Day One is a nonprofit organization that partners with youth to end dating abuse and intimate partner violence (IPV) through an empowerment model of community education, supportive services, legal advocacy, and leadership development. Day One’s clients are impacted by various issues beyond IPV, including the school-to-prison pipeline, lack of reproductive care, and housing insecurity. However, Day One has limited capacity to engage in advocacy efforts related to these areas. The client enlisted the team to identify best practices for setting policy and advocacy priorities and deepening staff and youth involvement in these processes. The team conducted legislative research, identified potential allies in elected office, surveyed staff and youth clients, and conducted employee focus groups. Based on its research findings, the team developed a final report recommending policy priorities, internal and external advocacy strategies, and best practices for engaging staff and youth.

TakeRoot Justice (TRJ) leverages legal and policy expertise to help community-driven movements dismantle systems of racial, economic, and social oppression. TRJ engaged a Capstone team to evaluate its role in community campaign advancement and ensure that its legal representation of individuals feeds into an organizing strategy for systemic change. The team conducted a literature review on movement lawyering and administered a survey to twelve of TRJ’s partner organizations. They also carried out focus groups across four key TRJ practice areas: consumer justice, housing rights, immigrants’ rights, and workers’ rights. Drawing on its findings, the team produced a report with guiding documents to increase internal capacity for organizing and a toolkit to facilitate stronger partner relationships.

The United Nations Capital Development Fund’s (UNCDF) Local Development Finance team is committed to facilitating effective urban infrastructure financing solutions in the world’s least developed countries (LDCs). As LDCs experience rapid urbanization, municipalities face mounting pressures to deliver a variety of public services. As urban inequality increases, LDCs also encounter additional challenges to providing basic infrastructure to marginalized communities living in informal settlements and slums. UNCDF enlisted a Capstone team to create strategies to improve and democratize access to basic services through urban form. The team conducted research on proven practices for creating livable cities that prioritize human connection and mobility, and for urban development that promotes health, prosperity, and sustainability. The team also investigated existing financing mechanisms that prevent municipalities from realizing the ideal urban form and proposed alternative solutions for community development finance. The team’s findings inform new efforts by UNCDF to create localized and specialized urban development funds.

Mi Familia Vota (My Family Votes) is a leading Latinx civic engagement organization whose mission is to build Latinx political power by expanding the electorate, strengthening local infrastructure, and engaging voters year-round. In Texas, a long state history of voter suppression has led to low voter registration and participation. Mi Familia Vota’s Texas division engaged a team to help expand its capacity to advance a proactive voting rights agenda. The team researched and analyzed electoral access policies, designed a survey to gauge community members’ voter access experience, tracked and evaluated new legislation introduced in Texas, and created a power map of key legislators and committees in the Texas House of Representatives to identify potential allies and opponents. With this information, the team produced a legislative action plan to guide Mi Familia Vota’s mobilization around affirmative and restrictive voting access proposals.

The Belize Association of Planners (BAP) is a nonprofit professional planning organization committed to promoting social justice and sustainability in the natural and built environments. BAP enlisted a team to identify intersectional vulnerabilities between climate change and gender in urban Belize, including aspects of social identity that contribute to heightened climate impacts on women and other marginalized groups. The team created public-facing materials—including policy briefs, short-term pandemic recovery guidance, and an interactive story map highlighting the team’s major research findings—to promote awareness of climate change and the importance of equitable urban planning. The team also created a framework for participatory action research projects for BAP to use to directly engage affected communities.

The New York City Civic Engagement Commission (NYC CEC) was established by the 2018 Charter Revision Commission to enhance civic participation in order to strengthen civic trust and democracy in NYC. With the help of the Capstone team, NYC CEC sought to create an inclusive, diverse, and culturally sensitive policy framework for civic life in NYC. The team conducted background research on the state of civic engagement in NYC, analyzed past and present government civic engagement policies and initiatives, and collected information on existing civic engagement policy frameworks. The team determined engagement categories for a quantitative civic engagement index and recommended key indicators of civic engagement, strategies for data collection, and best practices for future outreach.

Urbane Development is a certified minority-owned business enterprise that develops and deploys customized wealth building and equitable community development interventions in underserved communities by cultivating “anchor” institutions and investing in entrepreneurial activities within the communities it serves. In the absence of a standard mechanism for comparing justice outputs across projects or identifying junctures at which justice might be advanced, the organization engaged a team to help develop and apply meaningful key indicators of justice to its work. The team examined different definitions and manifestations of justice, empirically validated methodologies for measuring justice within the community development sector, and performed an intensive literature review. The team synthesized its findings to develop a justice rubric consisting of evaluative questions for Urbane Development’s staff, and created a customizable dashboard for calculating quantifiable justice “scores.”