Established in 2010, the New Orleans Business Alliance (NOLABA) aims to unite a diverse community of stakeholders to catalyze job growth, create wealth, and build an equitable and sustainable economic future for New Orleans. As a public-private partnership between the city and private investors from the local community, the nonprofit organization is led by a 17-member board of directors, composed of a cross section of New Orleans leaders, including the Mayor and representatives of diverse industries. Guided by its 2013 Prosperity NOLA report, a comprehensive development plan designed to Read more about New Orleans Business Alliance (NOLABA)...
What Counts, a joint publication from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute, offers a series of essays on how practitioners, policymakers, and funders can collect and analyze data to better inform community development strategies. The authors, with backgrounds in public health, education, finance, law, community development, and information systems, highlight the necessity of data sharing across sectors to foster collaboration.
This paper from the Economic Policy Institute encourages a critical examination of the role of structural racism, as embedded in policy, that has fostered extreme inequality in the St. Louis metropolitan area—made apparent after the shooting of Michael Brown. Author Richard Rothstein, Research Associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, finds that the institutionalization of racially prejudiced real estate, banking, insurance, and land use policies at the federal, state, and local level, fostered and continue to promulgate racially segregated neighborhoods with high poverty, unemployment, and oppressive policing.
Although an important figure in both U.S. and African-American history, Maggie Lena Walker is not a household name—not the way, at least, that her contemporaries such as Brooker T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, or WEB Dubois are.
Yet Walker was the first woman (of any race) in the nation to charter a bank, which she did when she opened the St. Luke’s Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Va., in 1903.
