“This report is a confluence of historical milestones, relationships and opportunities that highlight a shared farm to school story in Minnesota. Through skilled outside facilitation and building upon the strong foundation of collaboration that had already been laid, the Farm to School Leadership Team developed a team agreement as a basis for shared leadership, responsibility and accountability. … This report tells Minnesota’s farm to school story as reflected in key stakeholder interviews with 22 former and current leadership team members. The report documents the history of the farm to school movement nationwide and in Minnesota through a detailed timeline of milestones. Analysis of interviews and secondary data revealed a number of key benefits of the leadership team, including the benefits of connecting sectors to increase the credibility and legitimacy of farm to school practices while leveraging resources and building capacity around the state for those practices. In addition, policy education was seen as integral to advancing farm to school funding opportunities.”
“Social impact bonds, a recent innovation in social finance, are designed to harness capital and knowledge from private nonprofit, for‐profit, and public entities to address pressing social problems. Although there is great policy interest in understanding how social impact bonds can be used to tackle…
“The public-private food assistance system (PPFAS) emerged during the 1970s to address ‘emergency’ food needs and has since grown into a regularized social welfare system of grocery and meal provision and related program delivery, realized through the collective efforts of organizations and individuals. We explore…
“The public pays for and provides an incredible amount of data to governments and companies. Yet much of the value of this data is being wasted, remaining in silos rather than being shared to enhance the common good—whether it’s helping governments to stop opioid addiction…
“In our latest City Accelerator guide, ‘Resilience, Equity, and Innovation,’ we share the tools and processes four cities, Pittsburgh, Saint Paul, San Francisco and Washington D.C., explored in an effort to increase equity and fund infrastructure. With new approaches to managing public resources, these cities…
“It’s still early days for governments experimenting with pay-for-success (PFS) projects, in which governments ask private funders to foot the bill for social programs, and then agree to repay those funders if the programs achieve agreed-on results. As public budgets tighten and social challenges remain…
“From climate change to terrorism, the difficulties confronting policy makers are unprecedented in their variety, but also in their complexity. Our existing policy tool kit seems stale and outdated. Increasingly, it is clear, we need not only new solutions but also new methods for arriving…
“Social impact bonds—also known as ‘pay-for-success’ contracts, since they are not true bonds, but rather performance-based contracts—aim to help governments experiment with new ways of providing social services. The basic concept is this: Private investors provide the original funding, and the government only pays if…
“Defined as the process of establishing, steering, facilitating, operating, and monitoring cross-sectoral organizational arrangements to address public policy problems, collaborative governance has emerged as an institutional form valued by both professional and research audiences across a growing range of policy arenas. Practice has preceded theory,…
“Multi-level and collaborative governance are multifaceted concepts grounded in several academic disciplines, government orientations, and community-level experiences. This diverse foundation provides a rich and complex canvass for constructing and operationalizing ‘governance’. The fluid and organic definition of governance contributes to the diversified origins of the…
“We examine the adaptability of collaborative governance regimes associated with publicly managed ecosystems as they move from direction-setting to implementation phases. This is an under-researched topic and is particularly relevant given the growth of collaborative environmental governance efforts around the globe. Through an in-depth analysis…