Family Independence Initiative (FII) is a national nonprofit which leverages the power of information to illuminate and accelerate the initiative low-income families take to improve their lives. Using hard data and compelling stories, we are sparking a movement to transform the stereotypes, beliefs, practices, and policies that undermine families' efforts to get ahead.
FII believes that our country is greatly underestimating the ability of low-income families to lead their own change. FII has tracked the progress of hundreds of families over the last decade and found that the lack of upward mobility is not the result of a lack of initiative but can be traced to two other factors:
1. Lack of information, and therefore lack of investment, in the initiatives low-income families take on their own or collectively. In order to access services and programs, families have to show neediness instead of initiative(bolstering already prevalent negative stereotyping).
2. Negative stereotypes and the focus on individualism have led to government and charitable practices that discourage families from turning to one another and developing the mutuality that historically built America's middle class.
The Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative has launched a new website to share information about our collective efforts to combat homelessness. The website includes information on Homeless Initiative at work including real life stories of clients whose lives have been transformed, quarterly progress reports, educational information about Measure H, and latest news.
The way we work is changing forever. A host of technologies-from automation to digital platforms for coordination of tasks-are reinventing not just what people do to earn a living but at a much deeper level how we organize to create value. The landscape of labor economics is in upheaval.
Solutions won't come from any one agency, discipline, or company. It will take collaboration, broad public engagement, smart policy, and an openness to reinventing old economic models. The IFTF Workable Futures Initiative is a call-to-action for policymakers, platform developers, corporate strategists, activists, and of course other workers of all kinds, to join us in blueprinting these positive platforms for the future of work. The time is now to grapple with the challenges ahead, develop sustainable solutions, and create a future of work that is workable for everyone.
The Integration Initiative supports cities that are harnessing existing momentum and leadership for change, overhauling long obsolete systems and fundamentally reshaping communities and policies to meet the needs of low-income residents. - See more at: http://www.livingcities.org/integration/#sthash.fTTfVwwk.dpuf
The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank's official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products.
Through the OKR, The World Bank collects, disseminates, and permanently preserves its intellectual output in digital form. The OKR is interoperable with other repositories and supports optimal discoverability and re-usability of the content by complying with Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) standards and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
The site, accessible at www.clustermapping.us, provides cluster initiatives and other economic development organizations an opportunity to register in a national database. The registry allows initiatives to showcase their activities and events to a wider public, search for appropriate partners across the nation, and learn from best practice examples of their peers. The site also provides free access to a rich database on the profile and performance of clusters and regional economies.
The Initiative on Triple Bottom Line Development evolved from the College's Social Equity and Opportunity Forum (SEOF). The Forum was established by the Dean in 2007 as a bridging and brokering entity with a mission to elevate visibility and understanding of equity and opportunity issues in the region and facilitate effective response. When we speak of opportunity, we speak of fulfilling potential to thrive in physical, cultural, intellectual, and spiritual terms. When we speak of equity we speak of fairness, within and between generations, in the distribution of access, benefits, and burdens.
Advancing a new understanding of democracy for the 21st century and promoting new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life.
Promoting new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life.
The Collaborative is a national leader in the field of community development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. The Initiative sustains a wide range of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset-based paradigm and increase support for the field across-the-board.
The Democracy Collaborative was established in 2000 to advance a new understanding of democracy for the 21st century and to promote new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life.
Our goal is to change the prevailing paradigm of community economic development-and of the economy as a whole-in the United States toward a new emphasis and system based on:
Broadening ownership and stewardship over capital
Democracy at the workplace
Stabilizing community and emphasizing locality
Equitable and inclusive growth
Environmental, social, and institutional sustainability
The Collaborative is a national leader in the field of community development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. The Initiative sustains a wide range of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset-based paradigm and increase support for the field across-the-board.
