PolicyGuides.org draws on the research and policy analysis of more than 200 nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations funded by The Joyce Foundation.

The Joyce Foundation supports efforts to protect the natural environment of the Great Lakes, to reduce poverty and violence in the region, and to ensure that its people have access to good schools, decent jobs, open government and a diverse and thriving culture.

The Foundation is especially interested in improving public policies, because public systems such as education and welfare directly affect the lives of so many people, and because public policies help shape private sector decisions about jobs, the environment, and the health of our communities.

As the mission makes clear, the Foundation focuses its grantmaking on initiatives that promise to have an influence on public policies, because it believes that policy initiatives can lead to broad, systemic changes that affect the most people over the long run.

The Foundation’s public policy grantmaking includes some or all of the following elements:

• Research and analysis to define, document, and quantify a problem, to develop fact-based arguments for new and better policy options, or to identify and assess the costs, feasibility and likely consequences of policy alternatives.
• Policy development to offer up options to mitigate or remedy problems.
• Communications, media outreach and public education strategy to inform citizens and promote active participation in government.
• Permissible policy advocacy activities, which includes participating in official proceedings (such as legislative hearings); informing lawmakers; providing legal, technical, and drafting assistance when requested; and fostering public discourse among candidates and lawmakers to explain and defend their policy views.
• Demonstrating public support for reform through broad-based, diverse and bipartisan coalition-and constituency-building and grassroots organizing.
• Monitoring implementation and enforcement of new policies once in place — a process that may involve participation in the rulemaking and enforcement proceedings of regulatory agencies; blowing the whistle on those trying to circumvent the new policies; or, on occasion, litigation.
• Evaluation of a legislative or regulatory change to determine to what extent the goals of the change has been realized.