Public Policy Commons^™

Neighborhood Change In Las Vegas, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This Fact Sheet analyzes indicators of demographic and economic change in Las Vegas neighborhoods and suburbs, provided by “American Neighborhood Change in the 21st Century,” a study published by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO) at the Minnesota Law School. Researchers reviewed data from the 2000 U.S. Census and the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS) for the top 50 largest metros in the U.S. The study reports levels of neighborhood change, including economic growth, poverty concentration, gentrification, and low-income displacement. Data pertaining to the Las Vegas metropolitan region are synthesized to measure indicators of economic viability and housing availability.

Lessons From The Assessment For Learning Project: Strategies For Building An Authentic Learning Community, Heather Lewis-Charp, Daniela Berman, Sarah Lench, Tony Siddall

The Foundation Review

This article explores findings from an evaluation of the Assessment for Learning Project, a grantee engagement strategy led by the Center for Innovation in Education focused on creating a learning community founded in continuous reflection and safety for risk-taking. The article shares the project’s model and approach, grounded in the core design elements of a field-facing learning agenda, grantmaking that leads with learning, and collective leadership.

This article highlights the Assessment for Learning Project’s practices, such as a Request for Learning rather than traditional Request for Proposals; a requirement that grantees provide formative feedback to each other; and public demonstrations …

Coherent Assistance In Education Improvement: How Foundations Can Help, Ann Jaquith, Rosa Chavez

The Foundation Review

Philanthropic organizations are experimenting with ways to support capacity building in order to scale innovations and leverage funding for greater social impact. Increasingly, philanthropies are also attending to their own organizational needs for learning in order to inform strategy, shape future work, and measure effectiveness.

This article shares the lessons of the Aligned Partners Project, a three-year study of a foundation-funded interorganizational collaboration to align the work of three technical assistance organizations to meet the needs of one school district. It identifies challenges to providing coherent assistance as well as grantmaking practices that could address them.

A foundation seeking to …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Turning Changemaking Inward: How One Health Philanthropy Transformed Its Grantmaking Approach To Drive Deeper Impact, Christina Ellis, Laura Pinsoneault, Sarah Deering, Jesse Ehrenfeld, Erin Fabian, Cheryl Maurana

The Foundation Review

In 2014, the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment made a significant shift in focus to supporting adaptive rather than programmatic solutions to address critical health issues, and adopted a new approach that emphasized engagement with key stakeholders, recognizing the importance of contribution over attribution and requiring a long-term perspective on outcomes.

The endowment identified three new “changemaker” roles for itself, alongside new funding mechanisms and a set of conditions where positive change could be supported to influence health. While changemaking began as a description of the endowment’s strategic direction, today this philanthropic philosophy permeates all that …

Women’S Grantmaking For Economic Security: The Work Of One Coalition, Elizabeth May Gillespie

The Foundation Review

Philanthropy has historically been an avenue for citizens to pursue positive social change, yet little is known about what foundations are doing to foster economic security for women. This article seeks to help bridge this gap between theory and practice through an examination of one type of philanthropic organization — women’s grantmaking funds.

Focusing on the work of Prosperity Together, a coalition of 30 of women’s grantmaking funds dedicated to advancing women’s economic security, this article explores what the funds are doing to support this work. It draws on data from a landscape scan of the coalition’s members as well …

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

The Experiences Of A Foundation With A Limited Life: Benefits And Challenges, Lynda Mansson

The Foundation Review

This article discusses the benefits and drawbacks of a limited-life foundation’s philanthropy practice. The strengths, including a sharpened strategic focus and sense of urgency, and the challenges, such as ensuring impact and dealing with grantee dependency, are also relevant when closing a program. Drawing on reflections from the director general of the MAVA Foundation and learnings from foundations that have recently closed, this article also discusses how to prepare for the end date of a limited-life foundation. MAVA, a Swiss-based grantmaking foundation for 25 years, has a planned end date of 2022. The article features key lessons for foundations considering …

Back Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

A Canary In The Payout-Rate Coal Mine, John C. Alexander Jr.

The Foundation Review

In this article, we create a capital markets-based indicator to trigger when a discussion about changing portfolio payout rates may be appropriate. Although the payout rate is often a calendar agenda item for foundations and endowments, volatility in capital markets may cause a deluge of ad hoc payout discussions that may decrease the effectiveness of investment committees.

