5 Questions for…John Gomperts, President and CEO, America’s Promise Alliance

According to Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic 2014 (112 pages, PDF), a report published in April by America's Promise Alliance and its partners, the four-year high school graduation rate in the United States reached 80 percent for the first time ever in 2012. But while the overall rate is on track to reach the 90 percent goal set by the alliance's Building a GradNation Campaign, the report notes the troubling persistence of achievement gaps for low-income students and students of color. In an effort to help address those gaps, America's Promise just released Don't Call Them Dropouts: Understanding the Experiences of Young Americans Who Leave High School Before Graduation (72 pages, PDF), which looks at the multiple factors that result in students in high-poverty communities leaving high school before they graduate.

PND spoke with John Gomperts, president and CEO of America's Promise Alliance, about the positive trendlines in graduation rates, the implications of the reports' findings, and what philanthropy can do to address the achievement gaps that remain. Before joining America’s Promise in 2012, Gomperts headed AmeriCorps, Civic Ventures, and Experience Corps.

Philanthropy News Digest: Building a Grad Nation notes that one of the factors in the steady rise in the U.S. high school graduation rate over the last decade is the significant improvement in African-American and Latino graduation rates. To what do you attribute those gains?

John Gomperts: We as a nation have seen an almost 10 percentage-point increase in high school graduation rates over about a decade, which is notable, because that means that an additional four hundred thousand young people are graduating every year than were graduating a decade ago. That's four hundred thousand young people who are on track to becoming successful adults, which is a huge thing for those young people, their families, their communities, and the nation. And, yes, we have seen impressive gains among African-American and Latino students. Those two groups had a long distance to travel, and that was one of the huge red flags for all of us who are concerned about young people and opportunity. But while graduation rates for African Americans and Latinos have improved over the last decade, they still graduate at  lower rates and there is more work to do.

To what do I attribute these gains? A couple of things. The first is a much greater awareness of the challenge. For a long time, people just assumed that everybody graduated from high school, or that it didn't matter. One of the big things that America's Promise and its partners set out to do was to help people understand that lots of kids are not graduating from high school, as well as the consequences of not graduating for those kids, their families, their communities, and the country.

Second, greater awareness of the problem led to much greater accountability at the school level, community level, family level, and national level, so that all of a sudden, with significant help from the federal government and from folks on the outside, people are now tracking graduation rates and holding institutions and individuals accountable for the outcomes.

Third, there is no question that targeted school reform has helped drive improvements in graduation rates. Those efforts come in a variety of forms: better teachers, better curriculum, longer school days, charter schools, teacher evaluations, and so on. In addition, a whole host of reforms have been targeted to the lowest-performing schools, and those have made a difference.

Fourth, we've learned a lot more about, and invested more heavily in, evidence-based interventions in schools and in communities. We've gotten smarter about what the real barriers are that prevent kids from staying and succeeding in school. Some of those things have to do with school, some of those things have to do with life, and I think many nonprofits have done a great job of working with local school districts and others to provide the kind of support that young people who are growing up in challenging circumstances need in order to flourish and thrive.

Research and Crowdsourcing Shine a Light on Grantmaking Institutions

In 2013, more than 80,000 foundations collectively awarded nearly $50 billion in grants, benefiting people and causes in nearly every corner of our nation and the world. Grantmaking institutions have an enormous amount of influence in sectors such as health and education, in fields such as community change and economic development, and in the spheres of public policy and advocacy, and more.

Recently, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy launched Philamplify, which couples evidence-based assessments by experts with an interactive website featuring commentary from people with first-hand experience in philanthropy, nonprofits, and communities. Together, they create a comprehensive picture of what's working well and what could be working better. The impetus to build this new interactive website stems from the belief that transparency, mutual accountability, and knowledge-sharing can transform communities and maximize the impact of the country's grantmakers by creating a safe space for all of us to provide honest, constructive feedback.

As the president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation – an institution that values excellence and accountability in its grantmaking – I welcome the feedback Philamplify promises. Empowering our communities to thrive and enabling the dreams and possibilities of those in need through the power of philanthropy should always be a receptive, responsive, and, above all, effective process.

