During her 2025 State of the City Address, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announced four new policy proposals that were directly inspired by our research at the Center for an Urban Future.

Establish the NYC Minority-Owned Business Accelerator

In 2022, CUF published Scaling Minority Businesses: Adapting Cincinnati’s Accelerator for NYC, a report which urged city leaders to replicate Cincinnati’s successful Minority Business Accelerator to help more of New York’s great minority-owned businesses grow into larger, job-generating entities. As we wrote, “There are roughly 20,000 Black- and Latino-owned businesses across the five boroughs, but far too few of them ever grow from small businesses into medium-sized or large businesses.” We also featured the idea in our 2024 report, 5 Ideas to Expand Economic Mobility in NYC, and in 15 Policy Ideas for NYC to Start 2025. Speaker Adams announced that “the Council will help establish a Minority-Owned Business Accelerator, modeled after a similar effort in Cincinnati.” In her speech, Speaker Adams echoed the language from our report, saying “There are around 20,000 Black-and Latino-owned businesses across the five boroughs, but too few ever grow into medium-sized or large-scale businesses.”

The New York Times highlighted this proposal in its coverage of the Speaker’s speech, noting that CUF had “proposed the idea.”

Launch CUNY Fresh Start

This was the first idea in our January 2025 report, 15 Policy Ideas for NYC to Start 2025, and also a key recommendation from our November 2024 report, Helping NYC's Low-Income Adult Learners Succeed at CUNY. We urged city leaders to “establish CUNY Fresh Start, an initiative to reduce or eliminate unpaid balances up to $1,000 to help more adult learners to re-enroll at CUNY and complete their degree.” On Tuesday, Speaker Adams outlined a proposal to establish CUNY Fresh Start, saying: “We can … eliminate a major financial barrier by clearing old unpaid balances of up to $1,000 for former students to successfully re-enroll.” 

Create CUNY Flex

On Tuesday, Speaker Adams announced a proposal to “Expand Support for Low-Income Adult Learners by Establishing CUNY Flex.” CUF first proposed the idea of a CUNY Flex program, calling on city leaders to “establish CUNY Flex to help more of CUNY's low-income adult learners complete degrees.” We pointed out that nearly one-quarter of all degree-seeking undergraduate students at CUNY today are over age 25, but too many of these adult learners never get to the college finish line. Our research showed that most adult learners can’t take advantage of many of CUNY’s successful college persistence programs because they require full-time enrollment, shutting out the 55 percent of adult learners who study part-time. We recommended that “Mayor Adams and the City Council … tackle this gap by launching a new wraparound services initiative for part-time learners—potentially called CUNY Flex.” 

Expand CUNY ACE

Speaker Adams announced a proposal to “Expand CUNY ACE from reaching 3 percent of eligible students to 30 percent to boost graduation rates.” Her announcement echoed CUF’s recommendation to “Expand CUNY's highly successful but small-scale ACE program to help more senior college students succeed.” In our 2023 report profiling CUNY ACE (Playing NYC's ACE Card) and our op-ed To Boost Economic Mobility, Help CUNY ACE Grow, we noted: “ACE has served just 3 percent of the 93,305 bachelor’s degree-seeking undergraduates enrolled full-time at CUNY’s senior colleges today. By comparison, CUNY ASAP is now serving about 25,000 students each year, or nearly 30 percent.”