Primer series
The Inclusive Prosperity series covers cost of living, financing models that outlast a single grant, and innovation that keeps value available to the public.
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Primers
Draft
A City That Keeps Giving Back: Generative Cities and the Cost of Living
Adler Archer, JD · 2026
Strip away the abstractions and a city has a simple job: to let the people who live in it afford a decent life and build toward a better one. A place that does that is working. A place where the rent outruns the wages, where getting to work costs more than the work pays, where longtime residents are priced out of the neighborhoods they built, is failing at the one thing that matters most, however impressive it loo…
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Aligned but Unequal: Governing Partnerships Across the Public-Private Divide
Adil Eastwood · 2026
Public-private partnerships are widely promoted as a way to combine the strengths of business, government, and civil society on problems none can solve alone. The promise is real. But these partnerships join organizations with fundamentally different purposes: a business exists to create value for its owners, a public agency to serve a mandate, a civil-society organization to advance a mission. They can align on a s…
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Funding That Holds: Blended Financing and the Problem of the Funding Cliff
Brandy Hampton, MBA · 2026
A great deal of public-interest work dies not from failure but from the calendar. A program is funded by a grant, demonstrates results, and then ends when the grant cycle closes, because nothing was in place to carry it forward. This is the funding cliff, and it is one of the most predictable and wasteful patterns in the social sector. This primer is about how partnership in financing, the braiding together of d…
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Innovation That Serves: How Public-Interest Innovation Differs From the Commercial Kind
Shawn Swanson, PhD · 2026
Innovation is treated as an unqualified good, a word that ends arguments rather than starts them. But innovation always serves some goal, and the goal shapes everything: what gets built, who it is built for, and what happens to it once it works. Commercial innovation is organized to capture value for an owner. Public-interest innovation is organized to create value that stays available to the public. These are dif…
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Speaking to Each Other: Open Standards and the Case Against Lock-In
Alex Zhu, MS · 2026
When two systems need to share information, something has to define how. That something is a standard, and whether it is open or proprietary turns out to shape the entire future of the systems built on it. Open standards let anyone build compatible systems and move data freely between them. Proprietary ones quietly hand control to whoever owns the format. This primer is about open standards and interoperability, t…
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