Actively participate in government budgeting meetings, and attempt to prevent staffing creep. Bloat/bureaucracy will kill any community ownership that inhabitants might have.
Ensure that employees that are not performing are being fired. Speak in meeting about the need to adhere to performance reviews with metrics. If you do not keep our city departments heads in check they will break your city, because their job depends on it. Remove any pension plan for government employees, all they do is encourage stagnation, change them to 401k or TSP style programs.
Any nonprofit is mostly a band aid, while small wins can be rewarding they are more or less pointless in the long run.
The only way to improve the Top 10 cities is personal ownership change among the minority of the population that mostly just doesn't give a shit about anyone else. Litter is probably the easiest indicator of the give a shit factor. Everything else you do that does not directly impact community ownership is just lipstick on a pig.
The easiest way to fix community ownership is move people out of big cities and into cities with more direct social pressure to have ownership/not be a dirt bag.
The harder way is to reduce bureaucracy and blockers for small business and citizens. Not income taxes, but all the hidden taxes that hit small businesses, tap fees, permit fees, occupation tax, inspection fees, sewer tap fees, storm water fees, employee fees, inventory taxes, the list goes on and on and on and on. The impact of these taxes are amplified by the timelines, which are regularly measured in years, which almost no startup or small business entrepreneur can tolerate capital wise. These barrier fees and artificially long timelines are most prevalent in big cities, and make it nearly impossible for anyone other than large national brands to navigate/afford. Those national brands just remove revenue from the community, which encourages these small governments to keep passing more and more upfront fees/taxes and the cycle repeats until there are nearly no local small business owners left. (Tenant/renter small businesses are generally the only ones that remain after about 20-30 years of this cycle. ie convenience stores and restaurants)
Working for John/Sally your neighbor will fundamentally change your world view of your community. If citizens do not personally see their community being successful they will simple check out of social/civic give a shit process.
Working for HR also changes your world view and the result is not positive.
The people that will drive change in a community are the small business owners and workers not the bureaucrats/politicians that have never done anything in there life except talk about how growing the budget will solve "insert random issue" problem.