Impact Engines | Community to Community: Policy Equity for All
Community to Community: Policy Equity for All
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C2C and Bridge to Calculus teamed up this summer to support over 100 BPS students through a six-week program that combined precalculus, robotics, and hands-on science labs. Students explored physics, biology, chemistry, and even forensic science, guided by BPS teachers, Northeastern faculty, and peer mentors.
C2C and Bridge to AI launched a five-week summer program for 30 Oakland high school students, focused on hands-on learning in artificial intelligence and career prep. Students explored topics like prompt engineering, ethics in AI, and financial literacy, guided by Northeastern faculty, peer mentors, and guest speakers. tos here.
C2C’s Dr. Alicia Modestino and Lynn Sanders led the release of Building Opportunity, a research-informed guide based on 10 years of summer youth employment evaluations across Boston, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The manual offers practical strategies to improve program quality and expand access to meaningful youth jobs.
C2C was honored with the 2025 Data Champion Award from the National Youth Employment Coalition for its impact and innovation in Boston’s Summer Youth Employment Program. At NYEC’s Annual Forum, C2C Global Director Lynn Sanders and Postdoctoral Fellow Josh Lown took the stage to accept the award and share C2C’s approach to using data and community partnerships to drive change.
Inequity is a leading problem of our time.
Public policy is a solution.
Community to Community (C2C) uses data and analysis to design, implement, and evaluate public policies that push the needle forward on complex problems found in urban areas. We are scholars, researchers, policymakers, students, and community organizers working together to utilize a community-engaged research approach that fosters long term mutually beneficial partnerships.
Vision
We envision a world connected by thriving communities where shared knowledge creates equitable access to purpose, power, and prosperity.
Mission
Our mission is to understand and address social disparities by fostering trusting relationships between academic researchers and community or government partners. Centering the wisdom of community voices, we co-create research evidence that advances equitable practices and policies in the places our university calls home.
Values
What is needed to drive societal impact?
Bridging the gap in public policy.
Local policymakers often lack rigorous data and analysis about which policies are most effective, yet academics typically do not apply their knowledge to the most pressing policy issues in these local contexts, creating a gap between knowledge and practice.
C2C responds to real-world policy problems and creates societal impact through a fundamental shift in the way community-engaged research is conducted. Our iterative engage-think-do model promotes the co-production of policy analysis and implementation by connecting real-world practitioners that are closest to the problems with academics skilled in data and analysis. We use program evaluation and research evidence to fuel policy changes and fund programs that are driving societal impact. Every successful partnership gets us one step closer to the world we envision.
TESTIMONIALS
Adam Gamoran
President, William T. Grant Foundation
“Research conducted in partnership with public agencies finds a ready audience for action. Our foundation supports research that yields high profile findings. One example is summer youth employment opportunities in Boston. We had a study by Alicia Modestino, an economist at Northeastern University, showing that investments in summer youth employment payoff for less crime and more educational attainment, and she’s continuing that work in Boston.”
Rashad Cope
Deputy Chief of Worker Empowerment, City of Boston
“Before partnering with Northeastern, anecdotally, we knew a lot of challenges existed for youth to access the program, but it was very difficult to communicate these challenges from a policy standpoint to our administration without data to back it up. We were excited to lean on Northeastern to add credibility to this work and to the challenges that we know existed, so we could really develop a plan to address some of these issues. Now we have recommendations around ways we can centralize some of these processes through a common intake and have a system that serves as a depository of all youth applicants, so we can better see inequities that may exist, and see ways we can really improve the program.”
Sofia Navarro
Executive Director, Oakland Workforce Development Board
“Local government and university partnerships are essential to expanding social equity in our cities. The City of Oakland is fortunate to partner with C2C Northeastern to advance economic and workforce development goals through co-convening aligned stakeholders and building policy solutions that center evidence-based research and community voice. We are inspired by the results C2C has achieved in Boston to expand summer youth employment and we hope to incorporate insights from that work here in Oakland..”