Business Commons^™

Using Foundation Capital For Good: Opportunities In The Balance Sheet, John Sherman, Veronica Olazabal

The Foundation Review

Foundations increasingly use their full balance sheets to unlock more of their capital for good. They look beyond conventional grantmaking to pursue their charitable purposes in many ways that exemplify innovative, full-balance sheet approaches: investing in nonprofit and for-profit companies that offer clear social and financial returns; investing their corpus in companies whose products and services align with their missions; using social bonds to inject new resources into their programs; offering guarantees to help grantees manage risk; and avoiding companies whose practices run counter to their grantees’ efforts.

This article looks at the structures, pathways, and tools for foundations wanting …

A Mission To Improve Health: Lessons From Missouri’S Expanding Coverage Initiative, Anna Saltzman, Shayla Spilker, Megan Klenke-Isgriggs

The Foundation Review

To support the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, in 2013 Missouri Foundation for Health launched the Expanding Coverage Initiative. The fiveyear effort sought to reduce Missouri’s uninsured rate from 13% to less than 5% by developing a broad-based state coalition and employing a three-pronged approach of awareness building and outreach, enrollment assistance, and increasing health literacy.

While the initiative did not achieve its rate-reduction goal, the rate of uninsured Missourians dropped to 9% during the ECI’s time frame, a decrease on par with the national average despite the fact that at the time Missouri was one of 17 states …

Considerations For Measuring The Impact Of Policy-Relevant Research, Megan Collado, Lauren Gerlach, Caroline Ticse, Katherine Hempstead

The Foundation Review

Philanthropy, and the research and analysis it supports, has an important role to play in informing policy and making government more effective. Yet all too often, foundations and other research funders struggle to understand whether and how their investments have affected policy.

This article highlights the findings of an 18-month pilot project conducted by AcademyHealth to help the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation better understand the impact of a subset of the foundation’s research grants, across investment types, on health insurance coverage and health reform, and to help inform how the foundation may more systematically track and measure the impact of …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Symposium Report: Findings From The Research Roundtable On The Economic And Community Impact Of Broadband, Edward Feser, John Horrigan, William Lehr

Edward J Feser

In December 2012, a group of experts spanning disciplines and practice in the field of broadband policy met to discuss how the research community can better serve state and local policymakers and other stakeholders. This group of subject matter experts was convened to examine how best to measure the economic impact of state and national broadband deployment and capacity/adoption building efforts. The impetus for the symposium stemmed from the widespread view that there is a deficit of research, standards, and measurements to adequately inform the widely acknowledged view that broadband Internet is a driver of sustainable economic and community development. …

El Paso Economic Development System Review & Recommendations, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This report, commissioned by the City of El Paso, recommends that El Paso city government undertake a substantial reform of its economic development effort and that public and private sector stakeholders in the broader El Paso region mobilize to create an organizational vehicle for the kind of public‐private collaboration that is driving innovative economic development in many other major city‐regions in the United States. The analysis also calls for a stronger integration of physical, land use, and economic development planning activities in the city and region, consistent with a trend in international best practice in local and regional economic development.

Globalization, Regional Economic Policy And Research, Edward Feser

Edward J Feser

This paper considers two questions. First, are there unique implications of growing global economic integration for development planning and policy making at the city and regional level? Key issues include whether globalization is appreciably different today than it used to be and whether it means anything more, from the perspective of a given city or region, than heightened competition for resident industries and related challenges of more rapid macro-regional structural change and adjustment. Second, what kinds of spatial empirical research and model building would be most valuable to regional policy makers faced with designing programs and making specific allocative investment …

U.S. Regional Economic Fragmentation & Integration: Selected Empirical Evidence And Implications, Edward J. Feser, Geoffrey Hewings

Edward J Feser

The emergence of ten U.S. megaregions—increasingly contiguous spaces of high density development and population capturing a high share of U.S. economic activity—raises the question of appropriate scales for local, state and federal policy and how regional planning as a practice can adapt to an extended and, in some cases, almost continuous economic integration over space (RPA, 2006). Notions of cities as functional economic areas, more or less distinct spaces that operate as independent economic units, are less and less tenable as the basis for planning and policy making. At the same time, the megaregion phenomenon does not necessarily imply that …

Encouraging Broadband Deployment From The Bottom Up, Edward J. Feser

Edward J Feser

State governments that have elected to make investments to increase the availability of affordable broadband service in rural areas and low income urban neighborhoods should organize their efforts around a strategy that encourages and leverages locally-driven initiatives, rather than follow a top-down approach that seeks to identify and close all broadband service gaps in a comprehensive fashion. A bottom-up approach to state broadband policy has three major advantages. First, it is a conservative policy response in an economic arena in which the appropriate role of the public sector is highly contested and in which private sector deployment is proceeding rapidly, …

Regional Technology Assets And Opportunities: The Geographic Clustering Of High-Tech Industry, Science And Innovation In Appalachia, Edward Feser, Harvey Goldstein, Henry Renski, Catherine Renault

Edward J Feser

This study constitutes a systematic location analysis of the technology assets of Appalachia. The report identifies and documents sub-regional concentrations of technology-related employment, R&D, and applied innovation within and immediately adjacent to the 406-county service area of the Appalachian Regional Commission. By assembling and analyzing an extensive set of data at high levels of functional and spatial detail, the study reveals localized technology strengths that might be nurtured through focused economic development policy.