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About the Center for Civic Innovation
The Center for Civic Innovation’s mandate is to improve the quality of life in cities by shaping public policy and enriching public discourse on urban issues. We believe that outdated, bureaucratic, government-centered policies cannot revive our civic health, and that cities will turn around only by devolving power and responsibility to the people closest to any problem, whether they are police beat cops, parents or local ministers. CCI is chaired by former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith.
CCI is dedicated to non-partisan pragmatic public policy solutions. CCI’s advisory board is composed of a bipartisan group of mayors—such as Jerry Brown of Oakland, Martin O’Malley of Baltimore, Manny Diaz of Miami, and Rick Baker of St. Petersburg, Florida—who have achieved dramatic changes and improvements in their cities. CCI’s writers and Senior Fellows are among the nation’s foremost experts on urban public policy and are dedicated to developing new policy prescriptions to meet urban problems.
These prescriptions are contained in CCI’s authoritative publication: The Entrepreneurial City: A How-To Handbook for Urban Innovators. The Entrepreneurial City is a collection of brief presentations by America’s leading mayors and the nation’s most successful urban policy experts, providing a comprehensive array of reforms that can significantly improve the quality of life in our nation’s cities. Among the mayors and former mayors represented in this volume are New York’s Rudy Giuliani, Chicago’s Richard Daley, and Cleveland’s Michael White.
In conjunction with the Fannie Mae Foundation, CCI has also produced five “This Works” reports on time-tested programs for urban revival. These reports provide urban leaders with a “how to” guide for addressing some of the fundamental challenges facing America's cities: finance, crime, education, housing, economic development.
CCI’s main program areas are:
Education Reform
Education reform, particularly in low-income urban areas, is one of the top public policy concerns today, so it should come as no surprise that the Manhattan Institute has the best education reform experts in the country to offer practical advice to policymakers. Leading the Institute’s efforts in this area is the nationally renowned education researcher Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow and endowed chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.
Dr. Greene has conducted evaluations of school choice and accountability programs in Florida, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and San Antonio. Dr. Greene was the only researcher cited in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion and Justice O’Connor’s concurring opinion in the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case upholding the constitutionality of school vouchers. He is author of the book Education Myths. His articles have appeared in policy journals, such as The Public Interest, City Journal, and Education Next, in academic journals, such as The Georgetown Public Policy Review, Education and Urban Society, and The British Journal of Political Science, as well as in major newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
CCI’s work on education reform focuses on improving two main reforms of public education: school choice and accountability. School choice reforms (including charter schools and school vouchers) are dedicated to improving the options available to parents of children in public schools, and making public schools more directly accountable to parents for education outcomes. Accountability reforms are devoted to improving educational achievement by focusing on imparting knowledge and skills and making teachers, administrators, and students accountable for success or failure.
Crime Reduction
One of CCI’s greatest successes has been its role in reducing crime. The Center assisted and publicized Senior Fellow George Kelling’s work on the “fixing broken windows theory,” which has gone on to become the focal point of police reforms in numerous cities across the country, including New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. This theory holds that public disorder, like graffiti, leads to greater social pathology if left unattended. The Center also enabled Kelling and Catherine Coles to publish Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order & Reducing Crime in Our Communities, which details how the “broken windows” policing strategy is sweeping the country.
CCI and Professor Kelling are also co-coordinating a new initiative utilizing the “broken windows” method known as Safe Cities. Safe Cities is a pilot program designed to assist local and state law enforcement agencies in their ongoing efforts to detect and deter terrorist attacks in the United States. The Safe Cities initiative is being developed in consultation with counter-terrorism agencies from across the Eastern seaboard.
CCI Senior Fellow Richard Greenwald is working with Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, New Jersey to devise a prisoner reentry strategy. This strategy places emphasis on helping recently released prisoners find and maintain jobs and develop positive relationships with their children and families. This will reduce recidivism among the 1,400 parolees released each year to the streets of Newark.
New York City and State Fiscal Policy
New York City and New York State impose tax regimes on their citizens that are among the highest in the nation. As a result, both New Yorks tend to lag the nation in economic development and job creation. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow for Tax and Budgetary Studies E.J. McMahon monitors the finances of New York City and New York State governments and deciphers their implications for taxpayers and the business climate. His ongoing commentary and analysis of important fiscal issues can be found on his website, NYFiscalwatch.com.
Social Entrepreneurship
From the Founding to the present, America has been defined by a vibrant civil society where individuals come together in voluntary organizations of all sizes to help solve common problems. The Manhattan Institute's Award for Social Entrepreneurship honors contemporary non-profit leaders who have found innovative, private solutions for America’s most pressing social problems.
Every year, the Manhattan Institute solicits nominations for the Social Entrepreneurship Award from philanthropic organizations and social entrepreneurs from across the country. As many as five winners will be presented with gifts of up to $10,000 and will be invited to an award dinner in New York City attended by philanthropists, policy makers, and media. Nominations may be submitted by anyone familiar with a person’s or group’s activities, including the entrepreneur him- or herself. Nomination form will be available online in January, 2009.
Welfare Reform
Many of our nation’s cities continue to experience high levels of poverty, with significant segments of their urban populations seemly locked in an intractable cycle of unemployment and government dependence.
The welfare reforms enacted in the mid-1990s were designed to address these problems, and welfare reform remains one of the nation’s most impressive public policy success stories. Nonetheless, welfare reforms remain under constant pressure and criticism, and much work remains to be done to ensure that America’s urban areas are integrated into the mainstream economy—a precondition for access to the American dream.
CCI is committed to documenting the successes of welfare reform and exploring how it can be improved and expanded. CCI’s initiative Gaining Ground? Measuring the Impact of America’s Welfare Revolution, led by Dr. June O’Neill, Ph.D., the former director of the Congressional Budget Office, will track the success of the national law and state initiatives by analyzing the workforce participation and household earnings of single mothers, and family formation in the post-reform era.
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