Strategy and Implementation
Underpinning the entire CEDS document and engagement process are the strategies and actions that will be taken by the Economic Development District. Each region has its own optimal strategic actions to advance inclusive economic growth, which may include these six program areas with key equity implications.
Equitable Community Engagement
Ongoing community engagement is a vital part of successful economic strategies which deliver shared prosperity for the region. By engaging with the fullness of a community, a region opens the door to see all existing assets in the regional economy and create pathways to expand a region’s GDP growth. The public participation process, the activities to gather community feedback for planning purposes, frequently favors the most privileged members of a community. Research from select cities has shown that white residents make up the “overwhelming” majority of public meeting attendees, over representing their input and participation in the planning process. While public meetings are only one avenue to public participation, this over-representation illustrates the importance of equitable community engagement strategies to ensure that all voices and communities are represented in the planning process.
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Center those with lived experience in the community at any engagement meetings and encourage space for concerns and feedback. Narratives individuals share may need to align with the common economic narrative of the region and ensure that these individuals are empowered to share their experiences. Ensure that after the engagement process, partners and stakeholders receive a copy of the action plan that addresses the concerns and feedback they shared that informed this work.
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Understanding where in the community those who have been historically excluded from community engagement processes live and work is a crucial first step in ensuring that the EDD/EDO can reach them. When planning for the community engagement process, start by geographically mapping key audiences to ensure strategic locations for engagement opportunities.
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Historically, many CEDS public engagement materials have only been available in English, from invitations to public meetings to the document itself. Ensure that any print materials and online information are available in languages spoken in the community and have translation services available at any live engagement opportunities. Begin by identifying which languages are spoken in the community, which may reflect key audiences, immigrant or refugee individuals, who reside there.
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Only some people in the community have online connectivity, an electronic device, or the digital skills to complete an online survey or engage in an online convening. While technology has made it easier to gather feedback, be aware that key audiences whose voice needs to be included may not be able to access online engagement opportunities. Consider using locations that these audiences may frequent as locations for interviews or engagement, such as public libraries or senior centers. Beyond location, explore how pre-paid mailers or telephone engagements may provide alternatives to ensure that all are engaged in the planning process.
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Ensure that the locations of any engagement meetings are convenient and safe for the key audiences who have been historically excluded. Select places in the geographic areas identified and ensure they are transit accessible. Beyond just the site of the meetings, ensure that the day and time of the meetings are accessible for those that may work hours beyond just 9-5 or conflict with other key community activities. Some jurisdictions have offered childcare at engagement meetings to reduce barriers for parents and caregivers.
Small Business Support
During the pandemic, small businesses were on the front lines of economic disruption, facing lost revenue and closures. These economic disruptions were felt differently across geographies, industries, and, importantly, racial demographics. Black-owned small businesses closed at twice the rate of white-owned small businesses. Asian-owned, Black-owned, and Hispanic-owned firms all reduced operations significantly more than white-owned small businesses. Dovetailing with these trends, there has been an increase in entrepreneurship, with record business formation rates since the pandemic's beginning. This increase in entrepreneurship brings more diversity, including record rates of Black and Latino entrepreneurs, though these rates are still behind rates of White entrepreneurship. There continues to be a significant need to address barriers for these entrepreneurs in launching and growing their businesses to contribute to local economic growth in the region.
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This guide has discussed asset-based approaches, from language to mapping. When embedding equity in efforts to support and grow small businesses, start with the existing assets in the community, particularly successful entrepreneurs and business owners of color. These individuals will bring powerful expertise on where opportunities are and where barriers can be removed for other business owners, such as capital gaps or educational support.
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Start by looking backward at who was able to access COVID-19 small business relief programs and how they were able to access this support. Look at what preexisting inequities were in place for business owners of color that were compounded by the pandemic, especially access to capital. This was reflected in who could access COVID-19 assistance, with significant disparities in Paycheck Protection Program lending. By understanding the barriers in accessing pandemic support and how information was made available and disseminated to business owners of color, the EDD/EDO can identify gaps in services and outreach to address.
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Entrepreneurs need support and community when launching their businesses, but at a fundamental level, entrepreneurs cannot start businesses without funding. Capital access barriers have long hindered entrepreneurs and business owners of color, with traditional financial lenders turning down business owners of color at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. With increasing rates of entrepreneurs of color, these capital barriers must be addressed for local economic growth and to reduce racial wealth divides in the region. Consider the role of the EDD or EDO in creating and supporting new investment vehicles for entrepreneurs of color, including partnerships with Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and Community Credit Unions that don’t extract wealth and provide low-interest rates and greater flexibility.
