Targeted Universalism: Policy & Practice provides a roadmap to design policy that can serve groups otherwise excluded, while also promising to improve outcomes for people situated in relatively privileged positions. This is accomplished by re-imagining the range of implementation strategies needed to accomplish the universal goal. The targeted universalism framework was developed by Haas Institute Director john a. powell as a response to the constraints of the two dominant approaches in policy thinking: the targeted approach, and the universal approach. Targeted universalism borrows the strengths and avoids the weaknesses of both targeted and universal approaches. Yet, it is also categorically distinct in both conception and execution.

The Puerto Rico Department of Education has closed nearly half of the public schools in Puerto Rico since 2007. Puerto Rico is not alone; there is a broader trend of school closures in districts across the US, from Philadelphia to Oakland to Washington DC. But Puerto Rico shuttered an unprecedented 673 of its public schools (44%) in 11 years, far outpacing the rate of change and the number of closures in Chicago (the US school district with the second largest number of school closures). The impact of Puerto Rico’s closures on students, families, and surrounding neighborhoods is profound, yet it has largely been regarded as collateral damage of a necessary restructuring. This report, published by the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley and the Centro para la Reconstrucción del Hábitat, analyzes the human impact of the closures, the current state of the schools that have been closed, the response by affected communities, and strategies for a pathway forward.

In this report we comply with scholarship and legal precedent that defines access to include access to residential in-home service, quality service that serves environmental and personal health, and affordable service. Water security is a term in this report used to describe the presence of structural, systemic, and institutional arrangements that ensure everyone has consistent access to drinking water and wastewater services. Water insecurity looks different in the humid east than in the arid west, different in the Midwest from the South, different between urban, suburban, or rural. However different water insecurity problems look at the local level, they are the result of similar institutional, systemic, and structural problems. This is a study of the what persistent water insecurity looks like in the service area of Detroit’s drinking and wastewater system (DWSD) and specific places within that system, notably Detroit.