A just, inclusive society is one that welcomes all voices, and philanthropies should be the best ambassadors of these principles. Being heard has never been easier in the Internet age, and we are more connected than at any other time in human history. Online communication facilitates collective knowledge and experience on the practical application of charitable giving that touches so many lives in America and across the globe.

We rate our restaurants, our dry cleaners, and our shopping malls. Philamplify provides nuanced feedback in the way we steward billions of foundation dollars to serve the individuals and families that need it most and to address the most pressing problems of our times. At the same time, we suspect that grant recipients, grant seekers, and others shy away from offering their ideas for what could be done differently, lest their feedback be interpreted as criticism and not received in the constructive way it was intended.

We need to push back on this isolation bubble in philanthropy. I work in the charitable sector not because I believe I know better than the communities with which I work, but because I want to engage in a dynamic conversation with them in the hope of finding innovative, potent ways to solve pressing issues together. I subscribe to the belief that no matter what field you work in, the passion that you find in your mission is only enhanced by the feedback from those whose lives you impact – which is why the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation volunteered to participate in NCRP's foundation assessment process. We found that this impartial, third-party evaluation of our strategies to bring economic, social, and racial justice to the lives of Arkansans was not only helpful, but also necessary to bolster accountable, open, and effective grantmaking activity.

With Philamplify, I believe we've taken an important step in transforming the philanthropic world into a transparent, inclusive space that celebrates the diversity of opinions from those who are our partners in improving the lives of individuals, families, and communities. When philanthropy proactively taps into the rich ideas that come from openness and mutual accountability, the possibilities are boundless. I believe that day has come.

Dr. Sherece West-Scantlebury is president and CEO of the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, which works to improve the lives of Arkansans in education, economic development, and economic, racial and social justice. She also serves as board chair of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a national watchdog, research, and advocacy organization. This post originally appeared on the NCRP blog and is reposted here with permission.

Our Girls Are in Trouble, Too

I was thrilled recently to read about the Foundation Center's new report Building a Beloved Community: Strengthening the Field of Black Male Achievement. The report details the exciting and long overdue work in the area of black male achievement and provides recommendations for strengthening that work.

At Stoneleigh Foundation, we are familiar with the disparities that black males — particularly boys and young men — face, and we believe that, to improve life outcomes for this population, it is imperative to understand what it means to be a young black male in the context of current and past realities. We are certain that policies for serving these boys and young men can be successful only if we consider the intergenerational cycles of neglect and trauma that have been hardwired into their brains. Using a gendered and, in this case, cultural lens to approach public policy is necessary to advance a targeted and effective strategy.

We at Stoneleigh applaud the "intensified focus" on black males, and we look forward to having more partners join us in redressing the policies that have resulted in such unfortunate realities for too many.

Similarly, we would like to see the same gendered lens applied to girls when devising policies that affect young, at-risk females. Research shows a basic lack of awareness of how the challenges faced by girls differ from those of boys — and how we can and should serve girls differently. At a recent symposium hosted by Stoneleigh, we explored the unique challenges girls are facing, how coping with these challenges often leads to system involvement, and why girls are falling through the cracks of the current "one size fits all" child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Compared to previous generations, adolescent girls are getting into trouble with the law and with their peers at unprecedented rates. Girls in the child welfare system experience more teen pregnancies, bad birth outcomes, and poor health, and they are more likely to abuse their own children. And for many girls, the child welfare system leads directly to the juvenile justice system. But why? And what are we doing to support girls so that system involvement doesn't lead to these heartbreakingly too-common outcomes?

Our systems are failing girls because we have yet to seek the answers to these questions. We must explore ways to better harness the strength and resilience of girls, and that starts with understanding who they are, the challenges they face, and what they need to thrive. Let's take a cue from the powerful work being done to address the challenges faced by our at-risk boys and young men, and apply the same focus to girls. Our collective success depends on it.

Cathy Weiss is executive director of the Philadelphia-based Stoneleigh Foundation, which works to improve the life outcomes of vulnerable children and youth and also funds fellowships for individuals working to improve the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. The foundation recently convened a symposium titled "What About the Girls?" that brought together leaders in juvenile justice and child welfare to discuss the concept that girls can only be served effectively if we begin to understand the unique challenges they are facing.

