.

Leverage their unique convening and connecting capabilities. Municipalities cannot, and should not, solve online harms or address offline hate alone. What they are uniquely positioned to do is to bring ecosystems together: schools, libraries, police, youth services, community-based organisations, caregivers and youth themselves. Municipalities can convene trusted partners, fund micro-grants, support digital media literacy training, create youth advisory structures and reduce the burden on schools and families.

Secure more long-term sustainable, upstream rather than just short-term project funding. Long-term challenges cannot be effectively addressed through short-term initiatives and project funding alone.

Elaborate and promote a strategic, whole-of-city approach to prevention that addresses the drivers and manifestations of hate and social polarisation in the city. Such an approach, which may require the appointment of a strategy officer, can help integrate existing local government and community assets into a holistic and sustainable plan for strengthening social cohesion across the city.

Develop and implement proactive, partnership-driven strategies to counter future threats. Cities need forward-looking approaches – youth advisory boards, cross-government and civil society partnerships, ethical use of predictive analytics and pre-election norms against misinformation to anticipate emerging risks from AI, deepfakes and geopolitical information operations rather than reacting after harm occurs.

5. What Do Cities Need?

More tools to strengthen digital and broader resilience of their communities. This includes more city-focused media and information and digital literacy initiatives and a harm-mitigation toolkit to support local crisis response.

More tailored support to better understand and counter increasing threats from foreign actors targeting cities and local communities and leaders.

Training of local law enforcement in how to recognise a hate crime and follow a case through. Such training might focus on initial response procedures, operational guidance, key bias indicators and evidence-based practices.

Training of frontline service providers and community-based organisations on how to distinguish hate crimes from non-criminal acts. Training can focus on patterns, trends and victimised groups; impacts on individuals; intersectionality of hate; community reporting practices; and victims’ rights and needs. Such trainings can result in victim reassurance protocols that improve police legitimacy and trust from minority groups and national training standards that ensure coordinated responses to hate crime reporting.

More opportunities to share their perspectives, frameworks and practices with others. In particular, cities want more opportunities to share with national governments and the United Nations (UN) and other multilateral bodies that have developed and are looking to localise the implementation of global prevention frameworks and action plans (this includes contributing to the 2026 review of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy).

6. Cities and Women’s Local Leadership in Prevention

Women’s leadership should be considered a core prevention asset, not an add-on. Women mayors and councillors consistently advance collaborative, community-centred approaches that strengthen social cohesion and trust – key enablers of effective prevention of hate, extremism and social polarisation.
Gendered threats to women in public office are escalating and undermining democratic participation. Online harassment, intimidation and physical threats are driving women out of politics or limiting their public engagement. Addressing these risks effectively and sustainably requires institutional, city-level responses, going beyond just individual-level coping strategies and support.
Cities must invest in protection, mentorship and structural reform to sustain women’s leadership. Digital safety, physical security, peer networks and gender-responsive governance practices are essential to maintaining a diverse pipeline of local leaders and safeguarding inclusive local governance.

7. Cities and the Prevention of Gender-Based Violence

The prevention of gender-based violence requires coordinated, multi-stakeholder engagement at the local level. This should integrate local government actors, law enforcement, health services and frontline practitioners to deliver comprehensive and contextually grounded responses.
Trauma-informed and survivor-centred approaches are essential. Survivors of gender-based violence should be engaged throughout the programme development and delivery process. This helps facilitate the design and implementation of prevention and intervention efforts that are safe, responsive and capable of achieving meaningful outcomes for those affected.

