Published in the journal of Academic Pediatrics, this paper serves as a framing piece to ground the medical community in the current state of poverty and how it affects children and families. This resource can be utilized to help doctors and policy leaders at local, state, and national levels understand and address all the facets of childhood poverty.
This webinar features best-practices and effective strategies Promise Neighborhoods are using to promote the age-appropriate functioning of young children in their communities. In doing so, this webinar aims to equip Promise Neighborhoods and other community leaders with the knowledge, tools, and resources to turn the curve on the baseline indicator for GPRA 2: the number and percentage of three year-olds and children entering kindergarten who demonstrate age-appropriate functioning. The following experts are featured on this webinar:
- Michelle Palo, Project Services Director, Northside Achievement Zone
- Andre Dukes, Family Academy Director, Northside Achievement Zone
- Maureen Seiwert, NAZ Early Childhood Action Team Co-Leader, Executive Dir. of Early Childhood Education for Minneapolis Public Schools
- Dianne Haulcy, NAZ Early Childhood Action Team Co-Leader, Office of Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges
The Latino community in Portland, Oregon, has grown rapidly in the last 20 years, from 3.3 percent of Portlanders to 11 percent, and by 2040 it is estimated that 23 percent of the city’s residents will be Latino. This growth, however, has not been accompanied by increases in opportunity.
Recognizing the important link between access to healthy food, economic opportunity, community building, and culture, Hacienda Community Development Center (CDC) secured a federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) grant in 2012 to develop Portland Mercado, an innovative project which includes a Latino cultural space and public market, bringing fresh food and good jobs to the community.
This session presented information about the CED and CED-HFFI grant competition, based on the CED and CED-HFFI funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). It outlined the programs’ purposes and strategies, provided tips and tools for submitting an application for CED or CED-HFFI funding, and identified key application criteria and requirements.
This session provided prospective CED applicants with an overview of the CED program, including the program’s mission and objectives, organizations eligible to apply, the program’s target population, and examples of successful CED projects. The webinar also provided a summary of funding requirements and estimated award amounts.
Today, President Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland to be the 113th justice of the United States Supreme Court. By all accounts, Mr. Garland is an outstanding candidate. He had a stellar career as a lawyer, both in the public and private sectors, and serves as the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, perhaps the most prestigious and celebrated federal appeals court in the country. And in 1997, he received bipartisan support for his appointment to the DC Circuit.
Yet, if we are to believe what we have seen and heard starting just 15 minutes after Justice Antonin Scalia’s untimely death was announced, Mr. Garland will not be confirmed. Indeed, he will not even get a hearing. That a candidate as accomplished as Mr. Garland will not be allowed to make a case to the American public that he is the right person for the job and that he will protect the rights and liberty of all people living in this country, is an undeniably glaring signal of how dispiritingly broken and dysfunctional our politics have become.
Of course, there is more at stake with this nomination than the functioning of our political system. Critically important cases, whose resolution could undermine efforts to advance equity for low-income communities and community of color, are before the Court. For example, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Court will revisit the constitutionality of affirmative action. In Evenwel v. Abbott, the Court’s ruling could undermine the political power of minority groups, particularly Latinos. And at issue in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, is the financial sustainability of unions. Mr. Garland’s appointment, assuming he is confirmed in a timely manner, could lead to rulings that promote equity in all these cases.
Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution states, “[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, and judges of the Supreme Court . . . ."
President Obama has done his job. It is time for Republicans in the Senate to do theirs.
Authored by the Center for the Study of Social Policy, this guide shares tools that Promise Neighborhoods can use to develop processes and systems to build a shared accountability structure and to achieve better results for children and families. This resource lifts up the results-driven work occurring in Hayward Promise Neighborhood, Northside Achievement Zone, Chula Vista Promise Neighborhood, Mission Promise Neighborhood, Eastside Promise Neighborhood, and Indianola Promise Community
Part of a series of issue briefs dedicated to helping community leaders and policymakers bolster their campaigns and strategies with the economic case for equity.
Just outside of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a winter arts festival takes place in a pop-up village of ice fishing shanties. In Louisville, Kentucky, an artists’ collective is leading public workshops that blend traditional West African and Appalachian arts with contemporary urban performance. In Detroit, artists and local youth are designing a plaza and green space to boost entrepreneurial activity. These projects and 35 others are recipients of the ArtPlace America 2015 National Grants program, which aims to support artists and arts organizations to strengthen and transform the physical, social, and/or economic fabric of communities.
