The Urban Institute is a Washington, D.C.–based think tank that carries out economic and social policy research to "open minds, shape decisions, and offer solutions". The institute receives funding from government contracts, foundations and private donors. The Urban Institute measures policy effects, compares options, shows which stakeholders get the most and least, tests conventional wisdom, reveals trends, and makes costs, benefits, and risks explicit. The Urban Institute has been referred to as "nonpartisan", "liberal", and "left-leaning". In 2020, the Urban Institute co-hosted the second annual Sadie T.M. Alexander Conference for Economics and Related Fields with The Sadie Collective in Washington, D.C. History and funding The Urban Institute was established in 1968 by the Lyndon B. Johnson administration to study the nation's urban problems and evaluate the Great Society initiatives embodied in more than 400 laws passed in the prior four years. Johnson hand-selected well-known economists and civic leaders to create the non-partisan, independent research organization. Their ranks included Kermit Gordon, McGeorge Bundy, Irwin Miller, Arjay Miller, Richard Neustadt, Cyrus Vance, and Robert McNamara. William Gorham, former Assistant Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare, was selected as its first president and served from 1968 to 2000. Gradually, Urban's research and funding base broadened. In 2013, federal government contracts provided about 54% of Urban's operating funds, private foundations another 30%, and nonprofits, corporations and corporate foundations, state and local governments, international organizations and foreign entities, individuals, and Urban's endowment the rest. Some of Urban's more than 100 private sponsors and funders include the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Public funding as of the 2020 fiscal year comes from various branches of the United States government including the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the United States Department of Agriculture. Current initiatives At any given time 200 or more projects are underway at the institute. New work includes studies on retirement and aging in America, who pays income taxes, state implementation of the Affordable Care Act, working families and their children, immigrant children in US schools, the cost-effectiveness of crime prevention, and the personal and national challenges of long-term unemployment. The institute also studies the family, economic, and societal issues faced by prisoners released