8. Cities and Secondary Prevention

Complex cases require multi-agency, long-term and flexible support, not short-term programmes. Cities face threats that are increasingly non-ideological, rooted in trauma, isolation, developmental vulnerabilities and fascination with violence. Interventions increasingly last 18–36 months and combine mental-health care, social support, family engagement, mentorship, housing, employment assistance and ongoing monitoring. Preventing relapse — which is not uncommon — requires coordinated, persistent and adaptive support across sectors.
Secondary prevention must centre on relationships before interventions. At-risk individuals rarely trust institutions at first contact. Effective engagement begins through trusted intermediaries — families, teachers, youth workers, religious leaders or outreach programmes — who create the conditions in which psychosocial, mental-health or behavioural support can begin. Without a foundation of trust, even well-designed interventions are likely to fail.
Stronger national–local partnership is essential to address mandate confusion, safeguard confidentiality, expand specialist roles (e.g., psychologists, outreach workers), build online intervention capability and ensure stable, multi-year funding. Local governments are frontline actors but cannot tap into their true prevention potential without national backing, specialist capacity and sustained funding. Municipalities and community-based organisations are being asked to do more but with limited mandates, staff and/or resources. Cities are closest to the problem, but they cannot meet the challenge alone.

9. Cities and Tertiary Prevention

Effective rehabilitation and reintegration programmes rely on coordination and collaboration. Such programmes should tap into the comparative advantages and expertise of those involved, outlining clear roles and responsibilities and operating procedures, in turn mitigating duplication of services provided and ensuring prompt provision of support to the beneficiary.
Building trust with government institutions is essential. This is particularly so with the criminal justice system. Trust can be built by demonstrating the tangible impact and effectiveness of reintegration programmes, reinforcing the importance of having a robust monitoring and evaluation approach for such programmes.
There is a need to ensure that tertiary prevention programmes are fit to address the complexities of today’s threat landscape. For example, they should be broad enough to benefit those individuals who have been involved in a range of hateful activities, from antisemitic to anti-Muslim or gender-based hate.

10. Cities and Digital Resilience

Local governments can no longer treat online abuse and misinformation as peripheral issues. Online hate, harassment and disinformation are now core governance risks for local officials. Social media accelerates and amplifies false narratives – often outpacing governments’ ability to respond – directly affecting elections, public trust and officials’ personal safety.
Digital resilience is as much human as it is technical. Effective responses require strengthening critical thinking, mental resilience and community trust alongside platform engagement.
Digital resilience mirrors community resilience. Access, belonging and the ability to question information are essential defences against online hate and manipulation.

11. Cities Youth Engagement and Safeguarding Youth through Local Partnerships

Local government engagement with young people must shift from one-off initiatives and projects to building a structured, sustained ecosystem for engagement. This should include capacity-building and institutionalising youth participation in representative civic bodies. Paying youth for their time and contribution to such bodies can boost participation and equity.
Intergenerational collaboration can drive real impact. Local governments can help spark this collaboration by providing young people more opportunities to share real decision-making authority and by acting as partners and changemakers rather than gatekeepers.
Local governments should find more opportunities to help anchor youth in positive networks. This includes through after-school sports, arts and cultural programmes and should pay particular attention to those from underserved communities.
Youth are on the frontlines of rapidly evolving digital harms. Shaped by AI and algorithms, young people navigate an environment where online and offline realities are inseparable. Harms unfold simultaneously across emotional, social and safety dimensions and are accelerated by digital technologies, while adults and institutions remain focused on outdated risks or tools.
Trust, agency and belonging are the foundation of effective prevention. Prevention works best when youth are met with trust, consistency and belonging. Third spaces like libraries, clubs, faith spaces and community organisations play a critical role, especially during after-school hours.

Cities should blend digital platforms with in-person spaces that foster connection, dialogue and community. Hybrid engagement is essential to engage meaningfully with youth, who value online spaces, but increasingly seek structured, phone-free, real-life environments to build trust and well-being.