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Most conversations around business owners of color build on biases by industry. With corner stores and barbershops being front of mind, these existing biases tend to focus support to microenterprises in specific sectors, such as retail and service industries. These industries and business models are considered limited growth compared to high-growth industries that scale in other industries. These industries were more likely to be affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in lost revenue. When looking to support these business owners and entrepreneurs, focus on something other than programs and capital by industry. Create strategies to build the diversity of business ownership, not just by the number of companies but across the entire economy holistically, including industry and business size.
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Across social services, healthcare, and digital inclusion fields, community navigator models have expanded in providing individualized support, reducing organizational silos, and achieving equity outcomes. In response to the pandemic recovery, many programs focused on business navigators or community navigators seek to support entrepreneurs and small business owners in navigating the business launch or growth process. These navigation models structure a “front door” or individual with relationships across the community to connect the business owner to resources. With equity implications to reduce barriers to information and access to connections, consider how entrepreneurship and business support programs could use navigation models to connect business ownerships with community, support, and capital.
Inclusive Clusters and Industry Strategies
Regional industry clusters aren’t a new approach to economic development. By design, they identify promising growth opportunities in a region, target resources to accelerate that growth, and ensure the conditions to deliver economic competitiveness. Leveraging cluster strategies with a specific focus on inclusive growth, however, changes how industry strategies are delivered in place. As regions analyze industry activities and support target clusters, key considerations to activate inclusive clusters include how resources are targeted, how to identify growth opportunities, and how to create workforce partnerships.
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Inclusivity needs to be deliberate. For cluster selection, practitioners can identify those parts of the economy where diverse business owners and diverse talent are already thriving, as potential industry clusters to prioritize. Additionally, economic practitioners can identify how excluded individuals and businesses outside of target clusters can be connected to the target cluster, so they can both drive and benefit from the growth. Ensuring inclusivity remains a central point as the industry cluster grows by setting equitable goals must be part of the planning at the outset. Create metrics that track inclusive metrics, including job ladders, business supplier diversity, and opportunities for entrepreneurs.
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Smaller towns, rural communities, and disinvested parts of larger cities are often ignored in cluster strategies. Yet EDDs are uniquely positioned to identify, build, and serve industry clusters, which are most apparent at a regional rather than a local level. Economic practitioners can identify places and communities to activate in the cluster strategy, which will expand the overall economic growth of the cluster while also paving pathways of opportunity. Focusing on building coalitions and networks focused on cluster support, while reinforcing the commitment to inclusive growth will be key to the success.
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Just as clusters require jurisdictional collaboration at the regional level, the need for partnerships and collaboration exists across sectors and industry entities. Businesses within clusters can easily view other companies as competitors. This hinders building supportive systems that encourage inclusive economic growth and requires the collaboration of these companies to participate and support the larger cluster. Investments in diverse talent and workforce programs are integral to successful inclusive cluster strategies.
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Support can also include capital investment and financial products that align with the needs of the businesses. With access to capital as a significant barrier for business owners and entrepreneurs of color, women business owners and business owners in small towns, targeted financial products and opportunities can address equity barriers. For example, in Chicago, a cluster-focused organization designed financial products that targeted a subset of businesses that were smaller and primarily minority-owned to meet their working capital needs, which in turn contributed to the overall growth of the industry cluster.
Equitable Workforce Development
As the pandemic highlighted existing economic inequities, historical workforce disparities were at the forefront, with record rates of unemployment and the resulting financial consequences for low-income households. Hispanic and Black workers faced unemployment for the longest duration during the COVID-19 pandemic. With widespread school and childcare closures, women were more likely to leave the labor force to accommodate childcare needs. These labor market trends mirror the impacts on Black and Hispanic workers and women in past economic downturns, facing greater job loss rates and slower wage recovery. Workforce development systems can be uniquely positioned to disrupt cycles of systemic poverty by acknowledging and addressing the inequities that prevented inclusive economic growth during previous economic downturns.
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Most workforce organizations fulfill their mission by serving “everyone.” Accounting for historical and systemic racism and sexism, discrimination by ability, and the barriers presented by the criminal legal system, it becomes apparent that access to quality jobs and employment has entrenched inequities. Workforce development systems should equitably focus resources and programs on the individuals and communities with the most significant barriers to employment and identify ways to serve them effectively and realistically. Program goals, activities, and success metrics should reflect the specifics of the audience the EDD/EDO seeks to serve.
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Workforce development at its core is broad, spanning sectors and approaches; as such, a wide range of partners and stakeholders all play unique roles in the local ecosystem, and the complexity only grows when looking at the broader region. Stakeholders include workforce development boards, employers, higher education and community colleges, community-based organizations, unions and trade associations, public libraries, and beyond. To avoid fragmentation across these stakeholders, apply a collective impact lens to identify regional backbone organizations. These backbone organizations, or conveners, serve as the primary connector of strategies, activities, funding, and measurement. These organizations may be uniquely able with local partners to build a deeper understanding of local workforce trends.