Recent market performance provides a poor foundation for decisions related to a sustainable payout. The most sustainable portion of the investment return is the portfolio yield. We construct a metric using equity and bond market yields as a quantitative leading indicator of when …

Immigrants And Their Voting Power In Nevada, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Demography

This Fact Sheet presents the number of both documented and undocumented immigrants in Nevada, synthesizing data provided by New American Economy (NAE), a bipartisan research non-profit organization. To estimate the total number of immigrants in the U.S. and across each of the 50 states, researchers reviewed various data sources including the U.S. Census, the American Community Survey, the Center for Migration Studies, and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Can Cities Be Feminist? A Cross-National Analysis Of Factors Affecting Local Female Representation In Latin America, Katie Davis

Honors Theses

Women are underrepresented in mayor’s offices and on city councils across Latin America. In this paper, I examine gender-based differences in individual opinions toward running for office in Argentina and Uruguay, as well as conduct a twenty-six country analysis on factors related to female representation in municipal government. Based on these analyses, I make three main conclusions about female local representation in Latin America. The first conclusion is that women in Latin America are significantly less likely to want to run or feel qualified to run for office. The second conclusion is that cross-national variation in the percentage of female …

Political Parties And Demographic Transformation In Nevada, Elia Del Carmen Solano-Patricio, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Demography

This Fact Sheet presents projections of demographic change in Nevada’s political party coalitions using data provided in the report “States of Change: How Demographic Change is Transforming the Republican and Democratic Political Parties.” Using the composition of the two parties’ electorate in the 2016 presidential election as a baseline, researchers explore age, race, and education characteristics of voters in 14 U.S. swing states to predict the demographic makeup of voting groups in future elections. This Fact Sheet makes comparisons to other swing states, but focuses primarily on Nevada data.

Restructuring And Forgiveness In Financial Crises A: The Mexican Peso Crisis Of 1994-95, Christian M. Mcnamara, June Rhee, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Following a year in which repeated political turmoil sapped investor confidence in Mexico, putting pressure on the peso and draining the country’s foreign exchange reserves, on December 22, 1994, the Mexican government sparked a financial crisis by unexpectedly abandoning its policy of anchoring the peso to the US dollar and instead allowing it to float freely. The resulting collapse of the peso left Mexico with $40 billion to $50 billion in external debt (much of it dollar-indexed) coming due in the near term and almost no foreign exchange reserves. Faced with the prospect that Mexico would either default on its …

Guarantees And Capital Infusions In Response To Financial Crises C: U.S. 2009 Stress Test, Chase P. Ross, June Rhee, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

When President Obama took office in 2009, the Treasury focused on restarting bank lending and repairing the ability of the banking system as a whole to perform the role of credit intermediation. In order to do so, the Treasury needed to raise public confidence that banks had sufficient buffers to withstand even a very adverse economic scenario, especially given heightened uncertainty surrounding the outlook of the U.S. economy and potential losses in the banking system. The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program (SCAP)—the so-called “stress tests”—sought to rigorously measure the resilience of the largest bank holding companies. Those found to have insufficient …

Guarantees And Capital Infusions In Response To Financial Crises B: U.S. Guarantees During The Global Financial Crisis, June Rhee, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

During 2008-09, the federal government extended multiple guarantee programs in an effort to restore the financial market and contain the panic and crisis in the market. For example, the Treasury provided a temporary guarantee program for the money market funds, the FDIC decided to stand behind certain debts and non-interest-bearing transaction accounts, and the Treasury, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve agreed to share losses in certain assets belonging to Citigroup. This case reviews these guarantee programs implemented during the global financial crisis by the government and explores the different rationale that shaped certain design features of each program.

Guarantees And Capital Infusions In Response To Financial Crises A: Haircuts And Resolutions, June Rhee, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

After the mortgage market meltdown in mid-2007 and during the financial crisis in 2008, major financial institutions around the world were on the verge of collapsing one after another. Faced with these troubles, the government had to respond quickly to contain the crisis as efficiently as possible. It was, however, limited in resources, time, and experience. To make matters worse, the complexity and opaqueness of the financial market and these institutions greatly affected the government’s ability to design an efficient and consistent method to contain the crisis. Shortly after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, American International …

Editors’ Note: Fighting The Covid-19 Pandemic Financial Crisis, Andrew Metrick, Rosalind Z. Wiggins

Journal of Financial Crises

Policy makers need decision support as they consider their options. For the past six years the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS), which also publishes the Journal of Financial Crises, has researched and created content about the numerous interventions governments deployed during the Global Financial Crisis (2007-09) and other crises. With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, we considered how we could best deploy our past research and skills to assist the current crisis-fighting efforts. We decided that we could best contribute to the effort by staying true to our mission to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge about financial crises …

Initial Assessment Of Unmanned Aircraft System Characteristics Required To Fill Data Gaps For Short-Term Forecasts: Results Form Focus Groups And Interviews, Janell C. Walther, Liza M. Pytlikzillig, Jake Kawamoto, Adam L. Houston

University of Nebraska Public Policy Center: Publications

The integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the weather surveillance network must be guided by the data needs of the principal stakeholders. This work aims to assess data needs/gaps for short-term forecasts (

Non-Traditional Church Involvement As A Life-Course Turning Point: Qualitative Interviews With Religious Offenders, William Hunter Holt

Dissertations

This research project conducted and then analyzed qualitative interviews from former and current addicts and criminal offenders who are voluntarily participating in the Christian faith at the same non-traditional, Protestant church. An abridged case study of this church is also provided for background and context. Life-course theory and grounded theory are utilized.