12. Cities and Urban Planning for Economic Opportunities and Social Cohesion

Affordability is a core social cohesion issue, with housing affordability identified as a key structural driver of exclusion, social isolation and urban fragmentation. In many large cities, rising rent and long commutes are pushing essential workers out of the city, weakening community fabric and exacerbating mental health and safety challenges. Urban division is often a policy outcome, rooted in zoning, by-laws, housing supply decisions and failures to adapt to demographic and economic realities.
Urban planning shapes belonging through everyday experience. Public transport, parks, housing typologies, safety and access to services directly influence how residents experience their city and whether they feel they belong. Gender- and youth-sensitive planning lenses, from mobility to nighttime cultural activities, can make cities more inclusive. Planning is therefore not technical alone; it is deeply political and social, shaping who feels seen, safe and included.
Participation in city planning must be intentional to avoid reproducing inequality. Participatory planning should extend beyond traditional consultations, which tend to attract more educated and empowered citizens. Rather, they should also include innovative approaches that are more likely to attract a more diverse group. Such approaches include random citizen lotteries, paid participation, childcare provision, language and cultural mediation.
Cities need regulatory tools to manage saturation and capacity. Short-term rentals, migration pressures and urban saturation (housing, shelters, transit) are straining systems and capacities in a growing number of cities. Clear urban coding, vacancy taxes and capacity-based regulation are among the levers that cities can consider using to maintain control over affordability and access. Data-driven metrics are essential to understand when cities are full and to guide evidence-based planning decisions.

13. Community-Facing Institutions and Maintaining Social Cohesion in Times of Crisis and Division

Libraries, universities, community gardens, hospitals and local businesses have been key partners to cities in violence prevention, intervention and social cohesion. Everyone plays a role in safety – together, these institutions have worked with municipalities towards social inclusion and fostering important dialogue across difference.
Libraries are in unique positions to create accessible, reliable safe spaces for dialogue and engagement. Through libraries, such spaces can be made available seven days a week, providing services from financial to digital literacy to support for seniors and job hunters to hosting video game nights.
Local community foundations should be seen as partners in prevention. Building the skills and leadership abilities of local community foundations can help them move away from being purely a funder to an institution that helps develop and maximise the impact of community-driven solutions.

14. Capturing Cohesion – Monitoring and Evaluating Prevention Efforts

Cities should put in place a robust framework to monitor and evaluate their efforts to prevent hate and strengthen social cohesion. This is particularly given persistent challenges with data access, data quality and impact measurement to ensure interventions are evidence-driven and continuously improving.
Monitoring and evaluation of social cohesion or civic engagement and efforts to strengthen them needs to be a multi-pronged effort. For example, surveys should be complemented with consultations, town hall meetings and other forms of direct community engagement.
Local governments need to make the effort to reach the most marginalised. This is to ensure their perspectives and experiences are part of the data-gathering process (and in turn inform decision-making), whether through local partners (i.e., place-based organisations) or direct engagement.
Local governments and their partners should create an evaluation culture rather than an evaluation project. Evaluation needs to be considered core to and underpin all policy-making and programme delivery rather than being an afterthought.
Local governments should leverage what is already out there and think outside the box. There are a number of tools that can already be used or piggy-backed on when seeking to understand civic engagement, feelings of inclusion, etc.

15. Cities and Safeguarding Public Spaces in Polarised Environments

Local governments should look to fund or otherwise support the creation of spaces designed for inter-community engagement. Such spaces should seek to attract residents from different neighbourhoods in order to build community cohesion in their territories.
Even small, rural municipalities should have a plan in place for how to respond to incidents in public spaces that impact their residents. These should be co-designed with residents, community-based partners and local businesses.
City press releases and other post incident communications need to be complemented by personal statements from city leaders. Post incident response should also include outreach to community leaders to build trust and connect with affected communities.

16. Cities Mitigating the Impacts of Climate Change on Social Cohesion and Community Safety

Climate change is a social cohesion and prevention issue, not only an environmental one. Climate shocks exacerbate inequality, displacement and competition over resources, increasing risks of community tension and conflict – placing the issue squarely within a city’s prevention mandate.
Local governments are the first responders to climate crises, regardless of formal mandates. Cities bear the immediate social, political and security consequences of climate impacts, often without sufficient authority, resources or coordination from higher levels of government.
Community trust and preparedness are as critical as infrastructure for climate resilience. Early warning systems, community-based response mechanisms and locally appropriate mitigation strategies reduce both the human and social costs of climate shocks, shifting cities from reactive crisis management to long-term resilience.

