News

RBF grantee Center for Public Integrity was recently awarded a prestigious Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism.

While the 2008 U.S. presidential election was hailed largely because it put an African American in the White House for the first time, another celebrated success was the explosion in civic participation: thousands of new voters registered for the first time, volunteered, and turned up at the polls to cast their ballots. 

"There is no question about the power of the immigrant vote," says Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition.  In New York, where more than 4 million foreign-born workers produce nearly a quarter of the state's economic output, Ms. Hong's organization has sought to implement a "community-based electoral machine."

When Deborah Simpson decided to run for a seat in Maine's House of Representatives in 2000, she was an unlikely candidate for elected office: as a waitress and single mother, she lacked connections to deep-pocketed donors. She had, however, heard about the state's new Clean Elections Act and figured she could campaign by talking about issues instead of asking people to write her checks.  Read more

Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), has released a new guide that describes strategies and stories of how local civic engagement has developed over the past decade.

Country reports using the increasingly popular Greenhouse Development Rights (GDRs) framework, created by RBF grantees EcoEquity (a project of Earth Island Institute) and the Stockholm Environment Institute, are now available for Denmark, Finland, Ireland, and the Netherlands.

Bank Information Center consultant Heike Mainhardt-Gibbs, author of an RBF-funded study, will defend her latest findings in a panel discussion at the Civil Society Policy Forum at the 2009 World Bank/International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings from April 25-26.

The International Monetary Fund is pushing to scale back on loans to the world's poorer countries, which make up more than 47% of the world's $55 trillion economy.

Despite polling place issues in 2000 and 2004, and fears that they would reoccur in the last election, the vast majority of Americans said they had a positive voting experience in 2008 and intend to remain active in their communities.

The Center for Public Integrity, bipartisan watchdog and RBF grantee, has launched the Broken Government project, which provides a comprehensive online inventory of 128 executive branch failures during the Bush administration across the U.S. federal government.