This important tool was developed to help Promise Neighborhood communities and the field at large better understand the external conditions and developmental milestones that are needed to build the cradle to career continuum and to achieve the goals/outcomes set forth in Promise Neighborhoods. The tool illustrates the developmental pathways necessary to achieve the Promise Neighborhoods vision.

With support from Citi Foundation, PolicyLink and the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink (PNI) joined forces with five PNI communities (Brooklyn, New York; Los Angeles, California; Chula Vista, California; Orlando, Florida; and Indianola, Mississippi) to design and carry out strategies for embedding financial security into their pipelines of supports. The collaborative effort set out to embed the concepts of budgeting, emergency savings, saving for college, credit access, into existing PNI programs. The goal was to enhance the overall outcomes of Promise Neighborhoods by empowering youth and their families to gain control over their financial lives and thus, their economic futures. This report documents the early lessons from each promise neighborhood site and highlights the importance of including a financial security strategy as an essential part of a cradle-to-career continuum.

This guide articulates how a focus on health equity is critical to the success of the Promise Neighborhoods program. It describes how Promise Neighborhoods have used a disciplined results-based approach to improve community environments to support health and provides communities with best practices and resources they can use to achieve population-level results for children, ensuring they are healthy and ready to learn. 

There will be more people of color in Minnesota’s future, a fact that bodes well for realizing a more robust economy in the state. Minnesota’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model, commissioned by the state’s philanthropies, makes clear that realizing the potential of Minnesota’s growing diversity requires adopting an equity strategy that would grow new jobs and businesses while bolstering long-term competitiveness. Equity is an economic imperative that means fair and just inclusion for all into a society where every Minnesotan can participate and prosper.

Minnesota’s Tomorrow: Equity Is the Superior Growth Model summary available.

Details Market Creek's planning, design, and implementation process, and highlights the importance of resident involvement in this groundbreaking community development project where Market Creek Plaza, is among the nation's first real estate development projects to be designed, built, and ultimately owned by community residents.

Lake Research Partners, the national survey represents 1,000 eligible voters nationwide with oversamples of Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities across the United States. This polling surfaced ideological clusters of voters that represent patterns in understanding race and race-based policies to end social inequality. To further understand the clusters identified through polling, PolicyLink partners with HIT Strategies to conduct focus groups to gather more qualitative insight to the attitudinal trends. The insights gleaned through this research intend to support broader understanding of attitude trends that impact national narratives.

The survey results and focus groups in this study illuminate the importance of getting the message of racial equity out to the private sector and government leaders. The attitudinal findings also demonstrate the importance of getting a message into the collective soul of America. Our country cannot make the bold and swift change necessary to rescue our democracy if we do not understand the severity of America’s ideological discord.

Knowing where we stand in terms of cultural attitudes will help inform our grassroots, corporate, and governmental strategies to liberate the nearly 100 million people living in poverty. Creating a new country that unlocks the potential in us all, requires that we face all barriers to national unity bravely. Race & Equity in America: Annual Attitudinal Research continues to be an essential step in acknowledging our nation’s harmful history and its current manifestations so that we are precise in the path we chart with collaborators to reach America’s highest and truly attainable democratic potential.

This is the fifth in a series of briefs that describe the changes, insights, and lessons when arts and cultural strategies are deployed in service of comprehensive community development and planning. During ArtPlace America's Community Development Investments initiative, six participating organizations which had not previously focused on the arts developed creative placemaking projects and cultural strategies that could help them more effectively achieve their missions. PolicyLink conducted a research and documentation project to measure the progress, immediate outcomes, and impacts of those projects.

This brief examines how artists have worked with community developers to weave a stronger social fabric, enabling marginalized communities to pursue changes that lead to greater equity, resilience, and authentic local democracy.  Download the brief.

A project on Social Cohesion, Arts, and Health Equity has explored these questions in-depth with artists, leaders in public health and community development, and researchers. The most ambitious product of this exploration is the new multi-faceted report authored by Metris Arts Consulting: WE-Making: How Arts & Culture Unite People to Work Toward Community Well-Being. A 2019 convening of artists, researchers, public health leaders, and community developers yielded many insights and stories which are reproduced in the Proceedings and Thematic Analysis created by the Center for Arts in Medicine of the University of Florida. The Proceedings can be found here. Download the brief.