Alex Cohen is the Director of Learning and Evaluation for the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation. Public policies like higher cigarette taxes and expanded access to evidence-based cessation treatment can help lower smoking rates in Indianapolis and across the state. But employers looking to help their employees quit and improve their health today have a number of tools already available, beyond these longer-term policy efforts. Take the experience of two Fortune 500 companies who used incentives to help employees quit. In 2004, General Electric launched a program that offered employees up to $750 if they quit smoking for 12 months. To test the impact, GE randomly offered the incentive to some […]

Ellen Quigley is the Vice President of Programs at the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation An Interview with Scott Bess, Head of School, Purdue Polytechnic High School Background In 2017, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation awarded a $1.25 million three-year grant to support the launch and replication of Purdue Polytechnic High School Indianapolis (PPHS), a first-of-its-kind urban high school model aimed at developing a new generation of talent with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills to meet the needs of an evolving workforce.  Combining personalized learning with project-based curriculum, Purdue University created this model to establish new pathways for Indianapolis’ low-income, under-represented minority students to continue their higher education at […]