· Executive Founders
The town hall role that didn't exist yet
A Swiss town of around 40,000 residents was being asked to run more public events every year without ever adding a service to run them. The coordinator role was the gap.
A municipality of about 40,000 residents in western Switzerland was running more public events every year — concerts, festivals, civic ceremonies, sport meets — and still organising each one through the same departments that already had a full-time job to do.
Every event needed something from public works, something from the police service, something from communications, something from culture. There was no service called “events”, no role called “event coordinator”, and no single number to call for the seven or eight things every event required. Whichever service had nominally taken the lead spent half its energy on internal coordination rather than on the event itself.
The staff who picked up these projects were good and motivated. They were also, by the end of every summer, visibly exhausted — and the events themselves had started to show the strain.
We started narrow: an assessment of two upcoming events, the resources each touched, and where the friction was. The proposal was modest — a single part-time role accountable for both events, working alongside the existing services; a small steering committee of three department heads plus the deputy mayor, meeting fortnightly to settle the unavoidable trade-offs; a project plan for each event with named owners, dates, and a shared status page.
Then we ran it. For each event the coordinator drafted the plan, opened the conversations with the contributing services, held the weekly working session, and surfaced cross-service decisions into the steering committee instead of letting them escalate. Departments kept their own work and their own people. What changed was that no one was holding the whole shape of an event by themselves.
Both events ran on time. Signage was where it should be, volunteers had been briefed, the press release was agreed in advance. Inside the administration the difference showed up in tone before it showed in numbers: staff who used to be exhausted by August worked at pace rather than firefighting, and the steering committee started asking which event to add next year rather than which one to drop.
In small administrations, the gap is rarely the people; it is the absence of someone whose only job is to hold the picture and move the decisions through.