BoardStrong’s mission is to help nonprofits achieve the highest standards of board leadership, governance, and oversight through board training, consultation, and the provision of educational resources. BoardStrong currently has an online matching platform that helps organizations find talented board candidates in New York. The organization enlisted a Capstone team to conduct research on how to expand this matching platform to new markets. Although BoardStrong has nonprofit connections across the country, it sought additional context on regional nonprofit environments. The Capstone team met with stakeholders across various nonprofit landscapes and crafted an expansion strategy, identifying regions for initial expansion and the important players within those regions. The team presented its final report to BoardStrong leadership, detailing its findings, recommendations, and best practices for scaling the technology platform.

It has been 55 years since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, yet housing discrimination continues to impact people of color disproportionately. The Wells Fargo Foundation tasked the Capstone team with designing a grantmaking strategy to advance anti-discrimination efforts in the rental market. To do this, the team interviewed professionals working on fair housing issues—including fair housing testers, sociologists, economists, housing litigators, and advocates—to understand the current state of the field. Concurrently the team undertook a literature review to understand the specific mechanisms through which housing discrimination can occur. The results of these efforts led to an evaluation of the different ways discrimination takes place throughout six phases of the housing procurement process. Ultimately, the team crafted an informed and targeted grantmaking strategy with recommendations that focus on increasing equity and access to information about available housing units, proactively addressing tenant screening systems that perpetuate disparate impact, and enhancing housing discrimination enforcement.

Bricks and Mortals is a membership-driven nonprofit organization that helps faith-based organizations (FBOs) maximize the use of their buildings and properties to serve their communities. In support of the launch of its new space-sharing platform, Venuely, the client enlisted a Capstone team to provide fair space pricing guidelines, event insurance research, and market analyses. The team conducted several forms of market and competitor analyses and developed a burn rate equation to assist with on-platform pricing. The team also conducted interviews, surveys, and market research on the costs of running, renting, and insuring venue spaces across NYC. The team’s final report highlights its recommendations on Venuely’s strategic deployment, which will empower FBOs to enter the rental market smoothly, coordinate space-sharing operations with local artists and other community groups, and generate additional revenue streams for their congregations.

Students with special needs have historically been overlooked in the American public school system and only in the last 50 years has the federal government provided explicit protections for these students. Existing literature shows evidence of ongoing and significant differences in referrals to special education services based on race and gender. The Capstone team sought to understand whether, and to what extent, disparities in special education access contribute to disparities in educational outcomes for marginalized groups. The team analyzed data from the 2011 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and developed a final report outlining its findings to help inform special education support and services.

Guidehouse is a public-sector advisory firm that performs loan servicing, technology modernization, and financial services for the US Small Business Administration’s loan programs. Guidehouse enlisted a Capstone team to analyze the legislative and procurement aspects of three major economic relief programs implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic: the Paycheck Protection Program, the State Small Business Credit Initiative, and the New York State Emergency Rental Assistance Program. The team developed a comprehensive research methodology that comprised sourcing and analyzing public-sector data on the programs, reviewing research articles and academic journals, using data analysis to develop recommendations, and conducting interviews with experts identified by the client. The team delivered a white paper and infographic suggesting improvements in the implementation of economic assistance programs during unforeseen events.

The office of Downtown Revitalization and Transit-Oriented Development at the Suffolk County Department of Economic Development and Planning (SCEDP) promotes the development, growth, and retention of industry clusters that facilitate job opportunities, private capital investment, and tourism. To support the County’s efforts to retain and attract highly-skilled workers and young professionals, SCEDP works with municipalities to run technical and financing programs to promote transit-oriented development (TOD) around Long Island Railroad stations. The Capstone team worked with SCEDP to develop a plan for a Suffolk County TOD Index, an analytical tool to assess the location-based potential for TOD development and compare TOD suitability across locations. To develop the index, the team identified the key drivers of TOD success in Suffolk County by analyzing large amounts of public data and existing TODs through site visits, desktop research, and stakeholder interviews. Based on index-indicated TOD readiness, the team conducted several site-level analyses and provided high-level recommendations for future TODs.

New York City implemented an open enrollment policy for high school admissions in 2004, allowing schools to set their own admissions policies and students to apply to schools outside their geographic zone—leading to an increase in admissions screenings based on factors such as student attendance and past academic performance. The Capstone team explored the impact of this policy on public school fundraising, hypothesizing that families seek out “opportunity hoarding” within screened schools. The team examined fundraising by school-supporting organizations as one measure of opportunity hoarding, constructed an original dataset linking publicly available tax records to school-level data to identify the change in per-pupil fundraising by school, and conducted a difference-in-difference analysis comparing the NYC school system to zoned districts within Long Island’s Nassau County. While the team found that overall fundraising increased after the 2004 policy change, the small sample of available data limits the statistical significance of the findings. The final report presents a model for linking fundraising data to individual schools and suggestions for improving data availability.

Queens Public Library (QPL) is one of the largest public libraries in the country, providing over 8,000 programs and circulating over twelve million items per year to serve Queens’ two million residents. However, QPL lacks a diverse funding stream as most of its budget comes from New York City government funding. In an effort to expand upon its programs and services and improve its financial security, QPL enlisted a Capstone team to provide critical recommendations for increasing corporate fundraising efforts. The team conducted a literature review, expert interviews, an environmental scan, and case study profiles. Based on its research, the team developed a final report providing the client with the necessary tools to implement a successful corporate partnership strategy.

Established in 2014, RIP Medical Debt has eradicated over $5.6 billion in medical debt to date, providing financial and mental relief for over three million people. Despite significant legislative changes like the Affordable Care Act, the national medical debt crisis persists, often destroying the financial stability of America’s most vulnerable communities: the sick, the elderly, and the poor. RIP Medical Debt engaged a Capstone team to provide a comprehensive overview of the medical debt crisis, including extensive research to determine the scope of the crisis, how medical debt is created, why it persists, and who is most impacted. The team conducted a landscape analysis, interviewed key stakeholders, and surveyed existing efforts to decrease medical debt. The final report includes the team’s analysis of the current state of medical debt as well as specific recommendations to guide RIP Medical Debt’s emerging public policy agenda.