Category Archives: Websites/Databases/Blogs

Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past

Source: Smithsonian Institution, 2021

Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past offers a space for dialogue about race. It provides a safe and collaborative place where anyone can share experiences and increase their understanding of the legacy of race and racism.

Drawing on the breadth of the Smithsonian’s expertise, research, and collections, our goal is to help advance the work of others. Race and Our Shared Future provides an ecosystem of resources and experiences, both digital and live, featuring real conversations from local communities to national events.

Confronting race and racism is difficult, but necessary work. The Smithsonian strives to amplify your voices in our commitment to building a more equitable path toward our shared future.

Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past is built on six thematic pillars. Each is designed to make issues of race and systemic racism understandable, relevant, and, most importantly, changeable.

Attend an Upcoming Event
The Smithsonian is hosting in-person and virtual events designed to help all of us understand, experience, and confront race and racism. We’ll see you there.

Start New Classroom Conversations
From teaching toolkits to low-tech learning activities, the Learning Lab’s resources support classroom teachers’ efforts to amplify critical conversations about the history and legacy of race and racism in the United States and beyond with their students.

Safer Schools and Campuses Best Practices Clearinghouse

Source: U.S. Department of Education, 2021

The U.S. Department of Education, launched the Safer Schools and Campuses Best Practices Clearinghouse (the Clearinghouse) in accordance with Executive Order 14000 Supporting the Reopening and Continuing Operation of Schools and Early Childhood Education Providers. The Clearinghouse is designed to support young children, students, families, early childhood providers, teachers, faculty, and staff as early childhood education programs, schools, and campuses continue to reopen following closures due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The Clearinghouse will be a place to share and highlight best practices and lessons learned for operating safely during and after the pandemic submitted by early childhood providers, teachers, faculty, staff, early childhood programs, schools, districts, institutions of higher education, other places providing educational instruction and States.

EEOC Explore: Job Patterns For Minorities And Women In Private Industry (EEO-1)

Source: U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 2020

From the press release:
Today, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) launched EEOC Explore, a new interactive data query and mapping tool that gives users access to the most current, granular, and privacy protected aggregate EEO-1 data publicly available. EEOC Explore allows users to analyze aggregate data associated with more than 56 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide. The user-friendly tool enables stakeholders to explore and compare data trends across a number of categories, including location, sex, race and ethnicity, and industry sector without the need for experience in computer programming or statistical analysis.

As part of its mandate under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, public and private employers, as well as local referral unions are required to submit to the EEOC periodic reports which indicate the composition of their workforces by sex and race/ethnicity. EEOC Explore visualizes these aggregate data in ways that are more intuitive and efficient than previous methods.

EEOC Explore uses aggregate information from employer EEO-1 reports which include data such as employee demographics, which are collected annually from private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees. EEOC Explore also allows users to dive down to county-level details, surpassing the previously available static tabular format available on the EEOC’s public website.

Tracking PPP Loans – Search Every Company Approved for Federal Loans Over $150k

Source: Moiz Syed and Derek Willis, Pro Publica, Coronavirus Bailouts, July 7, 2020

As part of the Paycheck Protection Program, the federal government provided up to $659 billion in financial support to banks to make low-interest loans to companies and nonprofit organizations in response to the economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Search the loans approved by lenders and disclosed by the Small Business Administration (SBA).

Covid Stimulus Watch

Source: Good Jobs First, 2020

A new website from Good Jobs First combines CARES Act recipient data and accountability information on the companies from Violation Tracker, Subsidy Tracker and other sources.

The 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (or CARES Act) provides hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance to large and small corporations whose operations have been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. The public deserves to know which companies are receiving the assistance and whether aid is flowing to firms with a poor record of corporate accountability.

Covid Stimulus Watch answers those needs. It assembles CARES Act recipient data and combines it with information about each firm’s history of regulatory violations, previous government assistance, federal tax avoidance, and CEO and worker pay practices.

COVID-19 OSHA Complaint tracker

Source: Strikewave, 2020

Workplace health and safety is more important now, than ever. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers—whether unionized or not—have fought employers to ensure that workers and the public are protected.

One tool available to workers: complaints made to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. We’ve compiled an interactive map of COVID-19 complaints made nationwide including the names of employers, narrative descriptions of their offenses, and an overall breakdown of complaints by industry.

