EquityBlog

How do you create 180,000 new jobs without spending a single extra dollar?
The new report “More Transit = More Jobs,” by the good folks at Transportation Equity Network, has the answer.
If the country’s top 20 metro areas shifted half their highway spending to transit, they’d create 1,123,674 new transit jobs over a five-year period — [...]

Contact:
Janet A. Dickerson, Press Secretary
(510) 421-4157
Janet@policylink.org

NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS LAUNCH VIRTUAL BOOK CLUB EXPLORING RACE AND AMERICA’S FUTURE

Six-week online book club will join opinion leaders, equity advocates, and ordinary Americans in a national conversation on race and other critical issues facing our country today

September 8, 2010 – New York, NY – [...]

We must get America back to work. We must pull America back together.
That is why PolicyLink is honored to be a part of the “One Nation Working Together” March in Washington, DC, on October 2nd.

The march will bring together thousands of people from across the country to fight for jobs, for fairness, and for hope.
The [...]

Glenn Beck’s rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial wasn’t the only DC rally over the weekend.  Nor was it the most important.
More than 100 civil rights and religious leaders took joined together for an early morning gathering to remember Dr. Martin Luther King and the importance of the 1963 March on Washington. Wade Henderson [...]

This commentary by Angela Glover Blackwell originally appeared in the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. Sign up for other commentaries from the Spotlight here.
At no time in recent American history did the intersection of race, place, poverty, and policy become more shamefully evident than during the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The storm and the catastrophic [...]

Can suped-up bikes be part of the solution to the crisis facing boys of color? This video from the folks at “California is a Place” makes the case pretty persuasively:

 
According to the Scraper Bike King, in order to become a member of the Original Scraper Bike Team, you must:

Be a resident of Oakland, CA.
[...]

When I touched down in New Orleans in the early weeks after the levees failed, devastation and loss hung thick in the air. As PolicyLink has worked with our community partners over the past five years trying to forge an equitable recovery, we can still feel that sting against our faces many days.

“Stop calling it [...]

By Joe Brooks, Vice-President for Civic Engagement
The New York Times’ Bob Herbert wrote last week about “a tragic crisis of enormous magnitude facing black boys and men in America.”
The underpinnings of the crisis are clear and myriad —parental neglect, racial discrimination, rising drop –out rate, joblessness, unwed mothers, disproportionate incarceration,  black-on-black crime, and homicide as [...]

In today’s Sacramento Bee (the most influential paper in the California state capital), PolicyLink President Judith Bell laid out the case for passing AB 2720, the California Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Read a selection below and click here to read the full piece:
California is reeling from two seemingly unrelated crises – the economic downturn and [...]

A truly amazing and visionary op-ed in the New York Times today by Paul Tough, a former NYT Magazine reporter and author of “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America.”
From the piece:
Children who live in the 300-plus low-income neighborhoods that are pursuing Promise Neighborhoods support are, on the whole, stuck. Every [...]