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2016-04-01
Equal Measure;
In 2014, the Citi Foundation launched Pathways to Progress, a three-year, $50 million initiative in the United States to help 100,000 low-income youth -- ages 16 to 24 -- develop the workplace skills and leadership experience necessary to compete in a 21st century economy.
To achieve its ambitious goal, the Foundation enacted a multi-tiered strategy in ten cities: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Newark, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The U.S. strategy also includes complementary national and local investments, including the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, the National Academy Foundation, and the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues. In addition to the core and complementary program investments, the Citi Foundation's multitiered strategy includes substantial volunteer engagement by Foundation employees, and a significant communications platform -- augmenting grantee organizations' efforts to share their impact with the field.
In its efforts to advance youth economic opportunity on a significant scale, the Citi Foundation has invested in solutions that offer promise of sizeable and replicable impact.
2016-03-22
Knight Foundation;
Few U.S. cities have transformed the way that Miami has in recent years. In addition to its evolution as a year-round arts and culture location, there has been an increased focus on entrepreneurship as essential to the city's future growth. But what does entrepreneurship in Miami look like? And what are the gaps that need to be filled? This report provides an overview of the current state of Miami's startup ecosystem examining key drivers of success: availability of talent, funding access, and support systems that connect people and fuel startup growth. While the analysis shows that gaps persist in education, access to capital and opportunities to scale, there are positive signs pointing to an emerging and robust ecosystem.
2016-01-28
Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund;
Across the country, municipal Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs) provide hundreds of thousands of young people, often from low-income communities, with short-term work experience and a regular paycheck. Building off this existing, widespread infrastructure and connection to young people, the Citi Foundation and the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund (CFE Fund) saw an opportunity to connect young workers to bank accounts and targeted financial education, turning this large-scale youth employment program into a linchpin for building long-term positive financial behaviors. More broadly, Summer Jobs Connect (SJC) demonstrates how banking access efforts can be embedded in municipal infrastructure, a core goal of the CFE Fund's national Bank On initiative.
2015-10-08
Urban Land Institute;
Real estate projects designed to withstand the effects of climate change can provide substantial returns on investment and an array of other benefits, according to this new report. Case studies from 10 leading resilience projects are highlighted, ranging from a Boston hospital built to withstand coastal storms to a residential community in San Antonio built to withstand the effects of intense heat and drought. Other communities with highlighted case studies include Queens, N.Y.; Miami, FL; Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands; Nashville, TN; Tucson, AZ and Lancaster, CA.
The study found an array of benefits from the climate-smart designs in addition to their strength against climate unpredictability. They include:
Better energy efficiency. For example, multilayered impact-resistant windows save energy and reduce utility bills.Greater marketing, sales and leasing success driven by buyers' desires for well-built structures that will withstand harsh conditions and keep their value longer.Better financing options and lower insurance rates based on the reduced risk from resilient and hardened structures.
2015-06-01
Equal Measure;
Through this three-year Pathways to Progress portfolio review, Equal Measure will Provide a comprehensive narrative about the reach the Citi Foundation investment has had on youth, individual programs, and the grantee organizations. We also will examine how this investment fits within, and contributes to, the broader fields of youth, leadership, and 21st century workplace skills development.
2015-02-01
Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund;
In 2014, with funding from the Citi Foundation, the CFE Fund launched Summer Jobs Connect (SJC) to directly fund 1,850 jobs for low- and moderate-income youth and help five cities integrate financial education and access to mainstream financial products into municipal Summer Youth Employment Programs (SYEPs). The SJC initiative builds off of each city's existing SYEP infrastructure, in which they were already providing workforce development opportunities—and steady paychecks—to youth. Recognizing that financial empowerment strategies offer youth a pathway to productive financial habits and longer-term stability, the CFE Fund and city partners learned a number of important lessons about leveraging the SYEP opportunity.
2014-06-05
Cultural Policy Center at The University of Chicago;
Supported in part by Arts Alliance Illinois, and with the cooperation of several local arts agencies, including Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special events, and of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies.
This study compares the direct public dollars received by organizations and artists in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland (OR), San Diego, and San Francisco from 2002-2012.
Often, studies of public funding for the arts look at appropriations made on the national and state levels and estimates of local expenditures, but this report delves more deeply using grant-level data to examine the dollars received by organizations and artists resident in each city or region.
