The first of the Boston Foundation’s Racial Wealth Gap Event Series, “Minding the Gap: Land Wealth,” focuses on the role race and wealth have had in the distribution, allocation, and protection of land in our country. Ranging from the creation and enforcement of restrictive land use regulations, such as zoning laws, to the lack of investment in and prioritization of available public goods, the racial wealth gap has played a role in how land is used and who gets to benefit from it.
In partnership with The Barr Foundation, The Boston Foundation is pleased to announce the return of Live Arts Boston, with nearly $1 million in grants available for performing artists, creators, and cultural practitioners in the Boston area. Prior to the opening of the 2023-2024 cycle, Live Arts Boston is offering a series of six information sessions (4 in-person, 2 virtual) to share more about the new program and address any questions or concerns.
Dive into your holiday shopping and support local AAPI-owned businesses at a unique Asian-style night market inside the atrium at 75 Arlington/10 St. James in Back Bay. A roster of AAPI-operated small businesses will be on hand with holiday gifts, delectable treats and other festive items - for one special night only!
The next virtual event in the Racial Wealth Equity Research and Conversation Series will focus on baby bonds and feature Dr. Darrick Hamilton alongside Massachusetts Treasurer Deborah Goldberg and Connecticut Treasurer Erick Russell. The event will explore Dr. Hamilton’s research on the potential of baby bonds to help narrow the racial wealth gap and advance economic security for all. It will also include a discussion of the nation’s first statewide baby bonds program being rolled out in Connecticut and compare and contrast this with similar legislation pending in Massachusetts.
This Color of the Capital Gap forum featured a presentation of the latest data on the local disparities in capital access for entrepreneurs of color and a candid discussion with mission financing institutions that are working hard to close the gap.
On November 16, more than 300 people packed the Edgerley Center for Civic Leadership and our office space for the 2023 Annual Meeting. Featuring food from TBF nonprofit partner NECAT, a wonderful musical performance from Hamilton-Garrett Center for Music and Arts' Youth Choir, and with the 12 remarkable people featured in our Annual Report as special guests, we celebrated our new brand, our renewed focus on equity, and the nonprofits, donors and community partners who power of collective work.
Greater Boston faces a crippling housing shortage, the effects of which are most destabilizing for moderate- and low-income families and families of color in the region. The Greater Boston Housing Report Card highlighted how the region has been falling behind on housing production, and how housing cost burdens have been increasing, making rental housing and homeownership increasingly unaffordable.
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TBF President & CEO Lee Pelton joined the leaders of our three Equity Funds – Scott Knox, Javier Juarez, and Danielle Kim – with grantees from these funds – for a rich conversation about amplifying community power for our most marginalized communities and advancing a shared vision for grassroots philanthropy.
As part of a new Racial Wealth Equity Research Center initiative, Boston Indicators commissioned Amy Dain, among the region’s leading zoning experts, to research and write Exclusionary by Design: An Investigation of Zoning’s Use as a Tool of Race, Class, and Family Exclusion in Boston’s Suburbs, 1920 to Today. Based on extensive review of local planning documents, state reports, and press coverage over the past 100 years, the report finds widespread use of zoning as a tool of social exclusion against residents of color, especially Black residents; lower-income and working-class residents; families with school-aged children; religious minorities; immigrants; and, in some cases, any newcomers/outsiders at all.
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The Boston Foundation hosted a panel discussion about donors of color in philanthropy. The panel sought to reframe the conversation about groups who have traditionally been overlooked as philanthropists, with panelists discussing traditional and non-traditional philanthropy in communities of color and how to encourage greater appreciation, deeper engagement, and more wide-spread recognition of their contributions.
Celebrate two decades and counting of workforce development leadership and innovation with SkillWorks! Join us in this celebration of our work together and opportunity to reminisce and share visions for the future.
The Supreme Court’s recent ruling effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions has rippled across sectors, prompting nonprofit, corporate, and government leaders to examine potential impacts on their constituents, employees, programming, and missions. While the implications are not yet fully known, the nonprofit sector and its allies face a pivotal moment and opportunity to come together to continue to advance commitments to building a more just and equitable society.
Policies have systematically denied opportunities to Black households and other households of color, dramatically driving the racial wealth gap and entrenching the hurdles for some populations to accumulate wealth. At this event, Boston Indicators released the new report, A Long Road Home, which explores the existing landscape of programs and policies in Massachusetts to support homeowners—many of which are national models—and how we can build on this foundation to continue addressing these discriminatory policies and practices and pushing toward equity.
This session offered potential applicants to the Safety Net Grants program a chance to learn more about the eligibility requirements, application process and selection criteria.
Part of a new research and conversation series on racial wealth equity in Greater Boston, this event featured research from the Boston Fed, Racial Wealth Disparities: Reconsidering the Roles of Human Capital and Inheritance. This paper builds upon common analyses of the Survey of Consumer Finances to generate a variety of new insights into the relative asset levels of different racial groups.
This event celebrated the release of a research brief unveiling a snapshot of Asian-owned businesses in Massachusetts. The brief captures the resilience and resourcefulness of Asian entrepreneurs in the Commonwealth and highlights the significant contributions of Asian-owned businesses to the state's economy, which add billions of dollars while facing numerous barriers to accessing services that support businesses.
In 2022, Citizens Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), , with expanded funding by TBF and the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, launched the Neighborhood Emergency Housing Support Program, a one-time grant for community-based organizations to conduct proactive outreach to residents about housing stability resources. The Metropolitan Area Planning Council analyzed the efficacy of emergency rental relief and the vital role of community-based organizations. In this webinar, experts reviewed the recommendations and a panel discussion featured community-based organization representatives sharing their experiences.