It's Time to Make the American Dream Available to All

The barriers to success that black men face have been in plain sight for decades, so it is particularly heartening to see a movement taking shape that is specifically crafted to address these challenges and change the odds for one of the most disenfranchised populations in America.

I was on the board of trustees of the Open Society Foundations when the idea of a black male achievement campaign first came up. While it was obvious that something needed to be done, we immediately found ourselves facing a philosophical dilemma: Was it right to target just one group when other groups also need help?

In a country where cultural and racial relations are as complicated as they are in the United States, people are understandably hesitant to publicly announce they are going to help one group while seemingly ignoring all others. Eventually, we concluded that tailoring our efforts to a group that has a common history and a resulting set of common challenges is absolutely the right approach. Black men in America — while individuals in their own right — are heirs to a unique historical experience. After slavery was ended by the Civil War, black men faced decades of institutional racism, Jim Crow and segregation, public lynchings, and disenfranchisement. More recently, they have been abused and demeaned by a toxic street culture and media stereotypes that glorify self-destructive behavior.

If we are going to close the achievement gap and end what the Children's Defense Fund calls the "cradle to prison pipeline" for black boys and men, we need to take into consideration the insidious context of their situation. Indeed, as the Campaign for Black Male Achievement has taken shape, gaining traction even as parallel efforts have emerged, we've seen how necessary and overdue such an effort is. While there is certainly a lot of day-to-day work still to be done, the narrative and national dialogue have begun to change. Ignorance and fear are giving way to empathy and intelligent action.

We have, in Barack Obama, a president who has given the imprimatur of the White House to the idea that racism will not be sanctioned or ignored by society.  In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the president's empathetic response created space for an honest, open, and clear-eyed public discussion of race relations and the stubbornness of racism in America.

Weekend Link Roundup (May 24-26, 2014)

After another Typepad outage last weekend, we're back with our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy items from and about the nonprofit sector....

Advocacy

In the Summer 2014 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Steven Teles, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, Heather Hurlburt, a senior fellow for national security at Human Rights First, and Mark Schmitt, director of the program on political reform at the New America Foundation, argue that the mid-20th-century "golden age" of consensual politics in America was an anomaly and that, for nonprofits and foundations engaged in advocacy, there are three alternatives for dealing with increasing political polarization: staying the course; changing the system; and accepting and adapting.

Climate Change

On the F.B. Heron Foundation blog, Heron board chair Buzz Schmidt applauds Stanford University's recent decision "to 'repurpose' funds formerly invested in coal mining companies into investments that made more positive contributions to society's regenerative capital" and suggests that critics of the decision who suggest that divestment campaigns typically fail because they don't have any impact on companies' stock price are missing "the forest for the trees."

Education

In USA Today, Math for America president John Ewing argues that while the Common Core standards are not perfect, "they provide a structure that has a huge amount of potential if we just give [them] some time to work."

Fundraising

These days, it's hard to avoid talk about crowdfunding. But Social Velocity's Nell Edgington thinks it might be time to distinguish what's exciting about the crowdfunding approach from the hype and shares some questions to help us do that.

[Infographic] CECP's 'Giving in Numbers' Brief

This week's infographic summarizes findings from CECP's (formerly the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy)  2013 Giving in Numbers report. Instead of disseminating key takeways from the report as a "brief," CECP decided to put them into an infographic. What do you think? Is it a better presentation for this kind of information? Is it easier to share or embed in your own posts/tweets/FB updates? Share your thoughts in the comments setion below. And for a Powerpoint presentation of the report's findings, click here.

Justin Bieber vs. the Gates Foundation

When it comes to social media and "crowds," the largest philanthropic foundation in the world is no match for Justin Bieber. Not even close. As the graphic below shows, over the thirty-day period from November 3 to December 3,"Justin Bieber" was mentioned in 40,596,304 tweets while the "Gates Foundation" appeared in just 4,765.

This somewhat crazy comparison offers some important lessons for philanthropy as foundations struggle to measure their grantees' (and their own) online impact.

