Impact Engines | Community to Community: Policy Equity for All

Community to Community: Policy Equity for All

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Contribute to the C2C Impact Fund on Northeastern’s 2024 Giving Day!

Our current funding priority is C2C’s Summer Youth Employment Program which provides Learn and Earn opportunities to over 100 low-income high-school-aged youth across our Boston and Oakland campus locations. Participants are either enrolled in our Bridge to Calculus program or employed in a job on campus for 20-25 hours per week for 7 weeks. The program also provides weekly workshops on career exploration, college readiness, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

Events

Oakland Policy Equity Conference: Advancing Economic & Workforce Development – Learn More & Register!

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.”

Midori Morikawa

Deputy Chief, Economic Opportunity Inclusion, City of Boston

“From the Mayor’s perspective, the contribution to sustainability was evident in continuing the work with Alicia and increasing by $4m the investment in summer jobs. “No other higher education institution offers such high levels of engagement with policymakers and on-the-ground community practitioners to make societal impacts that’s timely and relevant.”