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The Urban Institute's MetroTrends research team has created an interactive report card on racial and ethnic equity in the nation's top 100 metropolitan areas. A brief commentary by Margery Austin Turner, the Institute's vice president for research, accompanies the map.

A multidimensional research initiative spanning America's fragile infrastructure systems debuts today at the Urban Institute with transportation planning expert Sandra Rosenbloom as its director.

The Urban Institute's MetroTrends research team has created an interactive map that reveals the relative employment strength in 16 job sectors for the nation’s top 100 metropolitan areas. A brief commentary by Graham MacDonald accompanies the map.

Sarah Rosen Wartell, a public policy executive and housing markets expert who co-founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) and serves as its executive vice president, will become the third president of the Urban Institute at the end of February.

Sparked by the publication of Leap of Reason by Mario Morino, this symposium convened a select group of twenty leaders from government, nonprofits, philanthropy, and business to discuss a challenge that has limited the collective impact of the social sector: the lack of encouragement and support in the nonprofit community for disciplined, data-driven management. The symposium explored barriers to and opportunities for making performance management more common in the social sector. Participants discussed possible solutions that would advance performance management, including the Outcome and Effective Practices Portal (now called PerformWell), an online resource for nonprofits seeking assistance with identifying indicators and tools to measure their outcomes.

Nonprofits report being "cut to the bone" in their budgets and fundraising results have not improved over the past year. Nonprofit organizations, particularly smaller entities, are struggling to secure funding for the vital services they provide in their communities. The Late Fall 2011 Nonprofit Fundraising Study examines fundraising results and their implications for organizational operations, and alerts managers and donors alike to consider the priorities facing the nonprofit sector in 2012 and beyond. The survey represents a unique collaboration by the Urban Institute's National Center for Charitable Statistics with Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy, the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Giving USA Foundation, Blackbaud, and GuideStar.

With the CLASS Act dead, the 7 in 10 seniors who will eventually need help with eating, dressing, or bathing, and their unpaid family caregivers are wondering where they can go from here. Many relatives of the aging struggle to balance their elder care duties with employment and other family responsibilities. The care they provide equates to $375 billion a year.

Nursing home care averages about $75,000 per year (and much more in certain parts of the country), while home health aides cost about $21 per hour. Options for financing long-term care are limited. Medicare covers long-term care only under certain conditions and for only a limited time. Only 12 percent of adults age 65 or older have private insurance. As a result, many families pay out of pocket until they exhaust their resources and turn to Medicaid.

Panelists will discuss the Urban Institute's Community Platform and other on-the-ground approaches to strengthening the capacity of communities and nonprofit organizations to tackle challenges in education, public health, economic development, aging, and other issues.

More than 1.4 million nonprofit organizations were registered with the Internal Revenue Service in 2009, 19 percent above 1999. How much do you know about the nonprofit sector?

In a month, Congress's Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, known informally as the Super Committee, will issue its recommendation on how to deflate the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. In a year, Americans will go to the polls to select many federal, state, and local leaders. And in between these events, state capitals will tangle anew over shrinking revenues, burgeoning constituent needs, and balanced-budget dictates.

Where, in all of this, are America's 74 million children? What challenges and opportunities are posed by budget battles when we think about the dramatic changes in children's lives in recent decades -- almost 22 percent living in poverty, the trend toward "majority minority" among children, the regional shifts from northern states losing children to southern states gaining them? What will it take to come to national and state budget decisions that invest at the level needed for the youngest generation to succeed, especially in light of states' senior role in funding children's programs and services?

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