Gamble and Huff, Horn and Hardart, Strawbridge and Clothier, scrapple and eggs…today, I am proud to announce a new Philadelphia partnership: City Paper and YoungPhillyPolitics.com.

Young Philly Politics was founded by Dan, to help young Philadelphians define and execute a progressive plan for Philadelphia. He was blessed (or cursed) to bring me on board, and the rest is history.

In the next few months, as YPP gears up for our city's Mayoral and City Council races, we’ll be joining with City Paper to provide innovative coverage of the issues at the heart of these elections.

Over the past two years, YPP has become the place to go to talk about schools, SEPTA, guns, or the dismal performance of the Eagles (well not for me so much…but definitely for you straight boys). More importantly, YPP has provided a virtual meeting space for the growing majority of Philadelphians who think that business-as-usual needs to stop so that our residents and leaders, together, can aggressively work to create a prosperous future for our city and its people.

That’s why we’re teaming with CP. We'd like to further develop some of the ideas we produce here to elevate the level of the debate in the '07 election. So, every other week for the next fifteen weeks, we’ll be picking an important problem that deserves to be highlighted on the campaign trail. Myself, or one of the other members of the YPP team, will post background on the problem here, and invite readers to make suggestions about a solution. We’ll take those suggestions, run them by candidates when appropriate, and incorporate the results into a column that will appear in the paper.

Essentially, we're going to workshop ideas on YPP, and publish what we come up with in City Paper.

This is a very real and direct opportunity for you to shape our city’s public debate, so please, share your ideas with us. Extra points for responses that include research! Beyond this particular exercise, as a community, we young progressives need to keep working together to come up with creative and practical ways to make our city better--after all in just 20 years or so, we'll be completely in charge!

The first idea we plan to workshop, in keeping with this week’s theme, is healthcare.

Click here to see what Brady has to say.