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Building an Economic Case for Policy Changes

Momentum Nonprofit Partners

Why Economics is your friend as a nonprofit advocate By Kevin Dean, President & CEO Tennessee Nonprofit Network Last year, at a conference out of town, I shared coffee with an old friend as she recounted her incredible public policy journey. Nonprofits excel at highlighting the human cost of social issues.

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Housing and Homelessness: Breaking Down Silos for Systems Change

Stanford Social Innovation Review

America’s homeless response system has been called “the emergency room of society,” conjuring images of a space where the focus is on urgent intervention—finding shelter or managing encampments—rather than trying to prevent crises from happening in the first place. Housing is the solution to homelessness.

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The Economic Case against Work Requirements

NonProfit Quarterly

Image credit: AndreyPopov on istock.com Work requirements—or requiring people to find employment in order to access public benefits—force people to prove that they deserve a social safety net. But where did they come from, and why are they still a central part of economic policy today?

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The New Problem-Solving Skills That All Cities Need

Stanford Social Innovation Review

By James Anderson Here’s a new axiom fit for the 21st century: The greater the global challenge, the more likely it is to fall to local governments to fix. Local governments are left bearing the brunt and have, understandably, so far struggled. Or take the ongoing global migration wave.

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The Pitfalls of Personal Judgment

Stanford Social Innovation Review

By Logan McDonnell As a nonprofit professional with over a decade of experience working in homelessness programs and currently working in homelessness prevention, I’ve often heard coworkers describe how a person in one of these programs reminded them of a close relative or friend.

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Can Cities Be the Source of Scalable Innovations?

Stanford Social Innovation Review

What little optimism remains to tackle such complex challenges is mostly placed in supranational schemes, such as the COP climate change conferences, or transformational national policy, such as the Green New Deal in the US. ” Scaling up social innovation takes time, but there are also varying ways it can be done.

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Systems Change: Making the Aspirational Actionable

Stanford Social Innovation Review

In recent years, social justice leaders have consistently called for a systems change approach to redressing the root causes of social problems, rather than only mitigating their symptoms. After all, social justice is by nature utopian. Public awareness: to change the perception of a group at a societal or cultural level.