Lesson #1 — "Crowdsourcing" requires a CROWD

The professionals that really understand crowdsourcing work for companies like eBay, not for philanthropic foundations. But like most of us, foundation program officers have learned enough about all this stuff to be dangerous and increasingly pepper their grantees with questions and suggestions about crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing works best when knowledge can be built on the clicks of very large numbers of people involved in relatively simple market-based activities such as shopping and travel, or where new markets can be created, as we are beginning to see with crowdfunding. Crowdsourcing in the philanthropic space, on the other hand, has by and large been a failure, and there is a trail of dead wikis to prove it.

'Under Construction': SEARAC - Washington, D.C.

Under Construction is a multimedia online exhibit showcasing some of the best and brightest organizations working with males of color. The UC team of filmmakers, photographers, writers, and nonprofit experts worked directly with each of these organizations for several weeks. The collaborations yielded comprehensive portraits of the services men of color receive. Each profile features a short video, a photography exhibit, a visual program model, and a narrative essay detailing the efforts of these organizations.

Under Construction is a project of Frontline Solutions and was made possible through the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. For more profiles, click here.

He'd stayed calm as a cop dumped the contents of his backpack onto the sidewalk.

Scenes like this had already played out with most of his friends. Today he was riding his skateboard to school and running late, and now it was his turn to be the law's concern. He was told to take his shirt off so they could take photos of his tattoos. All the while he stood quietly, insisting that he wasn't in a gang, saying softly, "I don't belong to nobody," over and over. But when he saw the cop get angry and toss his skateboard into the street, he ran after it, picked it up, and came right back to the questions. At 14, that plank of wood and those wheels were the only place he felt good.

"What gang are you in?" the officer asked Anthony Hem, a son of Cambodian immigrants. How many times would he have to say it? "I don’t belong to nobody." Finally the officer went to his car, came out with a list of area gangs, and picked one near the top. "He just came up to me and said, 'Now you're on gang file. You're from this gang now, the Asian Boyz'," Hem says. The Asian Boyz are affiliated with the Crips. From now on, that's how the law would see him.

In a country where conversations about racial equality are focused heavily on African Americans and Latinos, the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center in Washington, D.C., serves a different population. SEARAC supports grassroots organizations that are looking out for kids like Hem, children of refugees who face many of the same issues other minority groups face, like poverty, violence, prejudice, racial profiling, and despair.

The national organization focuses intently on state and national policies and helps organizations like Khmer Girls and Boys in Action in Long Beach, California, and the One Love Movement in San Diego, relentlessly push lawmakers to reconsider policies like the one that put Hem in a gang file with no notification of his parents and no due process for having his name removed. The policy knowledge that SEARAC shares serves as a tool that smaller organizations integrate into their mentoring and cultural education activities. The collaboration helps foster young leaders who can speak for a refugee community still reeling from the effects of genocide and war.

Time to Put Poverty Back on the Education Reform Agenda

A few months ago the Southern Education Foundation released a report detailing the demographics of public school enrollment in the United States. The single most important finding in the report? Nearly half of all public school students in the nation and a majority in Western and Southern states are low-income and qualify for free and reduced lunch — and an increasing percentage of those are students of color. Unfortunately, a much-needed debate about the challenges presented by these demographic realities, especially for the nation's schools, has yet to occur. In fact, the dominant narrative around public education in the U.S. would have it that entrenched poverty has little or no impact on educational achievement. We all recognize that teacher effectiveness and high expectations for students are important elements in student achievement. But can we really ignore the implications of being poor for school readiness and success?

Poverty is really a proxy for a range of conditions and circumstances that shape the daily lives of students. A student who is hungry or cannot see or hear adequately is likely to have problems concentrating in class. We also know that children from low-income families have much higher rates of untreated dental conditions and endure more acute illnesses that lead to chronic absenteeism and lost instructional time. If education reform policies are insensitive to these realities, there is little reason to expect that learning outcomes for low-income children will improve.

In spite of our best efforts, income-related gaps in student achievement in the U.S. persist, from grade school all the way through college. Indeed, I am not at all confident that we have figured out how to break the link between family income level and academic success. And so I would ask: Are we sure that our current reform agenda, with its emphasis on standards, competition, and accountability, is adequate to the challenge of helping kids, especially the most vulnerable, learn and develop in ways that prepare them for the world of work or other postsecondary opportunities? What more should we be doing, and what else might we consider doing, to increase the odds that all kids, regardless of race, ethnicity, or family income, can take full advantage of all this country has to offer?

