As the impact of COVID-19 grows in the United States, the lack of vaccines or effective treatment, coupled with anticipated subsequent outbreaks, has made it necessary to adopt unprecedented policy interventions across many aspects of daily life. Now many people are facing financial challenges resulting from these interventions and are struggling to pay housing and utility costs.

Four groups led by Duke University faculty have been awarded Collaboratory grants for research into pressing local and global challenges.

The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University has awarded funding to six research projects for Fiscal Year 2019–20 through the institute's Catalyst Program.

Now in its third year, the Catalyst Program aims to build on the Nicholas Institute’s mission by increasing engagement with Duke faculty to incubate and advance new partnerships, enhance policy-relevant knowledge, and create innovative policy solutions based on new creative synergies.

A proposal by the electric operator Duke Energy to site a combined heat and power facility on the Duke University campus became a teachable moment for 10 Duke students in a course on the ethical dimensions of environmental policy.

For at least a decade, long-time residents of Old East Durham have witnessed a redevelopment effort that has swelled the city’s population and brought new businesses and jobs but that has done little to protect them from rising housing prices and has even cut them off from some traditional support systems. Many are being pushed out of an area that they no longer find affordable. The concerns of those long-time residents are now part of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions’ first project on environmental justice. It is in that broad environmental justice context that the Nicholas Institute, along with the University of North Carolina (UNC) and North Carolina State University (NCSU), is engaging with Communities in Partnership, a new East Durham neighborhood non-profit, to document the unintended and collateral impacts of the city’s revitalization. This Kenan Creative Collaboratory project will eventually lead to proposals of policy mechanisms to address those impacts.