The Pew Charitable Trusts last week announced that it has awarded a $7.9 million grant to the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, a new initiative to find innovative solutions to urban problems in smaller American cities.
Based in Charlottesville, Va., and administered by the University of Richmond, the partnership has invited 109 cities with populations of 50,000 to 150,000 to submit proposals for addressing such issues as ill-prepared and underemployed labor forces.
The partnership will award as many as 15 three-year grants of up to $400,000, with an emphasis on projects featuring broad-based coalitions and involving multiple communities within cities. Each winning city will be required to match at least 25 percent of its grant.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has launched a four-year Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative aimed at improving the efficiency and fairness of juvenile-justice systems.
The foundation, based in Greenwich, Conn., this month announced it has awarded one-year, $75,000 planning grants to Cook County, Ill.; Milwaukee County, Wis.; Multnomah County, Ore.; New York City; and Sacramento County, Calif.
Each site will use its grant to develop more effective and cost-efficient alternatives to juvenile detention. All the sites will be eligible to receive three-year implementation grants of up to $750,000.
The foundation estimates that every year there are more than 500,000 admissions to secure juvenile-detention facilities nationwide--an increase of more than 30 percent over the past decade--and that more than half of all detained children were held in overcrowded facilities.
The Toyota Motor Foundation has awarded the National Center for Family Literacy an additional $1.5 million grant.
The new grant will enable the Louisville-based program to expand from 10 to 15 cities.
The center seeks to break intergenerational cycles of inadequate education by helping parents obtain high-school-equivalency diplomas and learn workforce skills while their young children attend preschool in the same building.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York last month elected Newton N. Minow as the chairman of its board of trustees, succeeding the former chairman, Warren Christopher, who resigned when he became U.S. Secretary of State.
Mr. Minow is a lawyer at the Chicago law firm of Sidley and Austin, a professor of communications policy and law at Northwestern University, and a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.--M.S.
