Dear Friends, Thank you for supporting the Urban Strategies Council over the past 32 years as we work with our partners and residents to eliminate persistent poverty in the Bay Area by transforming low-income neighborhoods into vibrant, healthy communities. A few of our 2019 highlights and achievements included: Being selected by the Obama Foundation as [...]
Earlier this month, the Aspen Institute convened twenty-some national grantees, including Urban Strategies Council, to its biannual “Opportunity Youth Form” (OYF) in Aspen, CO. The OYF gathering was centered around deepening the capacities of communities for multilateral collaboration, building effective success pathways, data driven impact assessment, and the role of healing and narrative in driving [...]
Public Services Librarian, Reginald Constant of Laney Community College and Urban Strategies Council Partner, gives feedback on mapping ecosystems at NNIP's May (2018) convening. Earlier this year, the Urban Institute brought together roughly 100 participants from communities across the country for the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) convening. It was well organized, as always, and the nonprofit [...]
In 2015, the United States had the highest prison population in the world at 716 per 100,000 people. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the incarceration rate for African American men in California is 4,180 per 100,000. For comparison, White and Latino men are imprisoned at rates of 420 and 1,028 per 100,000 [...]
From 2014-2017, Urban Strategies Council was honored to serve as the backbone for the Oakland-Alameda County Opportunity Youth Initiative. This prestigious three-year pilot was funded by the Aspen Institute at 26 sites throughout the nation, to better understand and serve the needs of Opportunity Youth. The Aspen Institute continues to create space to share best practices [...]
We are excited that Urban Strategies Council recently was featured by the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership as an example of how data intermediaries and local governments can work together to tackle community challenges. A collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners (including the Council) to further the development and use of neighborhood information systems in [...]
On April 6, 2018 over 140 participants gathered at Chabot College for an all day convening to celebrate formerly incarcerated college students and the campus-based programs and community partners that support them. The event was sponsored by the East Bay Consortium of Support Programs for Formerly Incarcerated College Students (Consortium), an entity that Urban Strategies Council played [...]
A few weeks ago I shared an overview of what collaborative fundraising is and why an organization would do it. This is the exciting conclusion on how to initiate collaborative fundraising. How to Initiate Collaborative Fundraising The best ways to initiate a collaborative fundraising partnership is to propose a pilot or respond to a [...]
Nonprofits exist to execute a mission that serves a need as opposed to the commercial sector whose mission is to turn a profit on goods or services. That said, being a nonprofit does not mean being nonprofitable, in fact our sector relies on many more vehicles for sustainability than our profit driven counterparts. Whether the [...]
At this time last year, Urban Strategies Council released a report on health and education indicators for young children that found boys of color in Oakland are far more likely to experience an array of poor outcomes in the earliest years of their lives – from high rates of asthma to no preschool experience to [...]
