Public Policy and Advocacy Strategies

Issue Spotlight

A new blog post from CityHealth, an initiative of the de Beaumont Foundation and Kaiser Permanente, explores how lessons learned from the 1918 flu pandemic can inform municipal policy makers' decisions related to earned sick leave, affordable housing, and other public health policies.

The Fiscal Policy Institute has released a new report that details the level of investment the state of New York should provide to support statewide census education and outreach by community-based organizations. The report's methodology assumes all people in hard-to-count groups get basic outreach from community-based organizations at an estimated cost of $2 per person, ten percent of the hard-to-count population receives a moderate level of outreach at a cost of $25 per person, and five percent of the hard-to-count population receive an intensive level of outreach at $75 per person. Based on these calculations, the Fiscal Policy Institute is calling for the state of New York to dedicate $40 million in next year’s budget for community-based organizations to do outreach around the 2020 Census, in addition to whatever funds the state commits to its own outreach and media campaigns and funding to local governments.