View Research by Author - Elsa Falkenburger

Elsa Falkenburger is a Research Associate at the Metropolitan Housing & Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on the Center's new program on neighborhoods and youth development. She has experience working on place-based initiatives and community development, juvenile justice, and program and organizational evaluation and performance measurement. Her current research stems from past Metro projects evaluating HOPE VI and the Movement to Opportunity.

From 2002-2008, Elsa was a Program Associate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). She worked on WOLA's Central American Youth Gangs program, promoting best practices in youth gang prevention, intervention and rehabilitation for policymakers in the U.S. and Latin America. During graduate school, she worked at the KDK-Harman Foundation helping grantees develop logic models and performance indicators for evaluating and improving educational programs for low-income youth. Elsa holds an MPA (2010) from the LBJ School for Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a certificate in non-profit studies from the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service, and a BA in economics and Hispanic studies from Boston College (2002).

EFalkenburger@urban.org

Publications

The multisite Housing Opportunity and Services Together (HOST) demonstration is an ambitious effort to test strategies that use housing as a platform for services to improve the life chances of vulnerable children, youth, and adults. This brief provides an overview of the project's early challenges and successes to offer practitioners insights on the planning and design of "dual generation" interventions and to inform policy supporting comprehensive place-based initiatives.

The U.S. Department of Education's Promise Neighborhood Initiative is one of the Obama administration's major antipoverty initiatives and a core strategy of the White House's Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. It is intended to improve educational outcomes by creating a continuum of school readiness, academic services, and family and community support for children from early childhood through college. The DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) received one of the U.S. Department of Education's 21 Promise Neighborhood planning grants in October 2010. This policy brief summarizes DCPNI's planning year and how DCPNI intends to improve the educational outcomes of youth in the years to come.

In October 2010, the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) became one of 21 recipients of a US Department of Education Promise Neighborhood planning grant. The Urban Institute partnered with DCPNI to act as the data analyst and local evaluator of this ambitious initiative. The Needs Assessment and Segmentation Analysis are intended to provide a timely understanding of the needs of the community and to inform the continuum of strategies developed by DCPNI and their workgroups.

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