Becoming the Community's Foundation: Insight and Change in New Haven

FSG helped the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven to develop a new donor development strategy based on an understanding of three critical questions: What motivates different segments of donors? Which services and offerings would be most attractive to each segment? How does the community perceive CFGNH?This article describes that process and features an interview with Will Ginsburg, CFGNH's CEO

Biofuel Boom, Aquifer Doom?

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Five years of social security reforms in the UK

The current Labour Government was elected in 1997 with few specific social security proposals. This paper argues that after five years, consistent trends in social security policy have emerged: there is a willingness to increase benefits; a “work-first” focus; increasing centrality for benefits that relate to ‘need’, which has involved expanded means-testing; a downgrading of contributory benefits; and, a desire to reduce poverty by redistributing to particular demographic groups. Many of these characteristics of Labour policy, such as the size of caseloads or aggregate expenditure, are yet to show up in various aggregate data, and we argue that this is probably due to various counter-balancing socio-economic changes since 1997. Looking forward, we discuss what the introduction of new forms of means-test might achieve. We also suggest that it might be considered odd that Labour has left Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit unreformed, especially since a good chance to reform them without significant cost or low-income losers, has been missed.