From: Mark Joseph
Date: November 7, 2013
Re: Launch of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities
We are thrilled to formally announce the launch of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University.
Based in the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, our mission is to help reduce urban poverty and promote successful mixed-income communities by facilitating high-quality research and making information and evidence easily available to policymakers and practitioners.
Building on nine years of research and consultation on mixed-income development in several cities across the U.S., we have worked for the past two years to design and launch a center that can add relevant and lasting value to the field.
We thank the Annie E. Casey Foundation for being the lead funder in support of our development and launch. Other funders of our current work include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Campaign for HOPE SF, The American City Coalition, and the Ohio Capital Corporation for Housing.
We thank our key partners including the University of Chicago, Washington University in St. Louis, the Urban Institute, Learning for Action, McCormack Baron Salazar, Urban Strategies, The Community Builders, The Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority and The American City Coalition. We look forward to collaborating with more of you in future.
One of our key products will be periodic Scans of the Field where we collect information about current practice and insights about a specific topic. Our first scan on the topic of Social Dynamics in Mixed-Income Developments is based on information from 31 developments across the country. We are currently working on our second Scan on the topic of Upward Mobility in Mixed-Income Developments. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions about future scans.
Please visit our website to see two other key products we are launching today: a database on mixed-income developments around the country and a mixed-income library. [2023 note: the database has been archived and may be obtained for research purposes by emailing dxw478@case.edu.]
The database currently has over 130 developments. We hope those of you who are developers and practitioners will check for your own developments and contact us with more up-to-date information about your developments that we can include. The database is a beta version that we will continue to refine based on your feedback.
The online library has over 140 entries on the topic of mixed-income development. We hope researchers will bring to our attention any of your articles and reports we are missing. Please join the online social media network on mixed-income communities that we have created along with this library to connect with fellow practitioners, policymakers, researchers and students interested in this field.
Special thanks to Taryn Gress, the project coordinator for the NIMC, who has worked extremely hard since joining us a year ago to make this launch possible and to Paul Brophy, our lead advisor and partner. Thanks also to Eamon Johnson for the development of the mixed-income database and to Smaranda Ene, Michael Salwiesz and Tiesha Hinton for their work on all the NIMC products.
Thank you in advance for your support of our work, we welcome your feedback and suggestions about how we can achieve our vision of being a central resource to the field.
With gratitude,
Mark Joseph, Ph.D.
Director, NIMC
Associate Professor