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Wealth Opportunities Realized Through Homeownership (WORTH): Baseline Report

May 15, 2023

This report is part of an evaluation of the Wealth Opportunities Realized through Homeownership (WORTH) initiative. Led by the Wells Fargo Foundation, WORTH supports efforts to close persistent disparities in homeownership in Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, San Diego, and rural and tribal areas. In each market, we examine housing supply and demand, homebuying activity, homeownership trends, and preservation conditions. We found that in almost every market, white households have higher homeownership rates than every other racial or ethnic group. Moreover, macroeconomic forces driving market conditions, like higher interest rates and moderating house prices, can significantly dampen or thwart market collaboratives' efforts to boost homeownership rates for people of color. Future evaluation will examine the implementation processes used in each market. The larger body of work contributes to understanding the crucial connection between homeownership and wealth-building and the multitude of barriers that households of color face in achieving homeownership. It also supports research-backed strategies for increasing homeownership for households of color and for reducing racial disparities.

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied: Milwaukee Public Schools, Persistent Disparities, and the School-to-Prison-and-Deportation Pipeline

March 22, 2022

Since as far back as the 1990's, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) has pushed Black students, students with disabilities, and other impacted students into the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline through its rampant and uneven use of exclusionary discipline. The new report details a pattern of disparate discipline rates meted out to students in different categories of race and disability status that continues unabated even today, 8 years after MPS initially came under scrutiny and investigation by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights.MPS continues to punish Black students more often and more severely than their white peers, even as evidence shows similar behavior across groups. This disproportionality, and the high suspension and expulsion rates in MPS, are core pillars of the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline.

Building the Relationships for Collaborative Governance: Case Studies from Across America

November 17, 2021

In recent years, a more collaborative form of democratic engagement has emerged, primarily at the local and state level, as well as internationally. Collaborative governance, or co-governance, refers to a broad range of models of civic engagement that allow people outside and inside government to work together in designing policy. This new form of engagement seeks to break down the boundaries between advocates and officials and is not only more democratic, but also more inclusive and open to those served by the government. How are co-governance relationships best developed, sustained, and supported? The clearest way to answer this question is not in theory, but from the learned experiences of co-governance, at the neighborhood, city, and state level. In this report, we highlight five of these cases in communities across the country where progress has been made to improve the quality of life and strengthen the bonds of community for all through the collaborative work of democracy.

Improving Community Safety Through Public Health Strategies: Lessons From Atlanta and Milwaukee

July 20, 2021

This report offers early lessons and recommendations from work the Annie E. Casey Foundation is supporting in Atlanta and Milwaukee to prevent gun violence. These communities are part of a national movement to increase safety and heal trauma by examining root causes and addressing these issues from a public health and racial justice perspective. Residents in both cities are shaping and leading safety strategies with the support of local nonprofits and other public and private partners. Their stories highlight the many ways that philanthropic and system leaders can help catalyze alternative public safety models and support their development and implementation — including helping to establish a new narrative about what it takes to keep communities safe and building and sharing evidence on effective public health interventions.As the work featured in this report shows, both public and private entities have roles to play in supporting a public health approach to safety. Residents in Atlanta, with funding and support from Casey and other investors, established a neighborhood-based advisory group and began implementing the Cure Violence model. In Milwaukee, another place where the Foundation is supporting Cure Violence, the movement to reimagine public safety is being driven by the city's Office of Violence Prevention. Each community developed strategies and programs based on local goals, needs and circumstances. One common thread underpinning their efforts has been the purposeful engagement and inclusion of people living in the areas directly affected by violence.

Public-Private Partnerships in Emergency Response: A Case Study of Milwaukee’s Civic Response Team

July 6, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic was an all-hands-on-deck moment. As communities were jolted into emergency response on many fronts—health, jobs, housing, education, childcare, food, and mental health—collaboration and coordination became essential. In Milwaukee, the Civic Response Team united local governments, philanthropy, and nonprofits to collectively manage response and recovery. In just weeks, they housed hundreds of people, delivered tens of thousands of meals, built and promoted a COVID-19 testing system, distributed hundreds of thousands of masks, provided families with technology to connect to school, rescued childcare providers, and soothed anxieties and grief.This paper studies how the public-private partnerships within the Civic Response Team worked during their first year, and shows what we can learn from them to support better partnership and emergency response in the future.

Collective Impact in Emergency Response: A Case Study of Milwaukee’s COVID-19 Civic Response Team

August 17, 2020

Milwaukee's COVID-19 response has been a remarkable mobilization of resources and organizations to address needs for shelter, food, testing, Internet connection, and more. Necessity has forced such collective efforts in many cities, but Milwaukee's may be unique in the civic architecture that has been built and that may be sustained beyond the crisis.The experience in Milwaukee provides a window into a city's comprehensive response to the COVID-19 crisis that also offers six lessons for how collective impact initiatives can be most effective in both meeting emergency needs and pursuing systems changes.

