March 14, 2012 City of Ideas: Reinventing Boston’s Innovation Economy Civic Engagement: Greater Boston has ridden out the economic downturn better than much of the nation, but without a critical reinvention of our innovation economy, Boston could lose much of that advantage. City of Ideas: Reinventing Boston’s Innovation Economy, the 2012 report from the Boston Indicators Project, builds upon a theme first surfaced in the 2009 Boston Indicators Report, A Great Reckoning: Healing a Growing Divide. This new report finds that economic inequality in the city has reached even more serious levels, as the region’s economic growth sectors create new wealth, but leaves poorer parts of the city behind. Greater Boston, however, has ridden out the Great Recession better than many other parts of the country. The report also spells out opportunities for the city and region to reduce economic inequality and develop a more robust, sustainable local economy.

December 07, 2011 Toward Closing the Achievement Gap: A One-Year Progress Report on Education Reform in Massachusetts Education: Less than 2 years after Massachusetts passed sweeping reform legislation that led to a $250 million ‘Race to the Top’ award from the federal government, an examination of the state’s reform and innovation finds many schools benefitting from the new rules and tools created in the reform legislation in the city of Boston and other districts, but cautions that systemic efforts must be made to broaden and deepen the pace of reform. The report looks at the progress of school reform in the state since the passage of the Achievement Gap Act in January 2010, through close evaluation of data and interviews with stakeholders, and lays out a number of recommendations to support continued change.

November 18, 2011 The Case for Community Colleges: Aligning Higher Education and Workforce Needs in Massachusetts Education: This report offers a comprehensive set of recommendations for strategically revamping the Massachusetts community college system to better align it with the needs of a 21st-century workforce. The recommendations emerged from research, by the Workforce Strategy Center and MassINC, that illustrated the challenges facing the Massachusetts community college system and the features of effective community college systems in other states.

November 17, 2011 2011 Annual Report: Changing Lives Philanthropy: In this year’s annual report, we tell the stories of just a few of the donors who have left bequests to the Permanent Fund for Boston—or have inspired others to create funds in their name. One story is about the very first donor who left a major bequest that allowed the new foundation to start making grants in the early part of the 20th century. Another is about a world-renowned social worker who left a fund with just one restriction—that it be used for “community building.”

November 09, 2011 The Measure of Poverty: A Boston Indicators Project Special Report Health and Human Services: In late 2008, the global and national economies crashed, with cascading challenges for people throughout the world and here at home, especially low-income households. The subsequent Boston Indicators Project’s report found Suffolk County to be among the most unequal counties in the nation and noted the increasing stress on low-income households in a high-cost city and region.  Today, almost three years after the onset of the Great Recession, those stresses are greater than ever.