Showing Up for Black Audiences

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, communications manager

Capping off our series of stories about the most significant trends shaping the policy landscape in 2022, we rounded up a sampling of some of the movers and shakers who — with Arnold Ventures support — are poised to make a big difference in criminal justice, health care, higher education, and more. From the federal level to individual states, these organizations and individuals are well-positioned to drive change this year.
 

What’s Happening: This year, keep your eyes on people like Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, who made waves last year when he resigned his position as a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's advisory panel in protest of the agency's controversial approval of an unproven Alzheimer's drug. That decision continues to reverberate across the health policy landscape with a recent decision by Medicare to cover the drug for people enrolled in randomized clinical trials.
 

Another organization worth watching? The Oakland-based group For the People, which successfully passed the nation's first-ever Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing Law that has already led to the release of more than 100 people in California. For the People is now expanding into new states.
 

Why It Matters: Driving policy change is no small feat — especially when it comes to solving some of the most entrenched problems in the United States. Arnold Ventures' network of more than 540 active grantees has demonstrated that it's up for the task.
 

One of the requirements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is that health plans offer FDA-approved contraception methods without cost-sharing — meaning without cost to the insured person. This makes contraception widely available and affordable for those getting health insurance via the ACA. But a law only works when it’s enforced. 

What’s Happening: The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) began noticing trends across health plans nationwide where people on ACA health plans were being denied or wrongly billed for contraceptive access in a wide variety of ways. The NWLC reported the violations to the Biden Administration, which has re-issued its requirements.
 

Why It Matters: As of 2021, 62.1 million women have insurance coverage that includes contraception without cost-sharing. However, if health plans wrongly bill them or deny them access to FDA-approved methods, people can’t get the care they need — and due to costs, they may have to forgo contraceptive care altogether.

What’s Next: The Administration has committed to revisiting the regulations that created sweeping exemptions to the contraceptive coverage requirement for those employers who claim a moral objection to contraceptive coverage. These exemptions allow virtually any employer to exclude birth control coverage from employee health plans, leaving employees to pay for birth control entirely on their own.  

Read our interview with Mara Gandal-Powers, director of birth control access and senior counsel for reproductive rights and health at the National Women’s Law Center, who has been closely monitoring this issue, as well as the NWLC’s report here.
 

Ezekiel Edwards, who recently joined Arnold Ventures as vice president of criminal justice focusing on pretrial. He previously served as a director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, where he used litigation, advocacy, and public education to challenge unconstitutional policies and practices in the criminal legal system and end mass incarceration. “I admire Arnold's emphasis on evidence-based solutions and figuring out how they translate practically on the ground,” Edwards says. “By measuring reforms and policies and practices by rigorous metrics with the aim to minimize injustice and improve communities’ quality of life, we can increase opportunity for change.”

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Criminal Justice

• Reducing violence goes beyond policing, writes Bloomberg CityLab in this piece on the approach taken by Dallas officials.
   
• CNN’s Jeff Asher makes the case for why improving the data infrastructure around gun violence is critical to understanding the nation’s spike in homicides. 
   
• Inside Philanthropy published an in-depth report on giving for violence prevention, an underfunded field, citing the work of AV grantmaking in gun violence research.
   
• Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is seeking to end the monthly fees charged to those on probation and parole, The Boston Globe reports.
   
• How court-issued fines and fees undermine health equity, via Health Affairs.
   
• The small town of Brookside, Alabama, has promised an investigation into allegations of racial profiling by police after reports of its aggressive ticketing of motorists to bring in revenue.
   
• Two years into the pandemic, federal prisons — including one in Fort Worth — still do not have COVID-19 under control, reports the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. 
   
• In “Ten Years Since Trayvon,” New York magazine tells the story of the first decade of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Health 

• Good news in health care policy reform: States are tackling drug prices and anti-competitive practices among hospitals, health systems, and plans, as well as focusing on improving care for people who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid. Read highlights from a forum hosted by Alliance For Health Policy and moderated by AV’s Mark Miller, executive vice president of health care.
   

• New resource: The Centre for Economic Policy Research highlights considerations for studying monopsony markets — a type of consolidation that frequently occurs in hospital and provider markets.
   

• New laws in two states — New York and Oregon — are designed “to make health equity a consideration when state regulators are reviewing proposed changes in hospitals and other health facilities,” according to a new blog from Community Catalyst. The laws arrive after decades of hospital and health system consolidation has left communities across the country without needed access to timely care, a problem acutely felt in both urban neighborhoods of color and in rural areas.
   

