Pittsburgh is on the rise. After decades of decline following the collapse of the steel industry, the region has successfully transformed its manufacturing economy into one driven by knowledge and technology. This resurgence brings great potential to deliver long-awaited jobs, economic opportunities, and neighborhood improvements to the region’s low-income communities and communities of color. However, the benefits of new growth and development will not automatically trickle down without a focus on equitable development. Produced by PolicyLink, along with Neighborhood Allies, and Urban Innovation21, this report presents a five-point agenda for realizing the vision of a new, “all-in” Pittsburgh, in which everyone can thrive, and highlights 16 specific recommendations for action. Download summary here.

Aligned contributions occur when leaders work together to take effective action that is complementary, mutually supportive, and leveraged to produce measurable improvement in a result. [Authors: Jolie Bain Pillsbury and Raj Chawla]

Designed by Clear Impact and based on the principles of Mark Friedman's Results-Based Accountability™ framework, the Results Scorecard™ helps Promise Neighborhoods leaders to collaborate, make data-driven decisions, and align the performance of their programs and initiatives with the impact that they create in the community. 

Exposure to a traumatic event places a young person at risk of: a lower reading proficiency, a lower grade-point average, and more days of school absences. Throughout their lifetimes, many young students living in underserved communities will experience one or more traumatic events-putting them at risk of chronic absenteeism and lower academic proficiency. During this webinar, Sue Fothergill (Attendance Works) and Rachel Donegan (Baltimore Promise Neighborhood) discussed: the impact of traumatic events on a student’s learning and trauma-informed strategies to improve academic and attendance outcomes for students living in Promise Neighborhoods.

A robust case management system is critical to tracking progress and improving outcomes for children and their families, along the cradle-to-career continuum. During this webinar, Mary Bogle (Urban Institute), Tara Watford (Youth Policy Institute), and Karin Scott (Indianola Promise Community) shared best practices for building a case management system that is: rooted in the Results-Based Accountability framework, tracks participation and performance, provides the opportunity to course-correct, and drives Promise Neighborhoods and their partners towards the achievement of a common set of results and indicators. 

PNI has developed two templates to assist you in representing your cradle-to-career infrastructure and the results you are achieving for children because of it. We envision that this will be an especially useful tool for sustainability. This set of tools includes (1) an aggregate snapshot of your pipeline, and (2) a general template that will be used to dive deeply into results/work associated with each Promise Neighborhood GPRA. Both templates are built around core pieces of your work: population results, baselines and targets, continua of solutions (families, programs, policies, and systems), partners, and funding. Through these complimentary templates, you will be able to provide an overview of your results-driven cradle-to-career system, while simultaneously providing specific, in depth snapshots of each indicator – and especially the level of flexible funding that is necessary to maintain and scale each deep layer of your work.

PNI has developed two templates to assist you in representing your cradle-to-career infrastructure and the results you are achieving for children because of it. We envision that this will be an especially useful tool for sustainability. This set of tools includes (1) an aggregate snapshot of your pipeline, and (2) a general template that will be used to dive deeply into results/work associated with each Promise Neighborhood GPRA. Both templates are built around core pieces of your work: population results, baselines and targets, continua of solutions (families, programs, policies, and systems), partners, and funding. Through these complimentary templates, you will be able to provide an overview of your results-driven cradle-to-career system, while simultaneously providing specific, in depth snapshots of each indicator – and especially the level of flexible funding that is necessary to maintain and scale each deep layer of your work.

Developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation as a part of their Skills to Accelerate Results leadership development program, this simple form can be used by individual members of a partnership to commit to a priority action that they will take to accelerate an agreed-upon result.

This six-step guide, produced by Bridgespan, can help you and your organization create a path to implementation. It provides strategies and tools nonprofits can use to implement their strategic plans in an effort to achieve impact year after year.

Created on behalf of the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink by Frontline Solutions and BCT Partners, this accompanying back-office capacity-building spreadsheet was developed to be a simple, straight-forward tool that organizations can utilize to plan for their administrative staffing needs.