IN THE NEWS
Nine Finalists Vie for Ash Center’s Prestigious Innovations in American Government Awards
On May 20, nine finalists for the Innovations in American Government Awards presented before the Innovations National Selection Committee in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard Kennedy School. Presenters made final remarks and responded to questions from the committee, chaired by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, before the committee deliberated to select the winner of the Innovations in American Government Award and the winner of the Roy and Lila Ash Innovations Award in Public Engagement, a special award in honor of the Ash Center's tenth anniversary. Both winners will receive $100,000 and each of the finalists will receive $10,000 for activities to encourage the replication of their programs. A year of innovations Finalists represented innovations from across the country in diverse policy areas such as the environment, prison education, Medicaid reform, and college savings accounts. In honor of this year’s special award, several of the finalists selected have devised creative approaches to engaging citizens in creating public value.
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Communiqué Fall 2015
www.ash.harvard.edu
Two of this year’s finalists focused on environmental issues. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Partnership for Wastewater and Drinking Water Facilities started as an experiment to gauge the potential for significant energy improvements in the water sector and resulted in a cross-jurisdictional partnership that reduced energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, generated renewable energy, and produced clean water. The effort has now been successfully implemented in all six New England states as well as 15 other states and US territories. In New York City, the Vacant Land Cleanup & Revitalization Initiative addresses social inequality by facilitating cleanup and redevelopment of thousands of chronically vacant and abandoned contaminated properties (brownfields) in historically disadvantaged low- and moderate-income areas. With 310 cleanup projects on 560 tax lots complete or in progress, the city has produced over 30 million square-feet of new building space, 4,600 new units of affordable housing, hundreds of small businesses, and over 8,000 permanent new jobs, and fostered over $8 billion in new private investment and $1 billion in long-term tax revenue.
Two of this year’s finalists hail from San Francisco. With an unprecedented charter from the San Francisco Unified School District, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department launched the Five Keys Charter School—a high school for adult inmates inside the county’s jails. The school was modeled around a unique mission, inspired by serving a population that had previously been unsuccessful in traditional education environments: run a school that inspires inmates to become students and sheriff's deputies to foster learning, and reduce recidivism through education. The model has reduced inmate violence and recidivism, interrupted cycles of intergenerational incarceration, and now serves 8,000 students annually across California. San Francisco is also the first city to automatically and universally enroll every public school kindergartner in their own college savings account, with a $50 seed deposit and incentives to start saving for college early and often through the Kindergarten to College Program. The program is designed to increase college enrollment for students from low-income families, reduce the exclusion of low-income families from financial products