Police Brutality Bonds: How Wall Street Profits from Police Violence

June 24, 2020

This report focuses on just one aspect of the cost and profits of policing—the use of borrowingto pay for police-related settlements and judgments. This report serves to uncover the lengths that municipalities have gone to hide both how the costs of police violence and who profitsfrom it. In our research, we found that cities and counties across the United States issue bonds topay for police brutality settlements and judgments. The cities range from giant metropolises such as Los Angeles to smaller cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Our report includes details on police brutality bonds in twelve cities and counties, including five in-depth case studies: Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Lake County, Indiana. 

Greater Milwaukee Foundation 10 Year Impact Report: A Decade of Distinction

October 1, 2019

From 2008-2017, Metro Milwaukee has benefited from rising opportunities, inspired by the vision that the community and Greater Milwaukee Foundation share for a thriving and equitable region. Milwaukee saw significant progress in education, youth development, neighborhood economic development and other areas, continuing a century-long commitment by the Foundation to strengthen the region through philanthropy. Data and stories reflecting the investment and impact of this 10-year period illustrate the shared success that is achieved through partnership among donors, community stakeholders, and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

Failing to Protect and Serve: Police Department Policies Towards Transgender People

May 7, 2019

American policing is in grave need of reform. Reports of racial and religious profiling, killings of unarmed civilians, and sexual abuse and other forms of misconduct by police across the nation are all too common. Over half (58%) of transgender people who interacted with law enforcement that knew they were transgender in the last year reported experiences of harassment, abuse or other mistreatment by the police according to the US Transgender Survey (USTS). Transgender people often feel, accurately, that they can do nothing about this mistreatment, knowing that they risk falling victim to additional mistreatment by those tasked with conducting and overseeing the complaint process.As we make groundbreaking advancements towards transgender equality, many members of our communities continue to be affected by disproportionate contact with, and often by bias and abuse within, policing and the criminal justice system. Transgender people face staggering levels of violence, homelessness, and poverty in the United States, with transgender people of color experiencing the greatest disparities. Thus, it is not surprising that, even though transgender people are more likely to be victims of violent crime than non-transgender people, over half (57%) of all USTS respondents feel uncomfortable calling the police for help when they need it.The purpose of this report is to promote stronger and more fair policies when it comes to police interactions with transgender people. This report focuses primarily on policies specifically governing police interactions with transgender people, including non-discrimination statements, recognition of non-binary identities in applicable policies, use of respectful communication, recording information in department forms, search procedures, transportation, placement in temporary lock-up facilities, access to medication, removal of appearance related items, training, and bathroom access. For each topic, model policies are provided that can and should be adopted by police departments in collaboration with transgender leaders in their communities.

From Failure to Freedom: Dismantling Milwaukee's School-to-Prison Pipeline with the Youth Power Agenda

April 1, 2018

The systemic criminalization of youth of color, youth with disabilities, and youth of color with disabilities in schools is one of the most blatant and egregious examples of structural racism and violence in this country. The presence of police officers, guns, handcuffs, and metal detectors in schools creates hostile teaching and learning environments that are reinforced by harsh, punitive, and exclusionaryii school discipline policies. Together these practices constitute what is widely referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline. As this report demonstrates, Milwaukee's reliance on punitive approaches to discipline is ineffective, costly, and, most troublingly, racially biased.

Voices from the Tables

December 14, 2017

The report summarizes the outcomes of On the Table MKE, an initiative led by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation that provides a unique opportunity for civil conversation among people interested in building new relationships, generatingideas and igniting action for the benefit of the community and its future.In its pilot year, thousands of people across the four county, metro Milwaukee region gathered in small groups on Oct. 17, 2017, to share a meal and discuss topics that matter as well as corresponding action – both individual and collective – that can improve quality of life in the community.Three themes emerged as the most salient within these discussions: connecting and collaborating, education, and race, equity, and inclusion.

The "Crime Gun Intelligence Center" Model: Case Studies of the Denver, Milwaukee and Chicago Approaches to Investigating Gun Crime

May 1, 2017

One recent development in the battle against gun violence has shown promise, however. That involves the use of technology to streamline and support police enforcement and investigatory efforts against criminals who carry guns. This report examines one of these promising technology-based applications: the Crime Gun Intelligence Center (CGIC) model. CGICs are an interagency collaboration among local police departments, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and other partners such as state and local prosecutors, to identify perpetrators of gun crime for immediate investigation, apprehension, and prosecution. CGICs combine state-of-the-art analytical technology, data processing systems, and good old-fashioned detective work to help police agencies more quickly analyze ballistic evidence, establish connections among seemingly unrelated crimes, and build criminal cases targeting both gun traffickers and trigger-pullers.