1. Josh Shapiro

Our Hero

ALL RIGHT, MAYBE “Hero” is A BIT MUCH: But last year at this time, we were wondering whether Doug Mastriano would be governor. (Seriously!) Now, not a day goes by without Shapiro at the center of conversation in the state. His robust efforts to reopen I-95 not only put him in the good graces of the entire Philly metro region; they dropped him into the national conversation as a potential presidential candidate down the road. GETTING RESULTS: Our new governor isn’t shying away from the spotlight, either, confronting major hot-button issues right away. In August, he signed the $45.5 billion state budget without the state-funded private-school voucher program that sparked controversy throughout negotiations in Harrisburg. And in September, he announced a new bulwark of democracy in our deeply divided state: automatic voter registration.

2. Cherelle Parker

Torch Carrier

You’d be forgiven if, as last spring’s Democratic mayoral primary marched along, Cherelle Parker’s campaign slipped off your radar. Jeff Brown grabbed the early headlines, followed by Helen Gym. Rebecca Rhynhart had her moment in the sun, and even Amen Brown stole some spotlight (for the wrong reasons). But when the votes were tallied, Parker — methodically, assuredly — made history as she won the Democratic Party’s nomination for mayor. If elected, she’ll be not only the city’s 100th mayor, but the first woman to hold the position.

“She was prepared for every forum and could read the room as well as any candidate I have witnessed,” Larry Ceisler, longtime Philly political analyst and founder of Ceisler Media & Issue Advocacy, says of Parker’s performance during the primary. “She should strive to be as good a mayor as she was a candidate.”

Throughout her journey, the former state Representative and City Councilmember had to overcome campaign fund-raising hurdles, rhetoric that she wasn’t progressive enough (compared to her biggest challengers, Gym and Rhynhart), and the challenge of how to build momentum in spite of how polls/political commentators had defined her campaign. Now, on the precipice of taking office (provided she defeats Republican David Oh, who’s considered a huge long shot in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly seven to one), she must decide what kind of leader she wants to be — what kind of leader the city desperately needs her to be.

“The future of several Black generations, at this Trump inflection point, will be defined in the next four to eight years, and this requires new and innovative thinking,” former City Councilmember and mayoral candidate George Burrell says of Parker. “She must grow into a transformative leader, not a better politician.” — Ernest Owens

6. Liz Magill

Friend of Ben

It’s been a year since Magill took the helm at Penn after stints at UVA and Stanford Law, not to mention clerking for Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the sort of varied career our Ivy’s multi-talented founding father would have approved of most heartily. In her inaugural address, she referenced his famous kite feat and said she, too, hopes “to draw down the lightning”: “That same excitement and urgency to make the experiment, to unlock foundational discoveries and share knowledge — I’ve felt it all year long.”

To kick things off last fall, she initiated a strategic planning process in which she posed two guiding questions to the school community: “What does the world need from Penn?” and “How do we cultivate a community that will rise to that challenge?” Like last year’s winning football team, she intends to “plan boldly and play offense,” she says. But higher ed is at a crossroads, and Penn is just the sort of institution reformers have in their sights. She’ll have to navigate ongoing battles over MOVE remains held by the Penn Museum, legacy admissions, minority enrollment, and polarizing guest speakers, among other sensitive topics — not to mention controversy over whether college (Penn’s price tag this year is $85,000-plus) is worth the cost.

And then there are the calls for her dismissal and the multiple donors slamming their checkbooks shut over the university’s response to what they consider antisemitism on campus. (Other members of Penn’s board of trustees have affirmed their support for her and beleaguered board chairman Scott Bok.)

She’s not flinching from what lies ahead for the city’s biggest employer. “I was fascinated to learn that about a century ago, some people wanted Penn to relocate to Valley Forge,” she mentions. “Ultimately, the decision was made to stay — the absolute right decision. Being directly involved in and informed by our great city has always been Penn’s catalyst, and we’re in this together. Penn is of and for Philadelphia.” — Sandy Hingston

Update: On December 9^th, after growing furor over her statements to a Congressional panel about campus antisemitism, Magill resigned from the presidency at Penn, though she’ll remain a professor there.