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While training and education may be central to workforce development, inclusive strategies also address the broader range of barriers in accessing upskilling or reskilling programs with wraparound supports. These supports, including transportation, childcare, and counseling, addressing larger systemic barriers that disproportionately face workers of color and women and lead to stronger labor market and program outcomes
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Most of the metrics within workforce development focus on employment, attaining employment, or maintaining employment. Disaggregating these traditional employment metrics by race and gender helps provide another window into disparities and addresses barriers and hiring discrimination. Also, to account for job quality, metrics should go beyond just employment secured to include wages and benefits secured to understand the full picture of economic mobility for workers by race and gender. These metrics of quality and progress, including wage gains, over time provide a much more complete picture to service providers of individual impact, rather than reinforcing job placement as the only metric of success.
Equitable Infrastructure
Infrastructure can be defined as “the physical framework upon which the U.S. economy operates, and our standard of living depends.” As such, the existing infrastructure, from highways to hazardous waste sites, illustrates a stark picture of historical inequities and racism in policy and funding. As national conversations around infrastructure investments and improvements seek to apply an equity lens, economic development districts are increasingly examining the impact of local infrastructure investments. Equitable infrastructure seeks to incorporate equity in each stage of planning, engagement, prioritization, and in building, to ensure that racial, gender, and geographic disparities are not being exacerbated further. Front of mind for practitioners during the COVID-19 pandemic were both broadband and digital access and transportation access.
Transportation Access
Transportation access, whether it be the ability to buy a car, access to carpooling, or access to reliable and frequent public transportation, is a growing concern for job accessibility, career mobility, and accessible, affordable housing. Lack of access to reliable and affordable transit impacts wealth building and career mobility. The pandemic has shown increased workplace flexibility, including remote work, for individuals not in essential, service roles. This flexibility is increasingly out of reach for low-income communities, disproportionally communities of color, who are more likely to hold frontline and low-wage roles.
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Engage and create participatory transportation projects with an equity focus. These needs assessments can include inventorying and assessing the range of mobility needs for specific communities, particularly regarding affordability, mobility, safety, health, and access to opportunity.
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With historic federal investment in infrastructure, the Department of Transportation is distributing the bulk of the available investments directly to state agencies. When looking at transportation improvement and equity in the region, additional investments may be available through state programs and initiatives.
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As Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO) undertake the creation of long-range transportation plans (LRTPs) and transportation improvement programs (TIPs) their prioritization processes typically take the form of a scoring assessment or a holistic assessment. In either of these approaches, equity should be a primary evaluation criterion across multiple modes of transportation, beyond just transit, and include significant public involvement.
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Facing mobility barriers, individuals with disabilities and older adults illustrate how innovations and technology have created new approaches and solutions with technology and shared mobility to address transportation barriers. Transportation departments are looking at how to deepen the impact of 5310 funding to examine mobility options for older adults and individuals with disabilities with considerations for demographics and race.
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eography and the diffuse nature of rural areas make planning and funding transportation programs difficult and require specific solutions and models. Additional models for rural communities include connector services, coordinated services, and voucher approaches.
Broadband and Digital Access
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a spotlight was shown on the essential need for digital access, with an increasing focus on the lack of internet access and broadband availability and affordability. During the pandemic, digital access meant the ability to go to school, stay employed or keep a business open. In recovery, as more services and activities remain primarily online, digital access is only more essential. Economic development districts saw firsthand how broadband mapping gaps and a lack of transparency on access and adoption have directly impeded economic competitiveness and equitable access to employment opportunities.
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In reference to national federal data, be aware of the significant lack of data and historical overstating of broadband access presented nationally. As the Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to improve the data available in the National Broadband Map, look to additional data sources to inform what may be a more accurate representation of broadband access in the community and raise awareness as the overstated data may impact the region's ability to access federal funds. Additionally, broadband access exists on a spectrum that includes the type of access, cost, and speed. When crafting metrics for local broadband access, consider how the type of access, the cost of access, and speed can impact online access regionally.
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While metrics that look at broadband access show key infrastructure gaps, low-income residents, disproportionately residents of color, may also lack access because of the high cost. When making broadband infrastructure investments, consider inequitable financial barriers to online access and the availability of information about low-cost internet access programs.
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While reliable broadband access is an essential component of digital access, it is not the only essential component. True digital access must address three components: broadband access and affordability, electric device access, and digital literacy and skills. Identify steps to ensure full digital access, including device dissemination and access, and digital literacy training for workforce development and beyond.