The Strong Healthy Communities Initiative (SHCI) in Newark, NJ, is a cross-sector institutional partnership that aims to close the education "opportunity gap" in Newark by improving child health and well‐being as a lever to greater student achievement. It is the vision of SHCI and our partners to ensure that all Newark children, regardless of income, are healthy and ready to learn.
An initiative of Peter Block and friends, Restore Commons aims to curate the ways of thinking and practice towards the common good. The move to the commons is well underway. We simply want to document it. Restore Commons is designed to be an online gathering place for stories and radical ideas strong enough to build the social capital and engaged community required to restore the common good.
The website features a variety of content including stories, articles, videos and podcasts that highlight inverted and radical thinking that is essential to an alternative economy, a connected neighborhood, and ways of dealing with the end of the so-called consumerist middle class. This is what is required to restore compassion, civility and interdependence that is disturbingly fragile in today's world. The focus is on place-based, localized and grassroots initiatives that are alternatives to the tools of empire.
Large-scale, long-term restoration
Since 2013, we have worked tirelessly to build a universal proof of concept that brings farmers, landowners, entrepreneurs, communities, nature organisations and legislators together to create real returns on investment per hectare. Called 4 Returns, this framework is capable of initiating, organising and following through on large-scale and long-term restoration initiatives that integrate ecology, land use and business.
"The World Climate Simulation, from Climate Interactive, the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, and U-Mass Lowell's Climate Change Initiative, is an in-person role-playing exercise of the UN climate change negotiations. Through the simulation, participants get to explore the necessary speed and level of action that nations must take to address global climate change. At the heart of the experience is the use of our interactive computer model C-ROADS, which is used to rapidly analyze the results of the game play. All the materials and tools for the game are available for free in multiple languages.
"
The School has been initiated and nurtured by Forum for the Future, with the support of multiple partners.
We have the ambition to serve the emerging field of systems change, as a vehicle for connecting and amplifying spheres of learning and practice, and as a case study of an initiative grown explicitly as a system change endeavour. To do this we have used a methodological framework developed by Anna Birney, Director of the School and author of Cultivating System Change: A Practitioner's Companion (2014). This framework suggests key capabilities for bringing about system change for a sustainable future can be divided into five core areas (read more here on our blog) which underpin our curriculum and our everyday practice.
The Carbon Tracker initiative is the first project of Investor Watch, a non-profit company established by its directors to align the capital markets with efforts to tackle climate change. The board of Investor Watch includes Mark Campanale and Jeremy Leggett. Investor Watch was founded in 2009 (Company No. 06888857)
The Open Streets Project is a collaboration between the Alliance for Biking & Walking and The Street Plans Collaborative. The goal of the project is to share information about open streets and increase the number, size, and frequency of initiatives occurring across North America.
Davidson Design for Life (DD4L) is an initiative of the Town of Davidson to foster healthy community design through the use of health impact assessments (HIA), public participation, and collaborative efforts in Davidson, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region, and North Carolina.
The U.S. Economic Development Administration's investment policy is designed to establish a foundation for sustainable job growth and the building of durable regional economies throughout the United States. This foundation builds upon two key economic drivers - innovation and regional collaboration. Innovation is key to global competitiveness, new and better jobs, a resilient economy, and the attainment of national economic goals. Regional collaboration is essential for economic recovery because regions are the centers of competition in the new global economy and those that work together to leverage resources and use their strengths to overcome weaknesses will fare better than those that do not. EDA encourages its partners around the country to develop initiatives that advance new ideas and creative approaches to address rapidly evolving economic conditions.
Citizen uptake to date has been, however less than was hoped. Part of it is the normal delay in innovation uptake, and part is linked to poor internet penetration and low connectivity in aid intensive countries. But the time has come to analyze more closely the reasons for this tepid demand side response or its lack of sustainability after an initial peak of interest. What may well be missing is the human element and the ability of people potentially interested in using this information to work together in conducive venues where they could exchange ideas, develop joint approaches, and train citizens and CSO organizations.