15. Jalen Hurts

The Face of the Franchise

We all know the broad strokes of Hurts’s influence: He’s the quarterback who’s played with a chip on his shoulder most of his career. From being benched halfway through a collegiate national championship game to transferring for his final year of eligibility to finishing second in the Heisman Trophy voting to blowing a circuit in Carson Wentz’s fragile ego when the Eagles selected him in the second round in the 2020 draft, Hurts’s path to the QB1 mountaintop has hardly been typical.

But that suits Philly just fine. That chip on his shoulder is why he never seems satisfied, even when the team wins handily. And that chip has been picked up by the Birds faithful, who now expect not only to win, but to win it all after last year’s near miss. It’s why the team inked Hurts to a $255 million contract over the winter. He’s the ultimate leader.

Beyond Hurts’s influence on the field, he’s finding ways to make waves off it, too. Our favorite Hurts story? The namesake cheesesteak — “The Jalen Special” — he designed for the menu of Elkins Park’s FoodChasers Kitchen has completely altered the trajectory of twin-sister owners Kala and Maya Johnstone. Before Hurts announced his sandwich at a presser, the Johnstones said, they went through about 10 pounds of steak a week. After that presser? One hundred pounds in three days. “He literally changed our lives, and he added value to us,” Kala told The Athletic in August. That’s influence. — Brian Howard

18. Our James Beard Award Winners

If you happened to be watching the James Beard Awards live this past June, it would have been hard not to see a pattern developing. First, Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon of Kalaya (pictured left) won Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. An hour later, Ellen Yin of High Street Hospitality (second from left) won Outstanding Restaurateur. Five minutes after that, Andrew Zimmern opened the envelope containing the winner for Outstanding Restaurant, smiled, and said, “Big night for this town.” Soon, Chad and Hanna Williams (center) and the staff of Friday Saturday Sunday walked across the stage to accept the foundation’s top award. (Oh, and Hop Sing Laundromat’s bartender-in-residence, Toby Maloney (right), took home a book award the night before.)

These aren’t just milestones in their careers; they’re milestones for Philadelphia. “I am so excited that the city is getting the recognition it long deserved,” says Chad Williams. “Philadelphia is now known to be one of the world’s most wonderful culinary destinations,” adds Suntaranon.

So now that they’ve won, is the work done? “What? No! It’s just a new chapter,” says Yin, who will continue empowering women in the industry through the Sisterly Love Collective’s new Cookbooks and Conversations series. In addition to the daily grind of running Kalaya, Suntaranon is releasing her first cookbook next year, while Maloney is researching his second book.

As for the Williamses? “We’re keeping our foot on the pedal,” says Hanna. — Kae Lani Palmisano

19. Dan Hilferty

Broad Street Bull

Fresh off orchestrating Philadelphia’s victorious 2026 World Cup bid last year, the former president and CEO of Independence Blue Cross took on a new role as top boss at Comcast Spectacor. “I’ve been drinking from a fire hose, but I also feel really good about bringing my style and my hopes for our culture to reality,” he says of heading the Comcast sports and entertainment subsidiary that owns, among other things, the Flyers and their home, the Wells Fargo Center.

The flow from that fire hose hasn’t let up; Hilferty entered his role in early 2023 as the Wells Fargo Center was undergoing a massive $400 million renovation and the 76ers began their controversial wall-to-wall campaign to move out of that South Philly home and build their own arena in Center City.

Now, in addition to serving as governor of the long-suffering NHL team, Hilferty needs to fend off high-profile rumors and misinformation and defend his vision of a sports complex where “there’s a level of traditional cooperation between the four major teams.” Despite David Adelman (#5) and Co. broadcasting their desire to break up with their landlord, Hilferty says he would “want nothing more than to build a partnership” with the Sixers, both in ownership of their shared home and to create a more vibrant stadium district.

