October 2009

• MDC's Disconnected Youth work directly benefits Durham Technical Community College. As the result of an effort begun by MDC to shine a light on "Disconnected Youth in the Triangle: An Ominous Problem Hidden in Plain Sight," Durham Technical Community College has received a $300,000 grant from the Gateway to College National Network to create programs that help high school dropouts stay in school.

• Former President of the Council on Foundations and Chair of MDC's Board of Directors, Jim Joseph, addressed the presidents and trustees of Southern community foundations at a conference on Strategic Philahthrophy hosted by MDC and the Aspen Institute. Read his remarks about how philanthropies can use all of their assets to promote equity in innovative ways.

September 2009

• Duke University, in conjunction with N.C. Central University and the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, hosted a public conversation on Disconnected Youth.   The event brought together concerned citizens from across Durham to form a collaborative aimed at implementing evidence-based initiatives to reduce youth disconnection by closing the gaps in Durham's network of programs and services for youth. Among those participating were Duke President Dick Brodhead, NCCU Chancellor Charlie Nelms, and GlaxoSmithKline Vice Chairman Robert Ingram. The group aspires to help Durham become a community where multiple pathways enable all youth to graduate high school college-ready and earn a post-secondary credential by age 25.

June 2009

• Community colleges and states selected for Developmental Education Initiative.  MDC and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced $16.5 million in grants to 15 community colleges and five states to expand groundbreaking remedial education programs that experts say are key to dramatically boosting the college completion rates of low-income students and students of color. The grants will fund the Developmental Education Initiative, which is being led by MDC and will build upon the most promising programs developed through Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count.  "This is a significant vote of confidence in Achieving the Dream and especially the colleges and students that are doing such hard work," said David Dodson, president of MDC. "These students are our workforce for the next 20 years, and it is critical that they get the post-secondary education they need to survive and thrive in a knowledge-based economy. Everyone's wellbeing is dependent on that?because if they fail, we fail."
  

May 2009

• MDC Program Director John Cooper explains why the disadvantaged have the most to lose in disasters. Read his column in the News & Observer which suggests that we already know what to do to ensure that devastation like that during Hurricane Floyd doesn?t happen again. Dr. Cooper?s article speaks to many of the lessons of the Emergency Preparedness Demonstration, a $2 million program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and managed by MDC in partnership with the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Texas A&M Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. The demonstration has developed assessment tools to help communities identify areas of concern and promising practices to address them. To learn more and get access to the tools and promising practices, click here.

• The Work Supports Initiative connects people with resources. MDC?s new Work Supports Initiative is moving toward connecting low- and moderate-income Americans with tax credits, public benefits, and student financial aid using a Web-based service called The Benefit Bank . When claimed, these supports are proven to increase employment, education levels, and welfare-to-work success ratios?and reduce poverty, hunger, homelessness, and recidivism. Ralph Gildehaus, the former director of The Ohio Benefit Bank in the Governor's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, leads WSI efforts at MDC and coordinates work with our national partners. See a graph showing results of Ohio Benefit Bank.

January 2009

• MDC helps promote tax credit for working families. Every year, working North Carolinians leave more than $135 million in Earned Income Tax Credits (EITC) unclaimed on their federal income tax returns, resulting in financial losses to the state of more than $200 million. Even more money is at stake as a result of the N.C. General Assembly's creation of a North Carolina EITC in 2008. In 2008, tax campaigns partnering with MDC?s EITC Carolinas  Initiative prepared over 25,000 tax returns, helped families access over $7 million in EITC, and saved tax filers over $5 million in tax preparation fees by offering free tax preparation services. EITC Carolinas held an EITC Awareness Day last month with State Treasurer Janet Cowell, Congressman David Price, Durham County Commissioner Ellen Reckhow, Durham Mayor Bill Bell, and Durham Superintendent of Public Schools Carl Harris; read the op-ed  column that N.C. Governor Beverly Perdue wrote in support.

• Change magazine focuses on ?Courageous Conversations? in Achieving the Dream. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning , published in cooperation with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, focuses in its January-February 2009 issue on Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count , the groundbreaking initiative to promote student success for which MDC is the managing partner. "After decades spent concentrating on open access, many community colleges across the U.S. are acknowledging the hard truth that the vast majority of students aren't meeting their educational goals," writes MDC Senior Program Director Carol Lincoln, national director of Achieving the Dream. "So the colleges are making student success both an immediate and long-term priority. That is the ultimate aim of Achieving the Dream-."

2008

• MDC is still creating opportunity at 40. As MDC marks its 40th year helping organizations and communities close the gaps that separate people from opportunity in the South, our Annual Report for 2008 describes a growing portfolio of work in education, job training, economic development, asset building and strategic philanthropy. We are leading a groundbreaking national community college initiative, creating career paths for Latino immigrants, helping working people create more than $21 million in wealth through the Earned Income Tax Credit, demonstrating the ways emergency preparedness can protect disadvantaged communities, and showing in our work and State of the South 2007 report how community philanthropy can refocus its work to address fundamental issues. "As the economies of the South, the nation, the world and the nonprofit universe have changed," writes James Joseph, our board chairman, "we are growing into a larger and deeper organization to keep pace."

• MDC report is relevant 22 years later. It was big news for the South when the Air Force considered Northrop Grumman Corp. and European Aeronautic Defense and Space Corp. to build the next generation of air-to-air refueling tankers--a contract could be worth up to $100 billion. The partnership was to build the tankers in Mobile, AL, setting the stage for a potential work force of 1,200 aerospace engineers, assembly workers and designers, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Air Force is still considering whether to award the final contract to Northrop or to Boeing, based in Seattle. The proposed location interested Post-Intelligencer business columnist Bill Virgin, who remembered an MDC report issued in 1986 called "Shadows in the Sunbelt" . The report found that the rural South was not reaping the benefits of growth in the region's urban areas, and that new strategies would be crucial to stemming declines in agriculture and manufacturing. So when Virgin needed a perspective on what had happened in Southern economic development since then, to help explain Mobile's apparent victory over Seattle, he called MDC. Senior Fellow Ferrel Guillory filled him in.  You can read Bill Virgin's column here.

