Public spaces are crucial to a community’s collective well-being. Although public spaces are intended to be equally accessible, young people, particularly low-income BIPOC, are made to feel unwelcome or excluded in many public spaces by the built environment, police, and other users. This report provides design recommendations for new forms of public spaces that are inclusive to all community members.

Today’s youth are rarely invited into the city planning process. This paper examines the experiences of young people involved in Y-PLAN, an initiative focused on fostering relationships between civic leaders and young people around meaningful action in order to create resilient cities that work for all residents. It also examines the importance of students’ lived experience and their proposals for how to respond to climate change and enhance resiliency in their communities. This paper concludes that the involvement of young people can lead to the adoption of innovative, inclusive, and equitable approaches to city planning.

From a modest beginning with 25 city and school district leaders from 6 cities and 5 school districts brainstorming over breakfast, lessons from PLUS are now reaching across the state and the nation, informing policy making and practice at all levels of government. CC&S has developed a framework for understanding city-school collaboration that aims to merge systemic and localized measures of systems change. Originally conceived as the "Ten Mechanics of City-School Initiatives" in 2010, further research and refinement has led to the "Seven Steps to Align High-Quality Education with Innovations in City and Metropolitan Planning and Development." This seven-step framework draws heavily from the lessons of the Bay Area PLUS teams, and provides the skeleton for the indicators presented at the end of this report.

In this paper, the 21st Century School Fund and the Center for Cities and Schools at the University of California Berkeley provide a conceptual frame for the joint use of PK-12 public schools. There is a growing conversation about and demand for joint use as a way to provide services to children and families in convenient locations, improve opportunities for physical activity by increasing use of school recreational and outdoor spaces, leverage capital investments, and more. However, engaging in joint use, particularly intensive sharing of space or use by multiple parties, presents ongoing challenges to school and community leaders. In this paper, we frame the basic challenges and opportunities for joint use to facilitate better conversations and planning for these type of collaborations.

Parents, teachers, and civic and educational leaders intuitively understand that high-quality educational opportunities for young people are essential to community health and economic vitality. Educational opportunity is the wellspring of individual, regional, and national progress. Many people across out national, however, face daunting obstacles to getting ahead. This is especially true for low-income communities of color faces with substandard housing and high-poverty neighborhoods, where conditions undermine health and economic prosperity and overwhelm schools A function of where people live, these roadblocks are especially pronounced for young people who lack the educational opportunities long associated with well-being and success in school and work over the course of their lives. The goal of this report is to support federal agencies - and community development and regional planning practitioners in the field - in identifying the mechanisms to tangibly link their work to educational improvement efforts to create cross-sector "win-wins," increase productivity, and foster social equity.