Tax Break Tracker

Source: Good Jobs First, 2020

Discover How Much Revenue Governments in the United States Lose Every Year to Tax Abatement Programs

TAX BREAK TRACKER is the first national search engine for tax abatement disclosures per Statement No.77 of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) for governmental entities – set forth by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). For more information about this new accounting rule, visit our GASB-77 Resource Center.

This database already includes nearly 20,000 individual entries extracted from Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) – each represents a reduction in tax revenue due to one or more economic development tax abatement programs as reported by a jurisdiction in a particular year, or the lack thereof: Many jurisdictions failed to comply with GASB 77.

Search by state or local governments from the drop-down menus below to find out the cost of economic development incentive programs to public services. For additional explanations, check out this user guide. If you do not see the locality you are looking for, you might find it here in this list of localities that failed to disclose their revenue losses: 1/6/2020

Copy, Paste, Legislate (beta)

Source: Center for Public Integrity, 2019

Do you know if a bill introduced in your statehouse — it might govern who can fix your shattered iPhone screen or whether you can still sue a pedophile priest years later — was actually written by your elected lawmakers? Use this new tool to find out.

Spoiler alert: The answer may well be no.

Thousands of pieces of “model legislation” are drafted each year by business organizations and special interest groups and distributed to state lawmakers for introduction. These copycat bills influence policymaking across the nation, state by state, often with little scrutiny. This news application was developed by the Center for Public Integrity, part of a year-long collaboration with USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic to bring the practice into the light.

Related:
Puppies, phones and porn: How ‘model legislation’ affects consumers’ lives
Source: Kristian Hernández, Pratheek Rebala, Center for Public Integrity, November 20, 2019

…..Earlier this year, the Center for Public Integrity, USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic analyzed model statehouse bills to take the first nationwide accounting of how prolific copycat legislation has become.

Today, the news organizations publicly released a new model legislation tracker that goes deeper, identifying copycat legislation by comparing statehouse bills to each other — and making that information accessible to the public.

The tool developed by Public Integrity reveals model bills — some previously unidentified — that impact nearly every aspect of American life, from who can grow hemp or breed puppies, to what can be called “milk” or “meat” for purchase at your local grocery stores.

Using the new model legislation tracker, Public Integrity retrieved nearly 1.2 million bills across all 50 states and compared their text to identify when two bills in different states have common language…..

ProGov21 – a digital library of progressive local government policies and practices

Source: ProGov21, 2019

ProGov21 is a shared resource for local progressive policy makers and advocates. This is a fully searchable on-line library of innovative progressive laws and practices used throughout the country, along with toolkits for their effective communication and advocacy.

To search for anything, simply type in the search bar above. You can put in a particular name, a policy area of interest, and much more. You can target your search by applying any of the filters that will then appear on the left of the screen, including level of government, state, year, kind of document, or policy area.

ProGov21 is a fully searchable digital library of progressive local government policies and practices as well as assists in their effective communication and advocacy. ProGov21 is maintained and administered by COWS but its contents and library are user generated from a broad array of progressive organizations.

Nonprofit Explorer: Research Tax-Exempt Organizations

Source: Mike Tigas, Sisi Wei, Ken Schwencke and Alec Glassford, ProPublica, Updated June 6, 2019

Use this database to view summaries of 3 million tax returns from tax-exempt organizations and see financial details such as their executive compensation and revenue and expenses. You can browse IRS data released since 2013 and access over 9.6 million tax filing documents going back as far as 2001.

Nonprofit Explorer includes summary data for nonprofit tax returns and PDFs of full Form 990 documents. The summary data contains information processed by the IRS during the 2012-2017 calendar years; this generally consists of filings for the 2011-2016 fiscal years, but may include older records. This data release includes only a subset of what can be found in the full Form 990s.

In addition to the raw summary data, we link to PDFs of full Form 990 documents wherever possible. This consists of a separate release by the IRS of Form 990 documents processed by the agency through June 2016; these documents may contain filings as recent as the 2015 fiscal year.

Features include:
Advance Search
Search for officers or high-paid employees, search for any word or phrase in an electronic filing, search by state, type of organization,

Person Search
Search for Officers or Employees