Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • Tech for Turnout

    High tech tools offer low cost ways to reach many voters and mobilize turnout, especially in mid term elections. From applications that allow campaigns to deliver personal text messages to hundreds of people at once, to new digital platforms for online polling and campaign management, many of the successful campaigns launched across the country during and after 2016 have leveraged these tech innovations to engage with voters.

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  • More Young Voters

    Get out the vote groups like Inspire U.S.and Penn Leads the Vote have found that many young people are more engaged than ever before in wanting to vote, but they just need a little nudge in the right direction. From simply answering questions, to apps that make peer to peer vote nudging easier, when universities and other spaces make voting a priority, youth voter turnout grows.

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  • Giving Locally

    After learning her home city of Austin, Texas ranked the 48th most charitable city in the country despite its strong economy, Patsy Woods Martin launched I Live Here I Give Here (ILHIGH) in 2007 to encourage Austinites to better meet the needs of their community. In other words, she wanted her neighbors and community members to give locally. To get Austinites to be more charitable, ILHIGH uses games, competitions, clever marketing, and a sense of community.

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  • Come Get Your Money

    Pennsylvania State Treasurer Joe Torsella launched two initiatives to help middle income families save money. The first is an awareness campaign called You Earned it Philly, which aims to encourage the over 50,000 people who qualified for Earned Income Tax Credits benefits but never applied. The other program, called Keystone Scholars, requires Pennsylvania to invest $100 for every child born in the the state, to be used as an adult for post-secondary training or education.

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  • “It's Not Just About Housing”

    While any attempted solution to homelessness is admirable, it’s the ideas that include community that may be the most successful. This is the concept supported by Stephanie Sena, a professor at Villanova who has dedicated her life to bringing “best practices” of homeless communities to Philadelphia. Still in the early stages, this community model would attempt to beat homelessness by bringing people together - not only giving a roof and a bed. Ideally, the community aspect would make the solution sustainable.

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  • Keeping It Local

    In Philadelphia, a program based on a similar initiative in Cleveland is on its way to success. PAGE (Philadelphia Anchors for Growth & Equity) will direct spending from large institutions locally. Specifically, it will work with anchor institutions like the universities in town and fill gaps, like building a laundry facility that will create jobs and fill the need by places like Jefferson Health and Penn Medicine. Job creation is what will keep this organization and the city of Philadelphia going.

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  • Make Voting Easy

    Voter turnout is higher where voting is made easy. Consider one innovation: vote-by mail. States that allowed mail-in ballots had an average of 10 percent more voting in the 2016 election than other states. More innovations include pre-registering young voters, automatically updating a voter’s address when they move, automatically registering citizens unless they opt out, and same-day voter registration.

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  • Citizen of the Week: Adam Kesselman

    In Philadelphia, the City Bright initiative is working to pay individuals experiencing homelessness to help clean up the streets in city neighborhoods. While it might not pay much and is not a silver bullet solution, incentives like recommendations and the small amount of pay can help - and are part of a larger trend around the country.

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  • Teaching Curiosity

    Since Ascend Charter Schools switched from the popular "No Excuses" model to a Responsive Classroom philosophy, test scores have steadily risen, suspension rates have dropped dramatically, and the racial achievement gap has all but disappeared. While traces of the former structures, such as repeated routines, still exist today, the school has also incorporated trauma-informed elements and social-emotional learning curricula.

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  • Fixing the Problems We Can Fix

    A Philadelphia non-profit is targeting young people who struggle when leaving the foster care system and providing them with comprehensive services to help them transition into independent living successfully; that includes helping them find jobs, homes, and more. The program is based off a model from Youth Villages, a national nonprofit, and is showing impressive results - for example, "90 percent of the youth who joined the program were in need of stable housing; now, 35 percent have their own homes, and the rest live with family, former foster families or in supervised independent living."

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