Jamie Bennett is the executive director of ArtPlace America, a 10-year collaboration of foundations, banks, and federal agencies launched in 2011. (PolicyLink is working with ArtPlace on its Community Development Investments Initiative, which is investing $3 million in each of six place-based organizations to investigate what it means to sustainably incorporate arts and culture into community development work.) Bennett sees creative placemaking as a way for arts and culture to act as a core sector of comprehensive community planning and economic development. America’s Tomorrow spoke to Bennett about the philanthropic world’s embrace of place-based strategies and the equitable economic impacts of ArtPlace America’s work.
Q: How are you trying to promote equity within the world of philanthropy and the arts?
A: The general definition [of arts and culture] we use is one that we borrowed from National Endowment for the Arts, which is “any generative act that's intended to communicate richly to others.” And when you use that definition, yes, you're talking about symphonies, operas, and ballets, but you're also talking about my grandmother's lacemaking; you're also talking about a Lakota dance. We tend to plot it out on a matrix, just by way of understanding it. And when you have that kind of bingo card, you can begin checking yourself and asking, “Am I working with all parts of this landscape or am I only connecting with certain parts?” So I think having that understanding of how the arts and culture ecology is organized really is a necessary first step towards making sure that you are engaging with all of it — and all of it equitably.
Q: How is ArtPlace trying to bring equity into the language, traditions, and rituals of the philanthropic world?
A: I think it is important to understand philanthropy as a sector that does require a certain level of cultural competency in order to intersect with it. And exactly as you said, there is a language, there is a series of rituals, and there is a semi-hidden, opaque power structure in place. Navigating all of that can be tricky. I think it's really incumbent upon those of us in philanthropy to make sure that we offer an on-ramp that is as easy as possible and that is as accommodating as possible to the broadest range of people.
An example is that those of us who have been working in philanthropy for 25 years know what an LOI [Letter of Interest] is. Right? It's a shorthand. To the other 98 percent of America, LOI are three letters that might as well be PDF or STD or whatever other three-letter abbreviation you use. So instead of saying we're releasing an LOI, we're simply saying, “Would you like to ask us for money?” We've [also avoided certain language] around outcomes assessment, outputs, and project evaluation. And instead we simply say, “What is it you're trying to do?” and, “How are you going to know if you've done it?”
Q: What do you see as the role of arts and culture in community development and neighborhood change?
A: Arts and culture are assets that are present in every community. Not every community is on a waterfront, not every community has strong public transportation, and not every community has a hospital or university to anchor it. But every community has people who sing and dance and tell stories.
We have to understand that every artist is somebody's neighbor and almost everyone has an artist as a neighbor. Issues of displacement are hugely important and need to be addressed, but I don’t know that arts-driven displacement issues are any different than any other kind of displacement issues driven by community development. I think we need to solve them together.
Q: Should place-based interventions be tailored to a neighborhood’s income level?
A: The mayor of New York City has just upzoned East New York, a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Change is going to come to that neighborhood and we know what the change is going to be and when the change is coming.
At the moment, there are many people focusing on affordability. How do we keep it so that if you are low-income you can continue to live there? Another thing that can help solve involuntary displacement is you can also make residents richer. I think we need to think about a strategy, for instance, that comes in and says to the barbershop that's been in the community for 30 years, “Change is coming; You need to negotiate a lease now that will be 20 years, or you need to try and buy your site; and maybe you want to put in three manicure stations and take advantage of the change in the market that's coming.” And so if we came in with a market investment, if we came in with an equity investment for that, I think that is going to do so much more to keep that small business in that neighborhood than just giving a local group a $50,000 dollar grant for organizing around preserving affordability. So I think in general my question is, “How do we bring in the market as a tool to work alongside philanthropic investment and/or community organizing investments?”
Q: Why are place-based strategies in philanthropy more than a trend du jour?
A: If you build really high-quality fabulous housing, but it's two hours away from any job, that's not going to work in terms of helping someone to build wealth and have an extraordinary life. So, the current movement I've seen with a lot of philanthropy is to really look at all of the systems that are at play in a community. So if a foundation cares about children, they realize that a child can't be healthy, happy, and achieve his or her full potential unless that child's family is also healthy and happy. So if you care about children, you also care about their parents and caregivers having jobs. And you care about all of them being educated. And you care about there being a safe environment. So whatever your point of entry, you really have to care about how all of these systems work together, which, I think in many ways, is Angela [Glover Blackwell]'s point about the series of systems that together add up to equity or inequity. It is about how housing intersects with transportation, which intersects with the economy, which intersects with the education system. So for ArtPlace and for philanthropy and government to say, “Okay, let's understand all these systems and how they intersect in their totality,” I think is a good move.