Key findings:
In 2012, Chicago arts organizations received $7.3 million in public dollars via competitive grants from local, state, and national public arts agencies combined. Only three of the 13 regions studied received more total dollars in 2012.Though Chicago arts organizations receive among the greatest amounts of public funding in total, a relatively small portion comes from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. Of the competitive arts grants dollars received in Chicago in 2012, 59% came from the Illinois Arts Council, 24% from the National Endowment for the Arts, and 17% from the city's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. For most cities/regions in our study, excluding Chicago, the majority of public grant dollars received by not-for-profits in the area for arts programming came from their local arts agency in 2012. For example, in 2012, San Diego received 93% of its public funding from the local level, 2% from the state level, and 4% from the federal level.DCASE's funding levels have been among the lowest of the 13 cities/regions studied on both a per capita basis, and in terms of total dollars, over the past decade (2002-2012). In 2012, Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events awarded $1.2 million in grants, which is $0.44 per capita. Of the 13 local agencies analyzed, only Phoenix, Boston, and Baltimore spent less in total dollar or per capita terms in 2012.Over the past decade, DCASE annually awarded among the highest total number of grants compared with other regions' local agencies. In 2012, DCASE awarded 520 grants in total -- 305 to organizations and 215 to individuals. In 2012, it awarded competitive grants to approximately 31% of the arts and cultural organizations in the city.Aside from competitive grants, five of the 13 cities/metro regions included in this study provide support to select arts and cultural organizations through line-items, which serve as significant sources of general operating funds.
2014-05-30
Urban Institute;
Many community development initiatives traditionally funded by foundations and the federal government evolved to respond to the economic conditions and barriers facing communities in big cities of the northeast and midwest. But conditions are dramatically different in Houston and other fast-growing metros like it. Neighborhood Centers, Inc. is developing and testing strategies for connecting underserved people to opportunities that reflect the realities of Houston's geography, demographics, and economy. This paper is intended to start a discussion about how these strategies differ from more traditional place-based antipoverty strategies, and how similar approaches may suit other metros like Houston.
2014-03-12
Urban Institute;
The underground commercial sex economy (UCSE) generates millions of dollars annually, yet investigation and data collection remain under resourced. Our study aimed to unveil the scale of the UCSE in eight major US cities. Across cities, the UCSE's worth was estimated between $39.9 and $290 million in 2007, but decreased since 2003 in all but two cities. Interviews with pimps, traffickers, sex workers, child pornographers, and law enforcement revealed the dynamics central to the underground commercial sex trade -- and shaped the policy suggestions to combat it.
2014-01-01
Duke Divinity School;
This paper illustrates the type of creative partnerships and dialogues that are happening in communities of color around the important health issue of end-of-life care. While the work of these three featured organizations is helping to set the standards for outreach within communities of color, they by no means stand alone.
2013-11-11
Pew Charitable Trusts;
The Great Recession created fiscal challenges for the 30 cities at the centers of the nation's most populous metropolitan areas that continued well past the recession's official end in June 2009. For most of these cities, the fiscal brunt was borne later than for the national and state governments and recovery has been slow.
Cities dealt with fiscal strain in a variety of ways: dipping into reserve funds, cutting spending, gaining help from the federal or state governments, and increasing revenue from tax and nontax sources. Although these strategies offered short-term solutions, many cities still faced declining revenue in 2011, the consequence of reduced spending, shrunken reserves, and rising pension and retiree health care costs.
Property taxes, which can be slow to respond to economic swings, helped delay the early fiscal effects of the Great Recession for most of these cities, but they began to decline in 2010, reflecting a deferred impact of the housing crisis. This trend was compounded by increasingly unpredictable aid from states and the federal government that were dealing with their own budgetary constraints.
Researchers from Pew standardized data from the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports from 2007 through 2011, the latest year of complete data available, for all of these 30 cities. This report examines key elements of each city's fiscal conditions, including revenue, expenditures, reserves, and long-term obligations, and adjusted them for inflation to facilitate comparison across the years. These adjustments allow insight into fiscal trends across cities and over time. Direct comparisons between cities may be limited, however, by differences in cities' tax structures and the range of services each city provides
2013-03-14
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation;
After receiving his MFA from FIU in 2008, P. Scott Cunningham launched his own poetry-focused faux-school, the University of Wynwood, which stages colorfully offbeat events in the geographic heart of Miami's art scene, reflecting Cunningham's desire to take contemporary poetry far from its academic comfort zone. What he eventually envisioned moved dramatically beyond the University of Wynwood's playfully unorthodox readings. Spurred on by a Knight Foundation arts grant, Cunningham brainstormed a project which would not only be a "world-class" event in itself, but transformational for Miami writ large. His idea? O, Miami -- a poetry festival as wry in tone and all encompassing in scope as its very name, one which would attempt to, with a nod to Joyce, make poetry general throughout the city. This is a report of the inaugural festival.