Advancing Hope for Black Men and Boys

How do you quantify hope? I've been asking myself that question recently in my role as manager of the Open Society Foundations' Campaign for Black Male Achievement. Indeed, with the intensified focus on the disparities facing black men and boys in America, and increased demand for evidenced-based outcomes and lifting up what truly works, it has been pressing on my mind and heart.

I come into contact every day with leaders, young and old, working hard to advance the field of black male achievement. They give me hope that lasting change is possible. This week, the BMAfunders team at the Foundation Center published a report, Building a Beloved Community: Strengthening the Field of Black Male Achievement, that provides the nation with a recipe for taking that work to the next level.

Given the growing national focus on the need to improve life outcomes for black males, it is a timely resource. Based on interviews with fifty leaders in the social, academic, government, and business sectors, Building a Beloved Community maps the black male achievement landscape and offers recommendations for strengthening the field going forward.

The report also attempts to answer the question posed in the title of its 2012 companion report, Where Do We Go From Here? Philanthropic Support for Black Men and Boys, and concludes that we should aspire to what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a generation ago, described as the Beloved Community — a nation committed to realizing its founding promise of "justice for all."

In describing his idea of a Beloved Community, King said "we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." That notion is linked to scholar and civil rights activist Lani Guinier's premise that black men and boys are America's "canaries in the mine" — that the inequities they face are inextricably connected to the well-being of all Americans. In fact, it was Guinier's premise that helped convince Open Society's U.S. Programs board of directors to launch the Campaign for Black Male Achievement in 2008. Since then, we have worked with countless partners to help catalyze and support the emerging leaders and organizations highlighted in the Building a Beloved Community report.

Taking Board Leadership From Good to Great

I'm a consultant who spends a lot of time working with nonprofit boards,
and as I ponder the experiences and effectiveness of many of those boards, I can't help but notice the gap that exists between their promise and actual performance. In fact, it brings an old song to mind...

You may say I'm a dreamer,
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us,
And the sector will grow as one.

Okay. I took some liberties with the lyrics. But since this is about board leadership, I thought you'd catch my drift and forgive me.

I'm in this line of work because, as the song goes, I'm a dreamer at heart and truly believe in optimal scenarios, especially as it relates to the millions of do-good organizations around the world and the people who lead them every day.

Imagine how different things would be in communities across the U.S. and around the world if every board member that served a nonprofit or NGO vowed to invest only their best into the organizations they lead and serve. They would read the financials and the body language of frustrated employees. They would hold executive leadership accountable in the boardroom – and in high regard outside it. They would balance criticism with encouragement. There would be fewer dictates and more discussion. Instead of being evaluative of goals, they would be evangelical about missions. What if breaking even and taking chances were equally rewarded? What would happen then?

Imagine.

Sharing Knowledge, Finding Solutions

As Atlantic Philanthropies makes its final philanthropic investments, it is asking some important questions, including: "How can we all build on the advances and lessons learned from our thirty-plus years of grantmaking?" and "How can we make sure that valuable knowledge on issues that matter to us is not simply lost when we close our doors?"

The Foundation Center has partnered with Atlantic to help answer these questions, starting with an issue that crosses every physical, political, and social boundary in the world: improving access to palliative care.

The result of our partnership is IssueLab's newly launched "Improving Access to Palliative Care," a special collection of more than eighty documents that provides valuable insight into why millions of people cannot access the care they need. Gathered from nonprofits and foundations around the world, the documents in the collection are easily explored through an interface that lays out the key barriers to access and some of the recommended solutions.

As we began work on the collection, I asked Gail Birkbeck, strategic learning and evaluation executive at Atlantic, why the foundation chose access to palliative care as an important topic to address in this way. "Since 2004, Atlantic has invested $58.5 million in palliative care covering a broad spectrum of activities, from building hospice facilities to funding professional staff associations and research institutes," said Birkbeck. "It's apparent from our work that, in general, how you die is a function of where you live. Especially in developing countries, there is limited access to palliative care."