• Through the Advancing Medicare-Medicaid Integration (AMMI) funding opportunity, AV is supporting the state of Indiana’s efforts to transform their long-term services and supports system for Medicaid beneficiaries. Indiana’s new program is expected to enroll over 80% of dual-eligible beneficiaries, presenting a big opportunity to impact the care delivered to this population of low-income seniors and people with disabilities. AV's partners at the Center for Health Care Strategies summarized Indiana's goals in this piece.
   
• The Associated Press reports that North Carolinians are now able to obtain birth control pills or a patch without a prescription at pharmacies that dispense immunizations. The bill, passed in 2021 with bipartisan support, went into effect this week.
   
• KUER reports that in Utah, a bill allowing for incarcerated people to have access to contraceptives, which treat a variety of medical conditions, passed its first hearing and is on its way to the state House.

Higher Education

• The American Enterprise Institute releases a set of nine papers entitled “Student Outcomes and Earnings in Higher Education Policy,” advocating for better data use in higher education, gainful employment rules, and institutional accountability.
   
• Third Way issues a new report rating schools by a new metric: an economic mobility index. It looks at which schools both enroll the highest proportion of students from low- to moderate-income backgrounds and provide those students with strong return on investment. Notably, Hispanic-serving institutions and HBCUs score high on the index; Harvard, which enrolls relatively few students in that demographic, scores much lower.

Democracy

• Try your hand at gerrymandering with this New York Times interactive. 

Also

• The New Yorker looks at the landscape of local media and efforts to bring quality nonprofit journalism to cities across the country, citing the work of the American Journalism Project.
   
• A bill introduced in the House by Reps. Chellie Pingree and Tom Reed is an important step toward restoring the connection between charitable tax benefits and direct contributions to charities.
   
• In Utility Dive, Alex Gilbert points out the cost of not using nuclear energy as part of climate mitigation. “Focusing on renewable energy while ignoring all other low or zero carbon technologies is based on an incorrect understanding of decarbonization imperatives, system-level energy costs, and investment portfolio principles.”
   
• The Pew Trusts issued a brief on Colorado’s evidence continuum, a framework that sets standards for building evidence to determine whether a social program works. It serves as a model for the use of evidence-based policy in state-level government and was conceptualized and developed with input from AV’s Evidence-Based Policy team.

It’s Gordon Parks’ world in the HBO-streaming documentary “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks.” It’s also the world of Ella Watson, Ralph Ellison, Mrs. Joanne Wilson, Red Jackson, Muhammad Ali, Flavio, and Richard Roundtree — just a few of subjects he captured with such nuance and elegance from behind his camera. Every moment is captivating in this look at the legacy of Parks and the power of images to advance racial and social justice. “Gordon Parks’ photography demanded that America look at itself,” says Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation. Parks, whose images of the Black experience graced the pages of Life magazine, inspired a generation of artists and activists, and we hear from many of them here: Spike Lee, Ava DuVernay, Devin Allen, Jamel Shabazz, and LaToya Ruby Frazier. It’s an hour and a half that you wish could stretch out even longer.

The Kaiser Health News podcast “An Arm and a Leg” details how consumers can understand and exercise their new rights under the landmark No Surprises Act, which protects patients from unwelcome surprise medical bills. Dan Weissmann talks to Patricia Kelmar, the healthcare campaigns director for US PIRG, a consumer-advocacy organization, about the law’s strengths and weaknesses, what’s covered and what’s not, and the questions patients should be asking when they seek care.

• In concert with the publication of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s modeling of college ROI and value, “Return on College Investment for Students and Taxpayers,” the organization will conduct an online panel from 1-2 p.m. ET on Feb. 8 to discuss its findings in the context of moving toward greater accountability standards in higher education. Register here.

• Learn the inspiring stories of Black innovators and creators making an impact in a wide range of fields in Hulu’s “Your Attention Please,” which celebrates Black History Month with a third season. In episode one, host Craig Robinson introduces us to Brehanna Daniels, the first Black woman in NASCAR’s pit crew, and Ashley Ann, who followed her passion to China and South Korea to become an in-demand dog groomer. Episode two features a comedy short by director Symone Baptiste and brings us to Philadelphia’s lauded Down North Pizza, which gives second chances to formerly incarcerated people. (Read this great Bon Appétit piece about its chef, Michael Carter.) If you haven’t yet watched the series, all seasons are streaming.
   
• Masterclass is offering for free the three-part class, “Black History, Black Freedom and Black Love” during Black History Month. Your instructors include Angela Davis, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jelani Cobb, Sherrilyn Ifill, John McWhorter, and Cornel West. 
   
• An 8-year-old sneaked his handwritten book onto a library shelf, and it now has a years-long waitlist.
   
• “Ten things I’ve learned about creativity in ten years,” brilliantly told by the creator of The Oatmeal.