While not traditionally on the front lines in the battle against global warming, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is poised to play an increasingly pivotal role in taking climate resilience and clean energy adoption into serious account for affordable housing planning and community development activities. As advisors to U.S. federal agencies and commercial clients engaged in the housing, community development and clean energy sectors, Grant Thornton Public Sector and Summit Consulting offer the following insights as the Biden Administration seeks to advance its climate resilience objectives.

In our most recent episode of Complexity Simplified, Summit senior analyst Rebecca Jackson sits down with Federal Student Aid program manager Tracey Duval. They discuss the key skills, tools, and techniques required for effective program management for government IT modernizations. Duval has leveraged her 19 years of experience managing distributed remote teams to quickly form an effective program management team on a mission-critical FSA IT modernization.

Welcome back to our blog series on program evaluation. If you haven’t already, check out last week’s post on literature reviews and environmental scans, the first step we take in conducting program evaluations. In this installment, we will be looking at focus groups.

This past weekend, Summit Consulting hosted our seventh annual—and first virtual—2021 DC DataFest with the University of Maryland’s Social Data Science Center. While hosting virtually posed its challenges, the spirt of DataFest was the same: students from different schools, different  backgrounds, and different majors working in teams collaborating on a data-analysis challenge that is most likely beyond the scope of what they normally see in their classes.

Welcome to the second part of our blog series on program evaluation. If you have not already, check out last week’s post introducing the series and providing a description of what program evaluation is. In this installment, we will look at literature reviews and environmental scans.

With contributions by Balint Peto

Welcome to our blog series on the alchemy of program evaluation. Program evaluation is the process of collecting and analyzing data to answer questions about how well and how effectively programs are working. Through mixed methods, we utilize both quantitative and qualitative data to answer such research questions as: How do you know if your program (or program modification) is achieving its mission? If program outcomes aren’t meeting expected goals, what isn’t working? What can be improved to increase program efficacy?

Women’s History Month celebrates the contributions and achievements of women throughout the decades. Here at Summit, we are proud to recognize the luminaries who shaped the worlds of culture, sports, politics, and more, such as Katalin Karikó and Malala Yousafzai. But we also know the importance of offering a helping hand to lift others up.

This is the third post of a series discussing the role of the ESG and impact investing field in advancing racial equity by increasing access to capital and measuring impact.

In the previous posts of this series, we discussed the racial wealth gap and the impact that historically low access to capital has had on communities of color. We also discussed what firms in the ESG and impact investing space are doing to advance racial equity. These strategies run the gamut from creating dedicated funds designed to reach Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs, such as Reinventure Capital; to employing screening methods for companies with strong diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, like the Minority Empowerment ETF cocreated by Impact Shares and the NAACP (in ESG terms, a positive screen to increase exposure); to reimagining the process of due diligence with a racial equity lens, such as the Due Diligence 2.0 Commitment.

Summit’s mission is to help make government effective and society just. Therefore, we speak out against acts of injustice.

We speak out against the tides of injustice and violence faced by Asian communities: tides with deep currents in history that have surged to even greater heights during this pandemic.

We speak out against the tragedy in Atlanta earlier this week. We speak out against the violence that led to the deaths of eight people, six of whom are Asian women.

This is the second in a series on advancing racial equity through access to capital and impact measurement. The author thanks Catherine Dun Rappaport of BlueHub Capital and Caitlin Rosser of Calvert Impact Capital for their contributions to this article, as well as their time, expertise, and devotion to this work.