Staff provided advice and guidance to foundation staff charged with planning and implementing significant and sensitive changes in the approach and scale of a grant program for CDCs and local community development intermediaries. Assistance included developing and assessing options, communicating the results of changes to grantees, and assisting grantees in making adjustments to funding changes.

Staff worked closely with staff and board members of a national association of community development partnership organizations in developing and drafting a working paper that articulated key challenges and new directions for the community development industry. The paper, intended for the benefit of the association’s member organizations, has been widely circulated in the community development field.

Staff recently completed a new round of evaluation and program development activity that supported a large foundation’s review of the direction of its future grantmaking for housing and community development programs in Indianapolis. This latest engagement builds on over a decade of program evaluation work that has tracked the development of the current system and the impacts of local programs on housing affordability and neighborhood improvement in Indianapolis.

Staff has worked closely for several years with the senior management team of Cleveland-based Neighborhood Progress, Inc., widely regarded as one of the country’s most effective local community development intermediaries. Urban Ventures’ current assignment is supporting a new phase of program and organizational planning that will guide NPI’s implementation of an expanded strategy that focuses on larger-scale “place-making” initiatives leading to larger-scale impacts on neighborhood markets and quality of life in targeted Cleveland neighborhoods.

Staff recently assumed responsibility for a continuing phase of a three-year evaluation of a grant program targeted to emerging community organizations and leaders in Cleveland. The program design includes support and training for a citywide grantmaking committee comprised of community leaders who review program proposals and make grant decisions. The program is being expanded to include all neighborhoods in the city and Foundation staff expect that the program could serve as a model for similar grantmaking programs in other cities.

Staff recently completed a multi-dimensional evaluation to gather information about usage of a new Internet access portal intended mainly for lower-income families and communities. The website provides an expanding array of content intended to help users become comfortable with computers and the Internet and to offer information and resources useful to families interested in improving their economic well-being. The study combined an extensive analysis of a database of users and site visits, focus groups with site users in target neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Washington DC and Chicago, and a survey of registered users. The study provided for the first time information describing the entire current user base, patterns of site usage, and early reactions to available content in the areas of financial management and jobs and employment.