Both the offenders and this church were chosen in an attempt to better understand how the offenders’ involvement at this house of worship, along with their faith in general, have impacted them. Obtaining the perspectives of the offender is essential for three reasons. First, qualitative research conducted in …

Hope: The Core Of Social Justice, Emily K. Locke

Public & Community Service Studies Student Scholarship

The purpose of Hope: The Core of Social Justice, is to defend the role of hope in social justice movements. For those who are aware of or who face systematic oppression, the idea of having hope can seem ineffective or even detrimental to any progress in overcoming such systems. But, by clearly defining hope and analyzing its characteristics, one may find that the goal of hope and the goal of any social movement are nearly identical. Philosophical, theological, psychological, and historical references help to shine light on the limited conceptions many have of hope and to support the idea …

Prescribing Public-Private Partnerships To Global Health Initiatives, Elizabeth Rhoads

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For six weeks I served as a finance intern with the Toilet Board Coalition (TBC) and created a Portfolio Presentation to deliver to TBC’s corporate board members in May. With my background in Public Health and interest in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, I was interested in learning how cross-sector partnerships can help accelerate global health development. My internship with TBC provided me with valuable firsthand experience in my topic of research, Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), which I was able to compare alongside a formal literature review. In this research paper I combine my research with my internship experience to …

Human-Centered Design And Foundation Staff: A Case Study In Engaging Grant Beneficiaries, Nicholas G. Randell, Megan Macdavey

The Foundation Review

As part of ongoing efforts to engage grant partner voices in their work with young people who have intellectual disabilities, program staff at the Peter & Elizabeth Tower Foundation have explored the notion of being physically proximate to these young people as a way to more authentically listen to them and their families — those for whose benefit the foundation’s grant dollars are ultimately intended.

The staff’s most recent engagement strategy looked at a way of solving problems and designing solutions for people that puts those people at the focal point of the process: human-centered design. For the Tower Foundation, …

Using Social Network Analysis To Understand The Perceived Role And Influence Of Foundations, Todd L. Ely, Katie Edwards, Rachel Hogg Graham, Danielle Varda

The Foundation Review

Collaboration between foundations and other organizations is critical to the success of foundation-supported initiatives, but the power dynamics among foundations, grantees, and their broader communities can be challenging. Social network analysis is a tool to assess collaboration among organizations and its outcomes. A unique yet often underemphasized benefit of this method of analysis is its focus on dyadic relationships between organizations, which presents an opportunity for foundations to evaluate their role in a network and how they are perceived by the very organizations whose missions they support.

This article leverages a social network analysis of community partners focused on addressing …

Assessing Change And Deepening Impact In Early Learning Systems: The Formal-System Self-Assessment Tool, Erika Takada, Clare Nolan, Meera Mani

The Foundation Review

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is investing in a 10-year strategy, Starting Smart and Strong, that partners with three California communities to develop and test solutions to support parents, caregivers, and educators as they prepare children to be ready for school. Central to this strategy are community efforts to create comprehensive early learning systems that model quality teaching practices, secure and ensure adequate distribution of resources, and have capacity to improve, innovate, and scale.

One of the challenges in systems evaluation is identifying meaningful indicators of interim progress toward longer-term change. From the start, the evaluation has been learning …

Participatory Grantmaking: A Test Of Rubric Scoring Versus Popular Voting Selection In A Blinded Grantmaking Process, Oktawia Wojcik, Lesleigh Ford, Keely Hanson, Claire Boyd, Shena Ashley

The Foundation Review

Because small, community-based organizations play a critical role in delivering services and expressing diverse community values, it is important to find ways to minimize disparities in their access to philanthropic resources. Participatory grantmaking is widely viewed as a practice with good potential to mitigate this tendency.

This article addresses the design of this approach to grantmaking and, specifically, whether changing the decision-making process in addition to changing the decisionmakers has an effect on how grants are allocated. It examines the design of two grant review processes — one based on popular voting, the other a more traditional rubric approach — …

Executive Summaries

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Foundation Review

No abstract provided.