From the Lumina Foundation, this video clip provides information on a public-private partnership in Louisville, Kentucky. The partnership has set a goal of adding 55,000 bachelors and associate degrees by the year 2020. The partnership is a collaborative effort of Louisville employers, educators, and civic leaders, who are focused on building a well-educated, innovative, and productive workforce. This video is the first in a series that will be released by the Lumina Foundation.

The Foundation Center issued this report on foundation giving trends in 2009. Education and health have the greatest shares of foundation grant dollars, which included areas of education, health, human services, and public affairs/society benefit. Human services had the most number of grants, but grantmaking did decline 2.1 percent from 2008 to 2009. Eight out of ten major fields experienced funding declines between 2008 and 2009 due to the economic recession.

In 2009, the United States ranked fourteenth in college graduation rates among industrialized countries, and this research highlights ways to improve college attendance and graduation rates at 4-year colleges. This working paper, through the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis, provides a review of 38 studies on the relationship between assets and children’s education attainment. Then, authors discuss Child Development Accounts (CDAs) policies, which have been proposed as an asset approach for helping to finance college.

This resource was authored by the Alliance for Children and Families and was designed to help non-profit organizations plan for the future. The report identifies “disruptive forces” that will fundamentally change and transform the non-profit human services sector. Pulling from research, authors provide an overview of six “disruptive forces” to help organizations become adaptable to change, which include: purposeful experimentation, information liberation, integrating science, uncompromising demand for impact, branding causes, not organizations, and attracting investors, not donors.

Annually released by the Giving USA Foundation, this report details trends in charitable donating throughout 2010, the types of organizations giving money, and which charitable causes are receiving the funds. In 2010, contributions totaled $290.89 billion, which was a 3.8 percent increase over 2009, and 35 percent of the total was given to religious organizations and 14 percent to education.

This cross-site analysis examines all 8 of the exemplary FBCO-TANF partnerships described in the project’s case studies, by drawing out important findings related to volunteer management, organizational infrastructure, inter-agency communication, and place-based strategies. Moreover, the 14-page report articulates some of the leading reasons a TANF agency would want to partner with an FBCO, and it describes how effective partnerships can emerge. (author abstract)

On April 26th, 2011, Peer TA hosted a Webinar on a pair of innovative partnerships between TANF programs (or other public systems) and local faith-based or community organizations serving the same low-income families and individuals in their communities. Though these two sectors often work independently at the local level, many TANF officials and program leaders have experienced considerable gains by partnering.

This cross-site analysis examines all 8 of the exemplary FBCO-TANF partnerships described in the project’s case studies, by drawing out important findings related to volunteer management, organizational infrastructure, inter-agency communication, and place-based strategies. Moreover, the 14-page report articulates some of the leading reasons a TANF agency would want to partner with an FBCO, and it describes how effective partnerships can emerge.

Given the weak economy, many nonprofit organizations have been forced to make budget cuts, and often, these reductions are in organizational capacity, rather than direct service funding. The Finance Project authored this report in response to these trends on four approaches for nonprofit organizations serving youth, specifically, and how organizational leaders can support and strengthen their organizational capacity, including building accurate overhead rates into contracts and grants, accessing funding to directly support capacity building, accessing technical assistance to support or improve organizational capacity, and forming partnerships to share administrative services.

It is expected that by the year 2018, sixty percent of all American jobs will require at least some college education. It has also been projected that if the current rates of degree completion continue, the American workforce will fall three million workers short of meeting the demands of this changing labor market. In this report from the Center for American Progress and the Council for Adults & Experiential Learning, the authors outline mechanisms and policies necessary to ensure postsecondary success among non-traditional and mobile learners. Among these mechanisms are articulation agreements between institutions allowing for easy credit transfers, methods for awarding credit to learning occurring outside of the classroom, resources that make educational options more apparent to students, and the development of programs based on competencies rather than credit hours. The authors stress that these changes are necessary both to meet the needs of the growing numbers of non-traditional students and to address the demands of the changing American economy.