The 2016 Menino Survey of Mayors, named in honor of late Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, uses a series of open- and closed-ended questions to probe mayors about their top priorities. More than 100 mayors participated in the survey, with responses coming from all over the country. Read More

At any given point in time, there are at least a few thousand job openings at anchor institutions in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Approximately half of these are entry-level positions. Normally this would be great news for a community. If jobs are plentiful, it must mean the local economy is doing well—right? Yet, it’s not that straightforward. Read More

Small businesses have been making major moves in an industry that is anything but small: renewable energy. In the United States, nearly 800,000 jobs have been created because of renewable energy, and the industry is showing no signs of slowing down. Since 2016, solar energy has been creating jobs at 17 times the rate of the national economy, and a new wind turbine gets installed in the United States every 2.4 hours. Participation in this industry puts a company at the vanguard of the energy sector, allowing them to grow with the demand for “green” energy. Read More

America may be prosperous but it is not inclusive. On the one hand, the nation and its cities and metro areas are still recovering from the economic trauma of the Great Recession: Economic output is up and unemployment is down. But on the other hand, the gains from that economic recovery are disproportionately concentrated among a relatively small number of advantaged groups and advantaged places. Inclusive prosperity has proven distressingly elusive; wide swaths of cities and metros and large groups of people have missed out on the economic rebound. Read More

A few months ago, we featured a story about how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has created a $100 million impact investing initiative redirecting funds into investment products that will not only provide monetary return, but support affordable housing, small businesses, infrastructure projects, and health and educational facilities. New York City, Washington, D.C. and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts all have similar initiatives, albeit at different scales. Read More