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2018-01-31
Central Corridor Funders Collaborative;
The Central Corridor Funders Collaborative (2007 – 2016) was an innovative partnership supported by 14 local and national foundations seeking to create a "corridor of opportunity" along Minneapolis and Saint Paul's Green Line Light Rail Transit (LRT).
2017-11-02
Woodstock Institute;
The report examines the state of traditional bank small business lending in Fresno County, CA, and Minneapolis - St. Paul, MN. It offers policy and practice recommendations concerning the noted disparities in lending to businesses in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and in communities of color. It is the fourth, and final, in a series of research reports examining small business owners' access to capital in eight major metropolitan areas.
2016-08-23
McKnight Foundation;
In 2011, The McKnight Foundation partnered with a set of districts and schools in the Twin Cities area, all serving high-needs students, on a PreK–3 literacy initiative. The Pathway Schools Initiative aims to dramatically increase the number of students who reach the critical milestone of third-grade reading proficiency, an indicator predictive of later academic outcomes and high school graduation. This report focuses on findings from Phase I of the Pathway Schools Initiative (2011–2015).
2016-06-22
Central Corridor Funders Collaborative;
The Central Corridor Funders Collaborative (2007 – 2016) was an innovative partnership supported by 14 local and national foundations seeking to create a "corridor of opportunity" along Minneapolis and Saint Paul's Green Line Light Rail Transit (LRT). The Funders Collaborative supplemented the programs and grantmaking of its member foundations by working with community organizations, the business sector, and public agencies to encourage collaboration, planning, and investment beyond the rail. The Green Line opened in June 2014, and the Funders Collaborative concluded its work two years later in June 2016 as planned.
2016-05-31
Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago;
Afterschool programs are seen as a way to keep low-income children safe and to foster the skills needed to succeed in school and life. Many cities are creating afterschool systems to ensure that such programs are high-quality and widely available. One way to do so is to ensure afterschool systems develop and maintain a data system.This interim report presents early findings from a study of how afterschool systems build their capacity to understand and improve their practices through their data systems. It examines afterschool data systems in nine cities that are part of The Wallace Foundation's Next Generation Afterschool System-Building initiative, a multi-year effort to strengthen systems that support access to and participation in high-quality afterschool programs for low-income youth. The cities are Baltimore, Md., Denver, Colo., Fort Worth, Texas, Grand Rapids, Mich., Jacksonville, Fla.,Louisville, Ky., Nashville, Tenn., Philadelphia, Pa., and Saint Paul, Minn.To date, research on data use in afterschool systems has focused more on the implementation of technology than on what it takes to develop and sustain effective data use. This study found that the factors that either enabled or hampered the use of data in afterschool systems—such as norms and routines, partner relationships, leadership and coordination, and technical knowledge—had as much to do with the people and process components of the systems as with the technology.Strategies that appear to contribute to success include:
Starting small. A number of cities intentionally started with a limited set of goals for data collection and use, and/or a limited set of providers piloting a new data system, with plans to scale up gradually.
Ongoing training. Stakeholders learned that high staff turnover required ongoing introductory trainings to help new hires use management information systems and data. Providing coaching and developing manuals also helped to mitigate the effects of turnover and to further the development of more experienced and engaged staff.
Outside help. Systems varied in how they used the expertise of outside research partners. Some cities identified a research partner who participated in all phases of the development of their data systems. Others used the relationship primarily to help analyze and report data collected by providers. Still others did not engage external research partner, but identified internal staff to support the system. In any of these scenarios, dedicated staffers with skills in data analytics were key.
2016-01-21
Boston Foundation, The;
A new study commissioned by the Boston Foundation on how Boston and comparable cities support the arts shows that only New York City has higher per capita contributed revenue for the art than Boston, among major American cities.
The study, titled "How Boston and Other American Cities Support and Sustain the Arts: Funding for Cultural Nonprofits in Boston and 10 Other Metropolitan Cities," also examined Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia, Portland Oregon, San Francisco, and Seattle. "How Boston" is a follow-up of sorts to a 2003 Boston Foundation report titled, "Funding for Cultural Organizations in Boston and Nine Other Metropolitan Areas."