• Latino Pathways helps immigrants succeed as entrepreneurs Rosa McIntyre, a recent immigrant to the United States, dreams of starting her own enterprise: "I clean house now, but I want to make more money, have a license, understand the law and make more clear my own vision for my business." Rosa and 23 other Hispanic immigrant students are currently enrolled in a series of workshops hosted by the Small Business Center at Guilford Technical Community College in Greensboro, North Carolina. The entrepreneur workshops are held on Saturday mornings with instruction in both English and Spanish.  The workshops are the result of a collaboration between the college and the Latino Pathways project. Latino Pathways is a partnership-based effort that seeks to build occupational pathways for immigrant workers that are often stuck in dead end jobs. MDC, Inc. was instrumental in bringing the partnership together and launching the project. Initial efforts focused on the health care industry and created an innovative Nurse Assistant training (now in its third class) that combines vocational training with language and work readiness skills. read more

2007

• The Kellogg Foundation has hired MDC to work with its Rural People, Rural Policy initiative, set in five rural policy networks throughout the country. MDC will help grantees further develop their networks and sharpen their skills in bringing about policy change that benefits rural areas. MDC also will design and coordinate peer learning sessions for the initiative.

• MDC's Emergency Preparedness Demonstration Program (EPD), a joint initiative of MDC and the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, has received a year's extension and an additional $500,000 from FEMA so that MDC can take the work into areas affected by Hurricane Katrina.

• Disconnected youth (young people neither in school nor working) ages 16 to 24 are the subject of an MDC research project, funded by the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, to gauge the scope of the problem in the Research Triangle area of NC, catalog and assess current programs tackling the problem, and make recommendations.

• MDC's EITC Carolinas program co-sponsored a news conference January 31 at the NC Legislative Building to inform North Carolinians about the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit and to promote passage of a state EITC to supplement the federal credit. A state EITC would improve tax fairness and help more than 800,000 low-and moderate-income North Carolinians build wealth and gain economic security.

• MDC President David Dodson talks about how community foundations can be innovative and effective. As Southside Virginia continues to undergo economic upheaval, the new Danville Regional Foundation is hoping to use innovative thinking - and $200 million - to transform the Danville area. MDC has been helping the Foundation through a planning process to effectively deploy its resources to aid the community. Listen to a January 25th audio interview with Dodson on WVTF News.

• MDC's EITC Carolinas has received $75,000 from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and another $75,000 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation to continue and expand its support of community tax campaigns across North Carolina. Additional funding has come from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation to support a joint initiative between EITC Carolinas and the IDA and Asset-Building Collaborative of North Carolina, the nation's first statewide system that supports, encourages, and invests in asset-building among low-wealth individuals.

• MDC's and The Duke Endowment's Program for the Rural Carolinas (PRC) has produced such promising results in South Carolina's Lower Orangeburg/Upper Dorchester (LO/UD) counties that the local team has been able to secure $150,000 in state funding to continue its workforce development programs, with the possibility of a second year's state funding if the program continues to have an impact. Better still, the state money is not restricted to the LO/UD geographic area but allows the PRC model to expand to other rural SC areas. Read more about the LO/UD story.

• Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a multiyear nationwide initiative to help more community college students succeed, is expanding from seven states to nine in July with the addition of colleges in Pennsylvania and Washington state. Support for the colleges joining the initiative comes from The Heinz Endowments and Education Assistance Foundation of Washington state. Houston Endowment is funding the addition of colleges in Houston, Texas, to the eight Texas colleges already participating. MDC is the managing partner for Achieving the Dream.

• MDC is providing ongoing help to the Danville Regional Foundation, a health conversion foundation with assets of $250 million. With MDC?s guidance, the Foundation has crafted its vision, mission, and strategic priorities and will be making a series of trips to innovative foundations around the country to learn about their programs.

• MDC, with the support of the Ford Foundation, launched a new website, www.sncp.us, dedicated to the work of community philanthropy. The site will serve as a virtual meeting space for those working in community philanthropy and contains a discussion board and articles about the experiences of communities as they build bridges across traditional barriers of race, class, culture and gender. Also on the site are articles about how local funders work with nonprofits, policymakers and community leaders to create sustainable communities.

• The Winter 2006 edition of Lumina Foundation for Education's magazine, Focus, is entirely devoted to community colleges and the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative. MDC is the lead partner for this multi-year national initiative to help more community college students succeed. Visit the Achieving the Dream website at www.achievingthedream.org.

• MDC senior associate Colin Austin has been selected as a Marano Fellow of the Sector Skills Academy. The competitive fellowship, supported by the Aspen Institute, provides Fellows working on sector employment projects with leadership development experience. Austin, who directs MDC's Connecting People to Jobs and Latino Pathways programs, is one of 24 Fellows from around the country selected for the one-year fellowship.

• MDC has been awarded $5.9 million by Lumina Foundation for Education to lead Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, a national initiative to help more community college students succeed - particularly students of color and low-income students. Thirty-five community colleges in seven states now participate in Achieving the Dream, which is funded by Lumina Foundation, KnowledgeWorks Foundation and Nellie Mae Education Foundation. More colleges may be added in 2006.

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency has awarded MDC and the UNC Center for Urban and Regional Studies $1.5 million to help develop an emergency preparedness demonstration program targeting disadvantaged communities. The project will last two years and MDC is the lead partner. See press release.