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This Hamilton Project policy paper provides a dozen facts on struggling lower-middle-class families focusing on two key challenges: food insecurity, and the low return to work for struggling lower-middle-class families who lose tax and transfer benefits as their earnings increase. These facts highlight the critical role of federal tax and transfer programs in providing income support to families struggling to remain out of poverty.

Systems thinking The fact that ecological sustainability is a property of a web of relationships means that in order to understand it properly, in order to become ecologically literate, we need to learn how to think in terms of relationships, in terms of interconnections, patterns, context. In science, this type of thinking is known as systemic thinking or "systems thinking." It is crucial for understanding ecology, because ecology - derived from the Greek word oikos ("household") - is the science of relationships among the various members of the Earth Household.

Knowledge wants to be free! 1We've decided to produce world-class educational materials by elite professors and elite designers. And give them to you for free. 2 We think you deserve free access to materials written by the world's foremost authorities - worth thousands of dollars - whether you are from New York or New Delhi. In fact, we wrote a mission statement about what we want to continue to do for you and the rest of the world. 3 In short, we do it as a labour of love and because we know you will help us in return!

Heartland Democracy engages directly with Midwestern youth, independent thinkers, centrists, and folks who are uninvolved in their community and politics.  Using shared values and critical issues as the bases and sparks for discussion, Heartland Democracy targets specific participants, institutions, demographic segments, and geographic areas for exchanges in which we weave together a coherent set of values, stories, history, facts, and ideas to reach the emotional factors so decisive in the shaping of mindsets. 

Our national transportation policy has barely changed since the 1950s, when gas was 20 cents a gallon and President Eisenhower launched the interstate highway system. Today, we live in a very different world. The interstates have been built. Americans are paying record prices at the pump and feeling stuck with costly commutes and congestion. Bridges are crumbling. As our population becomes ever more urban, more are breathing dirty air. Our climate is threatened. Too many older, younger and rural Americans are stranded. Volatile areas of the world literally have us over a barrel - millions of barrels a day, in fact.

U.S. Census Bureau State & County quick facts

About Voter's Edge Welcome to Voter's Edge Voter's Edge is a comprehensive, nonpartisan online guide to federal, state, and local elections in California, Illinois, and New York. With Voter's Edge, voters can: Access their full, personalized ballot by entering their address. Get in-depth information on candidates, measures, and who supports them. See candidate biographies, top priorities, photos, policy videos, endorsements, and detailed information about who funds their campaigns. Read neutral summaries of ballot measures, see the latest news on the measures, and find out who supports and opposes them. Check where, when, and how to vote, including information on their local polling locations. Keep track of their choices to make voting easier. Share information about the election with friends and family.

Collaboration is appealing in concept but challenging in practice. While extensive resources-including ones from the Community Tool Box, The Intersector Project, and NewNetworkLeader.org-exist online to support collaborative efforts, the fact remains that we human beings are simply not very good at making "we" work. And yet, most changemakers today acknowledge that to address the complex social and environmental challenges we face we must learn how to collaborate-across organizations, sectors, networks, and differences. Effective collaboration must become a reality, not just an aspiration.

Systems thinking, according to HU, has two important dimensions. One is the establishment of a new paradigm that understands global issues as inherently complex, multi-dimensional, conflictive and open to outside influence and intervention. A problem like slavery, for example, may seem intractable because of the economic interests it serves; in fact, the institutional and organizational linkages-the supply chains-that comprise slavery's power structure are vulnerable. The first step in system thinking is to map those linkages to better understand how they fit together and pinpoint their likely weak points. The next step is to devise a strategy that combines public advocacy, coalition building, insider lobbying, and investigative journalism to target those linkages, forcing those implicated in slavery, wittingly or unwittingly, to reform, and weakening the larger circuit of power over time.

The heart of our work is the Ecological Footprint. The Footprint measures human demand on nature, expressed as a single, easy-to-understand number that's scalable from an individual to a global level. Our Footprint data and tools empower leaders at the local and national level to make confident policy and investment decisions backed by facts.

These principles were initially derived by Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist by training, for groups that were attempting to manage common-pool resources. The fact that groups possessing these design features were capable of managing their own affairs was so new against the background of received economic wisdom that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. The design principles were later generalized by David Sloan Wilson, Ostrom, and Michael Cox in two respects. First, they follow from the basic evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species. Second, because of their theoretical generality, they apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources. That is why they provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy groups, which is the objective of PROSOCIAL." (http://alanhonick.com/prosocial/)

The SmartCode is a unified land development ordinance for planning and urban design. It folds zoning, subdivision regulations, urban design, and optional architectural standards into one compact document. Because the SmartCode enables community vision by coding specific outcomes that are desired in particular places, it is meant to be locally customized (also known as "calibrated") by professional planners, architects, and attorneys.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture - a modern "museum" on the Internet - promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE TOOL is designed to help optimize the impact of economic development investments on economic vitality, natural resource stewardship, and community well-being. Click below to get quick facts, or download this User's Guide to dig into details.