Key findings of this study, regarding Boston, include the fact that Boston's arts market is quite densely populated. While Greater Boston is the nation's 10th largest metro area and ranks ninth for total Gross Domestic Product, its non-profit arts market, which consists of more than 1,500 organizations, is comparable to that of New York and San Francisco, and consistently surpasses large cities such as Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia, in terms of the number of organizations and their per capita expenses.
2015-08-26
Business Resources Collaborative;
Like any large infrastructure project, the Green Line construction posed considerable risks to businesses operating on the line. To help understand how these changes impacted local businesses, Wilder Research partnered with the CCFC's Business Resources Collaborative to survey more than 200 business representatives along the Green Line. This information provides useful feedback for similar projects, and the findings provide an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and successes encountered by businesses during and after construction. We would like to share three vital findings from this research.
2014-12-10
Wallace Foundation, The;
Arts organizations of all kinds recognize that their futures depend on cultivating new audiences who will form long-lasting relationships with them. Perhaps no art form faces a bigger challenge in doing so than opera. Many people who've never been to the opera believe it's stuffy and elitist, and certainly not a place they'd like to spend a Saturday night. They think they'll feel like ignorant outsiders who can't possibly understand, let alone appreciate, what's happening on stage. Minnesota Opera set out to dispel those preconceived notions among women ages 35 to 60 through an unlikely partnership with a local talk-radio host who had a knack for relating to this demographic. An opera buff himself, he made the art form relatable and exciting to women who had never been to a performance, so much so that they jammed the phone lines when he announced ticket giveaways to Minnesota Opera on his radio show. After four seasons of the partnership, 1,114 households new to Minnesota Opera had redeemed their free tickets to attend a performance, and 18 percent had paid to come back. The company found that perceptions of opera as elitist were not insurmountable, but also discovered that one or two positive experiences were not necessarily enough to turn most of these new audience members into frequent attendees. Follow-up research identified barriers to that elusive return purchase, and the company has used these insights to adjust its marketing strategy to bring a number of those new audience members back.
2014-05-13
Journey For Justice Alliance;
The members of Journey for Justice, are comprised of thousands of youth, parents, and other concerned citizens from communities of color across the United States. They wrote this report because they need the American people to know that the public education systems in our communities are dying. More accurately, they are being killed by an alliance of misguided, paternalistic "reformers," education profiteers, and those who seek to dismantle the institution of public education. Some are being killed quickly; others are still in the early stages. But it is, at this point, quite clear that there will soon be little to nothing left of our public school systems -- and many more like ours -- unless current trends are disrupted.
2013-11-19
McKnight Foundation;
Jay Walljasper, commissioned by McKnight. In the fourth installment of the Food for Thought Series, Jay Walljasper looks at civic models from around the world that are worth replicating here at home.
2013-05-04
MZ Strategies, LLC;
Several efforts are emerging in the greater Minneapolis-Saint Paul, MN (MSP) region (also referred to as the Twin Cities) to support more strategic partnerships and align investment decisions to support regional economic competitiveness. The Twin Cities region is known for its regional governance and collaboration on a range of issues including transportation, revenue sharing and waste water infrastructure. The region is also home to more Fortune 500 companies per capita than any other metro region and a population that is, on average, relatively well educated and financially stable. Concerns have arisen over the last decade that economic and racial disparities are increasing, and that economic growth including business start-ups and wage rates are not keeping pace with regional expectations. In response, the Metropolitan Council (Met Council) and the newly created Greater MSP Partnership, among other regional economic stakeholders,are refining their efforts to advance equitable economic competitiveness for the Twin Cities region. Through funding from the McKnight Foundation, the National Association of Regional Councils (NARC) and MZ Strategies, LLC (the Project Team) partnered to survey a subset of regional planning agencies and examine efforts in Denver, Kansas City and Seattle metropolitan areas to highlight different approaches to economic competitiveness. The study provides a snapshot of regional economic innovation and collaboration necessary to achieve equitable economic growth in the greater Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area. The survey was distributed by NARC to directors and/ or lead economic development staff at 30 pre-identified regional agencies based on similarities and appropriateness to serve as a model for the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region. Overall, 16 of 30 regions responded -- a response rate of 53 percent.