For the South Jersey native and St. Joe’s alum, this is more than just business: “I’m a Philly guy, and I go to sleep happier or sad based on what [the teams] do. I feel like a fan in this whole thing.” — Laura Swartz

21. Joseph Cacchione

The New Health-Care Commander

Cacchione gets that people — providers and patients alike — are fed up with a health-care system that has seen more turmoil than ever over the past three-plus years. So when he was appointed CEO of Jefferson Health last September, he made it his mission to be a leader who puts his ego aside — he used to bartend at the old Philadelphia Athletic Club at Broad and Vine, after all — in the never-ending juggling act of patients and profits.

In one year, he made notable strides for the region’s largest health system, launching an initiative for reducing patient-care disparities, welcoming Sidney Kimmel Medical College’s most diverse class ever, and raising $166 million from donors — the second-most-successful fund-raising year in the institution’s history.

But there have been growing pains. Inflation continues to drive up expenses and labor costs, which is likely why Jefferson Health laid off 400 workers — the majority in corporate and admin roles — this past July. Plus, the nursing shortage — it’s the largest segment of the health system’s workforce — still presents challenges. (Mitigation efforts include upping the university’s nursing-school enrollment and tapping into the Nurse Emeritus Program, which brings retired and experienced nurses back to bedsides.)

Cacchione’s sophomore year ushers in a milestone: Jefferson will celebrate its 200th anniversary in January, with year-long celebrations that are still TBA. In the spring, he’ll help open the Honickman Center, a state-of-the-art outpatient-care facility in Midtown Village. “This project is much more than a building,” he says. “It represents the future of care delivery moving more and more away from the traditional hospital environment … and will enhance the patient-care experience by centralizing many providers into one facility.” — Laura Brzyski

24. Presidential Hopefuls

When City Council President Darrell Clarke announced in February that he wouldn’t seek reelection, speculation immediately turned to his gavel — and who would pick it up the following January. The position, as molded by Clarke over the past two mayoral administrations, has slowly wrested power away from the Mayor’s Office and seated it within Council, a profound shift. The next City Council president will not only have to deal with Clarke’s long legislative shadow, but also herd a remarkably inexperienced body: Come January, at least 12 of its 17 members will have served one term or less.

Into that void steps a trio of Council’s most experienced Democrats, all from the centrist bloc of the party. (The ideological similarities between the three candidates mean the race will likely be decided on interpersonal grounds rather than political ones.) In just the past year, Mark Squilla’s (pictured right) role in Philadelphia politics has skyrocketed thanks to one project in his district: the proposed Sixers arena. (You may have read about that in #4, #5, #19, #27, #72, #73 and #76.) He’s seen as a quiet consensus-builder, as his efforts to navigate the opposing arena parties have shown. Majority leader Curtis Jones Jr. (pictured center) may lean on his business experience — he was previously the head of both the Minority Business Enterprise Council and the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corp. and told the Inquirer he views the president as “the CEO of Council.” Finally, there’s Kenyatta Johnson (pictured left), whose repeated legal troubles apparently haven’t tripped up his ambitions — he’s viewed as the front-runner for the role.

Then, in August, Northeast Philly Councilmember Mike Driscoll threw his hat in the ring. And Cindy Bass has also expressed interest. January can’t come soon enough. — Bradford Pearson

39. Prema Katari Gupta

Heir Apparent

“I still remember the way I felt the first time I saw Philadelphia,” says Gupta, who wasn’t born to city life, having grown up in rural Connecticut before going to college in small-town Maine. It wasn’t until 2003, when she came here for grad school at Penn and fell in love with the place, that her urban fate was sealed. “If you like cities,” she says, “there’s not a better place to live.”

This may not be a surprising sentiment from the next president and CEO of the Center City District, but it isn’t just the party line: Gupta has spent the past two decades working in Philly place-making — or, as she puts it, “creating ties between people and places as economic strategy.” Now she’s poised to take over the CCD in January, when founding president Paul Levy retires to a position on the board.