Weekend Link Roundup (May 10-11, 2014)

Our weekly roundup of new and noteworthy items from and about the nonprofit sector....

Arts/Culture

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, David Skeel, a professor of bankruptcy law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, argues that the $816 million art-for-pensions deal to keep the Detroit Institute of Arts collection intact and in the city fails to protect all creditors equally and, therefore, is probably illegal.

Communications/Marketing

On Beth Kanter's blog, Jay Geneske, director of digital at the Rockefeller Foundation, shares the thinking behind the foundation's decision to underwrite a project that looks at the role digital technology can play in elevating the practice of storytelling as a way to inspire action on behalf of the poor and vulnerable. Findings based on the foundation's initial convenings have been packaged in a report, Digital Storytelling for Social Impact, that's embedded in Geneske's post or can be downloaded here.

Education

In a post on the Campaign for America's Future blog, Jeff Bryant, editor of the Education Opportunity Network site, looks at a handful of recent reports that call into question the efficacy of private charter schools.

Environment

Nice two-part interview on the Greenpeace USA blog with environmental activist and documentarian (The Story of Stuff) Annie Leonard, who earlier this week was named to lead the organization.

The announcement by Stanford that it was divesting its endowment of investments in coal companies has officials at other colleges and universities feeling the heat, writes Jonathan Berr on CBS' Moneywatch site. But in the New York Times, op-ed contributor Ivo Welch, a professor of finance and economics at UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management, argues that "[i]ndividual divestments, either as economic or symbolic pressure, have never succeeded in getting companies or countries to change."

[VIDEO] World in Transition (Albert Wenger at DLD NYC)

This week, instead of an infographic, we decided to change things up with a relatively short video featuring Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures, which is best known for its early investments in Zynga, Twitter, and Tumblr.

In the video, which was recorded at the DLD (Digital-Life-Design) conference in New York City earlier this month, Wenger explains that human society is the midst of a transition as profound in its implications as the shift from hunter gathering to subsistence farming was in the Neolithic Era. What's more, says Wenger, the transition from an industrial to an information society has already begun to create big changes in the global economy, including:

• Disappearing growth
• Disappearing jobs
• Disappearing capital
• Disappearing attention

Wenger has lots of other interesting things to share -- including the fact that half of all jobs in the global economy could be automated over the nex twenty years and the fact that a book published in the U.S. today sells an average of two hundred and fifty copies. (So much for Plan B.)

Check it out. If Wenger's factoid about our increasingly attenuated attention spans is correct, you'll only interrupt yourself once before the end.

 

 

What do you think? Is Wenger's description cause for optimism? Or does it just make you want to crawl under the covers?

-- Mitch Nauffts

The Sloping Reality of Spend Down

(Jeffrey Solomon is president of The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. This post originally appeared on the GrantCraft blog.)

Immense change is part of life for any foundation that is spending down. Employees are naturally concerned about their futures, while management is focused on smooth organizational transition.

So it is no surprise that of all the managerial issues presented in time-limited foundations, those involving human resources – and the emotional toll attached – claim the greatest amount of energy and deserve a great deal of thoughtful and purposeful attention.

Two recent pieces in this series captured ground-level dynamics of employees choosing to leave or join a time-limited foundation. And so here, it's logical that I address some of the personnel management issues that have emerged during this period at The Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (ACBP).

From the inception of ACBP in 1986, Andrea and Charles Bronfman understood that staff was the most important resource. Our founders manifested that understanding in a variety of ways – some practical, some symbolic – but all with the objective of developing, incubating, supporting, and integrating staff as key players in realizing ACBP's philanthropic mission.

One example of this was the existence of a full-time human resources manager and an information resources management professional on our staff. While this may appear standard, even mundane, for us it was not. These positions could well have been outsourced, considering the relatively small size of our staff. But their in-house presence underscored the centrality of their roles and the high value placed on personnel in the overall ACBP framework.

Neither of these positions exist now – one is outsourced and the other has been absorbed by an existing staff member – even though ACBP is still slightly less than two years from complete spend down. This simple fact well reflects the sloping reality of operating in a spend-down environment, and doing more with less in a thoughtful and deliberate manner.