Thank you for joining us for the release of the 2023 report from the Boston Opportunity Agenda and the Birth to Eight Collaborative, '(Re)Building Boston's Early Education and Care Sector: Supply, Affordability and Quality Needed.' This year's report examines the continued impact of COVID-19 and pandemic recovery investment on child care in Boston, analyzes changes in supply and demand, and considers the measurement of and access to quality child care.
Boston Indicators and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston hosted their first convening in a new research and conversation series on racial wealth equity in Greater Boston, focusing on surveys of wealth. The event detailed how the best surveys on wealth are conducted, why they’re so complex, and why good local data is hard to come by. It showed what the best national data reveal about wealth inequality by race, income, and education and provided detail on a new local effort to fill local data gaps.
This new report analyzes the region’s unique and growing intra-Black diversity, maps how residential patterns have shifted, and details how disparities by income and wealth manifest across Black communities. Discussion at the event unpacked what these trends mean for our shared efforts to move forward toward justice. The event included music, food, drink and opportunities to connect at receptions both before and after the program.
On March 23, we gathered for the release and discussion of two new research reports about the postsecondary enrollment and completion trends of Boston students. Following the research presentations, panelists representing the Boston Public Schools and local college access and success nonprofit organizations discussed the implications of the research as well as recent directions and developments in supporting Boston students on their postsecondary journey.
Please join us for the release and discussion of a new report about the complex early childhood education and care subsidy system in Massachusetts. Following the research presentations, panelists representing different segments of the early childhood ecosystem will discuss the implications of these findings and recommendations to strengthen the subsidy system in Massachusetts.
On November 16, the Boston Foundation was pleased to host an online webinar focused on the importance and impact of the U.S. Census and its data in Greater Boston. Co-Sponsored by Boston Indicators, the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center and Massachusetts Voter Table, the event featured three presentations on the history and importance of data to drive solutions to critical problems, and ongoing efforts to ensure that Census data now and heading toward Census 2030 reflects a complete count of residents.
Held in conjunction with the release of the first in a series of biennial report cards on the state of the city in a changing climate, our virtual forum dug in on the barriers to change, and highlighted where Boston can continue to be a world leader in climate response. After a presentation of the findings, the researchers shared methods they used to evaluate Boston’s ongoing progress toward the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, their ideas about how to make our city climate ready, and their recommendations for ways that everyone, from government officials to residents, can collaborate and contribute to meaningful change. Following the data presentation, a panel of experts in the field had a conversation sharing their perspectives on a series of questions.
Before a sizeable and thoroughly engaged online audience, the Asian Business Empowerment Council, or ABEC, made its programmatic debut with a lively forum designed to elevate the voices of the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) business community and a number of panelists in position to collaborate with them.
Please join us at our first in-person forum in two years, for the release of the 2022 Greater Boston Housing Report Card. This year’s Greater Boston Housing Report Card explores current trends in housing availability as well as barriers to accessing existing subsidized housing. The research presentation will be followed by a panel discussion of experts, each with a unique perspective on the interwoven housing access inequities.
On October 25, Boston Foundation President and CEO Lee Pelton sat down for a virtual conversation with American historian and journalist Jill Lepore as a special event honoring donors to TBF’s Annual Campaign for Civic Leadership. Using history as a way of discussing the “deep divide in our nation,” Pelton asked Lepore to place our current politics in the context of other times.
The Boston Foundation hosted an information session for fellow nonprofit partners to learn about impala, a groundbreaking new startup being built to democratize access to critical social impact data and connect grantmakers and grantseekers to foster greater collaboration. During this webinar, attendees learned how to use the free platform, and connected with the impala team to share questions and feedback to inform the ways in which the impala tools can impact and support relationship-building and resource generation efforts.
Ahead of the 2022 Midterm Election, the Boston Foundation held our first nonpartisan conversation on voter engagement. We set the table for the conversation with a presentation by Boston Indicators with some grounding data on the state of voting in Massachusetts and then moved into a panel discussion where we heard from experts in the field to answer the question: What can we as individuals and institutions be doing to get the vote out?
At a town hall-style presentation, Vital Village Networks, in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Ariadne Labs, shared their progress to date bringing together a new coalition around increasing equity for birthing familes, and shared some of the powerful stories of why the coalition is needed now.
This year, the Boston Foundation began hosting a three-part discussion series on the topic of reparations. In our third conversation we explored models at institutions, such as health centers, higher education institutions and foundations. The conversation was moderated by M. Lee Pelton, President & CEO of the Boston Foundation, and Imari Paris Jeffries, Executive Director of King Boston. Joining them for this conversation was Michael Curry, Esq., President & CEO of Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, and Cynthia Neal Spence, Director of the Spelman College Social Justice Scholars Program.
Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions of American workers. But those who provide support for people in infancy, illness, disability or old age are too often excluded from our conception of high-value labor. So, this Labor Day we released the latest Boston Indicators report on care work in Massachusetts, analyzing recent trends in this overlooked sector. A panel of experts joined us to discuss these trends through the release of Care Work in Massachusetts: A Call For Racial and Economic Justice for a Neglected Sector.
SkillWorks and the Boston Foundation launched the inaugural cohort of the SkillWorks Fellowship Solution & Design Lab for Workforce Innovation and introduced the first round of SkillWorks Fellows, followed by a discussion moderated by President & CEO, Dr. Lee Pelton, on the future of workforce and economic equity.
In order to address the housing crisis, we must reorient the process to improve equity — by focusing on representation, participation, and inclusive engagement. The report “Representation in the Housing Process: Best Practices for Improving Racial Equity,” by Boston University, prepared for the Massachusetts Coalition for Racial Equity in Housing, and related forum highlighted the disconnect between the traditional methods of developing and implementing housing policies and the needs and wants of the communities for whom these policies are developed.