Levy — widely credited with reinventing downtown (“Twice!” Gupta says) — is no easy act to follow, but Gupta likes the advice one board member gave her: “Don’t think about this in terms of the shoes to fill; think about what your shoes are going to look like.” And at a critical post-pandemic bounce-back moment, “There are a lot of people who have perceptions about what things are like downtown and haven’t resumed pre-pandemic activity,” Gupta says, even as the population has grown. There’s ample room to think about what today’s Center City might want and need. (Think: studies about this new ecosystem, continued greening, the extension of the rail park, and more.)

Beyond the economic lens, Gupta sees a thriving Center City as a social necessity, too — a tool in our fights against the loneliness epidemic and climate change. “The heart of the city belongs to all of us,” she says. “It’s not just one neighborhood for some people: It’s an avenue of opportunity for everyone. That’s inspiring to me.” — Christine Speer Lejeune

40. Jay Arzu

Corpse Reviver

If, sometime in 2035, you board a shiny new B-V Broad Street Line train at Cottman Avenue subway station, you’ll have Arzu to thank for it. After the planners at both the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and SEPTA had all but buried the Roosevelt Boulevard subway, Arzu has unearthed it and put it firmly back on the region’s transportation agenda.

The Penn PhD of city planning student points out he couldn’t have done this on his own — “I had amazing people behind me” — and cites Ben She of the city’s Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability; Cameron Diaz of 5th Square; “and champions like State Rep Jared Solomon [D-Northeast Philadelphia] that made this coalition possible.” He also got a behind-the-scenes assist from one of his instructors: SEPTA general manager Leslie Richards (#13), who teaches a course Arzu took. “He is very self-motivated, very passionate, and he was all those things before I met him,” she says. “But he took good notes during that class, because he is doing everything the right way” to get the subway built.

The project will have a huge price tag — anywhere from $2 billion to $4 billion to complete. But Arzu says it will be worth every penny because of its projected high ridership and potential to promote redevelopment in the Northeast. He also paints it as a matter of transportation equity: “We have the money, which is being thrown only at concrete when we could be throwing it at people and investing in communities.” — Sandy Smith

51. Della Clark

The Rainmaker

“I’ve become a capital revolutionary,” Della Clark tells me on the phone from Miami, where she’s just landed to attend the L’Attitude conference because she’s hoping to score some face time with one of the keynote speakers, the CEO of a major U.S. bank. Clark is the longtime president of the Enterprise Center, the West Philly-based nonprofit that’s laser-focused on helping diverse small businesses get started and then keeping them rolling.

Take Donna Allie, whose 700-plus-employee commercial cleaning company, Team Clean, Clark advised some 30 years ago. Allie says Clark’s sage management advice — “You can’t lead the wagon if you’re in the wagon” — has stuck with her. But in those decades of incubation work, Clark noticed a few things about what she calls “low-wealth founders,” or entrepreneurs who don’t come from prosperous families. “Everyone comes in with a loan or very small grant” for those businesses, she says, “but they do not come with investment capital.”

To address this, in 2022 Clark helped launch Innovate Capital Growth Fund, a for-profit entity working to raise $50 million to $75 million with the goal of pumping cold, hard seed funding into the coffers of diverse founders with three specific qualities: growth IQ, emotional stamina, and the ability to manage multiple revenue streams. The capital market “is a white-dominated industry that only sees risk when they look at minorities. They will throw up all kinds of roadblocks,” says Clark. “I’m going to crack the safe.” — Brian Howard

60. Gun Violence Chroniclers

In a city where gun violence and its carnage are so crushingly ubiquitous, even the great tragedies (and aren’t they all?) risk fading into the deadening thrum of everyday news: Shooting here; shooting there.

But every single story is an account of its own and worthy of telling, says Inky reporter Ellie Rushing (pictured second from left), who writes often and memorably of Philadelphians affected by gun violence. “And no act of gun violence in this city should be seen as ordinary.”

