The latest from Wes Moore ... Independent Budget Office ... Rockefeller Foundation

Robin Hood CEO Wes Moore popped up at Franklin & Marshall, a liberal arts college in Lancaster, PA, where he gave an inspirational speech about his life. The talk included tales of how Harry Belafonte got him thinking and how he started his own nonprofit as a college student. The College Reporter has all the details, except …  

Look what I’ve got! My moms book! I am so proud of her and thankful for what she has shared. It’s powerful, personal, and uplifting.  Love her so much!#PreOrder #ThankfulThursday  https://t.co/S3mqtctQ0P

— Wes Moore (@iamwesmoore) September 13, 2018

… his mother, Joy Thomas Moore, might have a better story to tell of the Moore family than even her son, who is the author of the best-selling The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. Her autobiography is out, but it’s “not an autobiography, but a guidebook for growing a loving, productive family,” writes Washington Informer.

Urban Youth Alliance International is among the 20 finalists for the $10 million Economic Opportunity Challenge, a joint effort of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The New York City nonprofit provides diversion and post-release services for juveniles and formerly incarcerated people. “The 20 finalists listed below represent organizations from cities and towns across the country implementing community-driven approaches to help create better work, provide skill development opportunities, improve financial security, and build economically vibrant communities,” reads a Sept. 17 press release from the Rockefeller Foundation. More than 60 semi-finalists had been in the running for $1 million grants and “tailored technical assistance.”

Read more here.

New York City is rethinking how it develops budgets for senior centers and a new report Independent Budget Office explains why. “For years, some providers of city-funded social services have questioned disparities in the funding of their programs, with wide differences in how much support some groups receive for each participant despite offering a similar set of services,” reads the report released on Sept. 17.

Here are four verbatim takeaways from the report:

• Attendance at senior centers varies widely, with average daily participation in 2017 ranging from 25 to 515. In that year, budgeted spending per participant per day ranged from $5.34 to $87.83 and was roughly correlated with the number of daily participants, with larger centers generally spending less per participant, likely as a result of economies of scale.
• Despite this relationship between budgeted spending and senior center attendance, neither the number of participants per day nor the number or types of services provided at each center fully explained the wide variation in per person budget allocations across centers.
• For example, three centers in Brooklyn and the Bronx each served an average of 77 daily participants and provided a similar set of services; two of them received roughly equivalent budget allocations of $22.54 and $23.25 per participant per day, while the third center received $36.59 – more than 1.5 times as much as the other two.
• Conversely, two senior centers in Manhattan received virtually identical budget allocations of $10.92 and $10.93 per participant per day, in spite of the fact that one served 399 participants on an average day while the other served 152, fewer than half as many.