Ecosystem Barriers
Ecosystem barriers are the wider range of factors keeping individuals from participating economically. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many ecosystem factors caused financial anxiety for low-income residents, including housing and childcare. As residents lost wages and spent any savings, they faced a looming threat of eviction and prolonged school closures. All these factors compounded during the pandemic alongside public health fears. To develop equitable interventions to support those most affected by these barriers, consider how the region is addressing needs in housing and childcare.
Childcare
The childcare crisis in the United States is not new. For decades now, many families continue to struggle finding and paying for childcare. Meanwhile daycare providers are among the lowest-paid workers in the country, often lacking benefits such as health insurance. The disruption brought by the COVID-19 pandemic renewed conversations, while 2 out of 3 working parents changed their childcare arrangements, and 2 out of 3 childcare centers that serve less than 75 children struggle to break even. And now, 50% of parents who have not returned to work cite childcare challenges as the reason. To support an inclusive recovery, consider new strategies to address the childcare crisis in the region.
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When revisiting small business support strategies, consider how these efforts could be tied to supporting local childcare businesses. Some organizations, including examples in Maine and Texas, have sought to find ways to support the start-up or expansion of childcare businesses, including access to funding and support in licensing. Consider how small business support assets and strategies could be focused on supporting childcare access.
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Many call the for-profit childcare business model “broken.” This perspective highlights the challenge of balancing rising costs and supply and demand for businesses. When looking at opportunities within the region for the childcare workforce and the opportunity to build wealth through shared ownership, consider how in planning, the EDD can support and explore both for-profit and non-profit models, including the potential for cooperative or shared business ownership structures.
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Childcare providers typically face high-employee turnover. Look at steps that can be taken to incentive childcare workers, including increasing wages, and benefits and expanding health insurance coverage to these employees.
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As steps are taken to address the need for more affordable childcare, look at how scheduling could support greater childcare accessibility. Many low-wage, essential workers face challenges in their roles that require work on evenings, nights, and weekends, when most childcare providers are closed. When understanding key industries in the region, such as healthcare or retail, or seasonal industries impacted by tourism, there may be an opportunity at the regional level to remove workforce barriers by crafting or incentivizing childcare solutions that address scheduling flexibility to increase accessibility.
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As individuals, primarily women left the workforce during the pandemic due to childcare challenges, there will be a continued need to support returning to work after an absence. Many organizations and programs have been helping women in returning to their careers, but with the scale of departures during the pandemic, additional demand and support will be needed. Look at how the region’s workforce strategies may align with scaling return-to-work programs and targeting job placement efforts.
Housing
Following the 2008 financial crisis, Black and Hispanic households were more likely to face housing-related hardships, such as eviction or delays in mortgage or rent payments, than compared with white households. This was only compounded for homeowners in neighborhoods of color, who also saw steep declines in the value of their homes following the financial crisis. The inequitable impact of these economic shocks play out similarly in the COVID-19 pandemic, where the eviction and foreclosure rate for Black and Hispanic households increased by 7%, compared with 2% for white households. These trends, built on a history of economic exclusion, only widen the existing racial wealth gap. As eviction moratoriums spread and provided only temporary housing stability, a larger conversation emerged on the need to address more proactive and sustainable housing solutions.
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A long history of systemic racism and redlining has shaped generational wealth and access to asset-building and has shaped economic mobility today. With the racial and gender inequities that played out in the COVID-19 pandemic, it emphasizes the need for housing programs to be specifically designed for and outreach conducted to the most impacted residents. Lead with race and gender at the center and acknowledge institutional inequities that have and still create housing instability.
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While leading with an equity focus, including centering race and gender, also consider key audiences with historical housing challenges and programs that can be tailored to their unique needs. These communities include justice-involved residents, individuals with disabilities, victims of domestic violence, and LGBTQ+ and gender-diverse individuals. These audiences are all more likely to be unhoused or face housing instability. Ensure support programs are housing-first and provide critical support and assistance for these audiences.
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Homeownership allows lower-income and young households to invest in assets and build wealth. When designing and building homeownership programs, consider how to coordinate efforts across partners with increased access to down-payment assistance and affordable credit. Consider policies in the community that can lead to zoning reform or incentivize mixed-income housing. When building these pathways and programs, remember that homeownership is just one strategy to create housing access and build wealth but the only strategy.
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As the “Buy the Block” movement takes root in Houston, Rochester, and Baltimore, there is continued momentum to build new community ownership models that create affordable and commercial property housing and ensure residents are not displaced. Explore opportunities for inclusive growth in community land trusts and opportunities through land banks.
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Build on any steps to distribute rent relief or housing support funding during the COVID-19 pandemic by creating opportunities to educate tenants about anti-displacement strategies, including tenant education, code enforcement, and more.