This — telling the human stories that cut through headlines, giving them shape and soul and meaning for a whole city of people — isn’t just Rushing’s raison d’être. It’s also part of the mission of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, the nonprofit founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jim MacMillan (left) in 2020 to explore how storytelling — ethical, empathetic, impactful storytelling about gun violence — could grow public support for life-saving policies and even shrink the violence. One important aspect of this work, according to PCGVR research director and Temple trauma surgeon Jessica Beard (right), is framing our incidents of gun violence not as singular episodes of crime, but as the public-health crisis they constitute — an epidemic with real human cost, but also with real causes and real solutions.

This is part and parcel of the writing that’s coming these days from Pulitzer finalist Mensah M. Dean (second from right), whom you likely know from the quarter-century he spent working for the Inquirer and the Daily News. He reports on the “longer view” — trends, ideas, causes, promising interventions — of Philly’s gun issue for the national gun violence reporting site The Trace. So why this beat, why these stories, why now? Dean will tell you — same as Rushing, actually — that he feels compelled to fight against any normalization of this violence that’s stolen so much from so many, particularly from young Black men. “It’s not normal. It can’t be normal. We have to convince the powers that be and the people that we can do better. Because this is life-and-death,” he says. “Life-and-death.” — Christine Speer Lejeune

61. Orlando Rendon

LifeSaver

When Orlando Rendon was growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, Nelson Playground was off-limits. So were the handball courts of Parque de Colores and the open grass of Norris Square. Maybe his parents would let him spend an hour at one of them, but it was always “Be home when the sun starts to dip.”

That experience — or, technically, lack of experience — colors Rendon’s work as the city’s newest Parks & Recreation commissioner. It’s a job that, without exaggeration, touches every corner of the city: 191 community centers, more than 1,400 athletic fields and courts, 400-plus neighborhood parks, golf courses, computer centers, summer camps. And it’s one that, as the city continues to dig its way out of its most violent era in decades, requires a leader who understands the needs of the people.

Rendon views his role not just as making sure the department has as many spaces open and available as possible, or even that they all have high-quality programming. That programming has to be relevant: A pottery class might be right for one center, whereas an xBox tournament — “Get it on on the screen, not in the street,” Rendon says — draws a bigger crowd elsewhere.

And maybe it’s not at a gym or rec center, but a roving program, one that hits parks and neighborhoods without a Friends group or advisory council to program the space. A hopscotch or jump-rope tournament that gives kids a safe space even for a few hours? Whatever it takes. “We just … we got to get it done,” Rendon says. “And that’s the attitude: We got to get it done. Because what’s at stake is crucial. It’s people’s lives.” — Bradford Pearson

75. Jacqueline Romero

History-Making Prosecutor

When we told the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania — i.e., the top federal law enforcement official in the eight-county region — that she was on this list, she scoffed. “If anything, I’m trying to avoid being associated with the idea of ‘influential,’” Romero said. “I’m not worried about rubbing elbows. I’m not worried about the next job. I’m just here to do the important work I’ve been called to do.”

But being influential isn’t all about rubbing elbows, schmoozing and gladhanding. Sometimes, just doing your job can be hugely influential, as is the case with Romero, whose office is heavily focused on public-safety issues, like the scourge of carjackings that have blanketed the city in recent years.

“I live in Philly,” says Romero. “I’ve had my home broken into. I’ve had my friend’s car stolen from in front of my house. I talk to people all the time who don’t feel safe going to work, in part because of all the carjackings on the news.”

When Romero, who worked in the Philly office for 16 years, rose to the top job in June 2022 amid a record-setting crime wave, she made history herself. While most U.S. Attorneys are men (and predominantly white men), Romero is the first woman to hold the office in Philadelphia. Not only that: She’s also the first woman of color and the first LGBTQIA person to have the job here.

But Romero seems unconcerned with all these firsts. “What I’m concerned about is making the city feel safe,” she insists. “I have an obligation to do so.” — Victor Fiorillo