ArtPlace commissioned Transportation for America (T4A) to write and produce a rigorous national examination of creative placemaking in the transportation planning process. This resource identifies ways that transportation professionals can integrate artists to deliver transportation projects more smoothly, improve safety, and build community support. This field scan explores seven of the most pressing challenges facing the transportation sector today and identifies how arts and cultural strategies can contribute to solutions.

The diversity of the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area region is a tremendous economic asset – if people of color are fully included as workers, entrepreneurs, and innovators. Equitable growth is the path to sustained economic prosperity. In fact, closing racial gaps in income would boost the regional economy by more than $200 billion. The 2017 Nine-County Bay Area Equity Profile complements an initial five-county profile released two years ago and recently updated. Read the profile.

Author(s): Benjamin W. Chrisinger, Stanford Prevention Research Center, Stanford University School of Medicine

Across the U.S., neighborhoods face disparate healthy food access, which has motivated federal, state, and local initiatives to develop supermarkets in “food deserts.” Differences in the implementation of these initiatives are evident, including the presence of health programming, yet no comprehensive inventory of projects exists to assess their impact. Using a variety of data sources, this paper provides details on all supermarket developments under “fresh food financing” regimes in the U.S. from 2004-2015, including information such as project location, financing, development, and the presence of health promotion efforts. The analysis identifies 126 projects, which have been developed in a majority of states, with concentrations in the mid-Atlantic and Southern California regions. Average store size was approximately 28,100 square feet, and those receiving financial assistance from local sources and New Markets Tax Credits were significantly larger, while those receiving assistance from other federal sources were significantly smaller. About 24 percent included health-oriented features; of these, over 80 percent received federal financing. If new supermarkets alone are insufficient for health behavior change, greater attention to these nuances is needed from program designers, policymakers, and advocates who seek to continue fresh food financing programs. Efforts to reduce rates of diet-related disease by expanding food access can be improved by taking stock of existing efforts.

From San Francisco, California to Flint, Michigan, the nation is facing an escalating housing crisis. Skyrocketing rents, inadequate infrastructure and stagnant wages are some of the barriers that are preventing millions of low-income Americans and communities of color from reaching their full potential. Healthy Communities of Opportunity: An Equity Blueprint to Address America’s Housing Challenges weaves together insights from the fields of healthcare, housing and economic security to outline a case for progressive, equity-focused policy.

• Archived webinar
• “This Is a Nationwide Epidemic”: A Frank but Hopeful Conversation with Evicted Author Matthew Desmond

"Healthy Communities of Opportunity provides an actionable roadmap to solve the interwoven housing and health crises that impact many people. This thorough review of the housing crisis from PolicyLink and their cross-sector approach to the solutions is a significant contribution to addressing the problem."
David Fukuzawa
Managing Director, The Kresge Foundation’s Health and Human Services programs

 

For low-income people of color, where you live not only determines access to education and employment but how long you live and how well you live. This new report from PolicyLink and the Kresge Foundation puts forth an action agenda to create far greater access to vibrant, healthy communities of opportunity.
Angela Glover Blackwell
PolicyLink President and CEO

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.