17. Cities Countering Human Trafficking and Safeguarding Human Rights and Public Safety during Mega-Sporting Events

Preparing for mega-sporting and other large events requires multi-actor collaboration long before the event actually takes place. Local governments should be tapping into their existing community-based networks, local businesses and coordinating with local and federal law enforcement to plan for (and mitigate) human rights infringements, whether this is trafficking or discrimination.
Local governments are well-placed to strengthen the nexus between sports, human rights and community safety. They can facilitate collaboration and partnerships between sporting associations, sports clubs and local organisations working on child protection, racial justice and violence prevention.
Overall, mega-sporting events require a human-rights-centred planning approach, grounded in early community engagement, ethical use of technology, gender and youth-focused prevention, strong interdepartmental coordination and firm municipal negotiating power. Sustainable outcomes depend on legacy partnerships and ensuring survivor participation in the design and oversight of anti-trafficking policies and programmes.
Cities should invest in targeted, multilingual awareness and risk-detection strategies. These should be on- and offline and could include i) tailored outreach to vulnerable populations, including migrant workers and Indigenous communities, through multi-language campaigns and community-led delivery; ii) monitoring social media; iii) partnering with law enforcement and intelligence agencies and iv) using proactive communication to detect and disrupt threats during mega sporting events.

18. Effective and Sustainable National-Local Cooperation (NLC) in Prevention and Response

Trust before transactions. Effective NLC requires long-term, relationship-centred engagement rather than episodic or transactional interactions. Sustained engagement, capacity building and listening to local needs are essential. Misaligned funding, limited local experience at the national level and project-driven approaches risk targeting the wrong problems and undermining impact.
Effective NLC depends on flexibility and adaptation. While national governments can set shared objectives and guardrails, prevention and cohesion efforts must be co-created and adapted to local contexts, communities and threat environments rather than imposed through rigid, one-size-fits-all models.
Local needs should drive national-level support. Capacity-building by and financial assistance from the national level are most impactful when aligned with priorities identified by local stakeholders, rather than shaped exclusively by national-level assumptions or mandates.
Local governments should be involved upstream, not just at the point of delivery. National strategies are far more effective when local actors help shape them from the outset; without this, local authorities often struggle to see themselves in the framework and implementation suffers.
Shift from projects to permanence: Moving from short-term, project-based funding to sustained, core support is essential to retain qualified practitioners, ensure continuity of services and build durable local capabilities.
Crisis management is a shared governance function, not a hierarchical one. It is important to recognise that crisis management sits at the intersection of national leadership and local execution. National governments are responsible for strategy, policy and resource mobilisation, while local authorities are often first responders and primary implementers. Where this division of labour is not clearly articulated or operationalised, responses become fragmented, delayed, or politicised.
Effective crisis response requires formalised cooperation frameworks that clarify mandates, decision-making authority and escalation pathways between levels of government. Weak coordination and limited information-sharing can constrain NLC in response to a crisis. Crisis response should rely on pre-existing coordination channels, standard operating procedures and trusted relationships rather than ad hoc arrangements during emergencies.
Investing in coordination mechanisms before crises occur is as important as investment in response capacities themselves.
National strategies must be translated into city-level preparedness and operational plans. National action plans and policies, while necessary, are insufficient if they do not meaningfully translate to the local level. This can be done, for example, by embedding national strategies within municipal institutions, including social services, probation and community policing structures. National crisis frameworks should require municipalities to develop aligned local preparedness plans, supported by expertise, capacity building and financial resources.
Crisis response legislation and/or policies should be comprehensive, covering all types of crises with clear triggers for national support. While natural disasters or terrorist attacks may trigger national action, smaller or recurrent crises, including climate related (such as droughts, floods etc.), can fall through policy and legislative gaps. This can create reactive, under-resourced response systems and can places undue strain on local authorities.
Sustainable crisis management depends on predictable resources and long-term capacity building. Sustainability should be designed into crisis systems through multi-year funding, institutionalised capacity building and clear exit or transition strategies.
Learning and adaptation are essential in an evolving risk environment. Crisis management must evolve in response to changing threat landscapes, climate risks and social dynamics. Static strategies quickly become outdated. Therefore, crisis frameworks should include mechanisms for regular review (involving both national and local government actors), learning and adaptation, linked to real crisis experience.