In two recent National Journal articles, Matt Vasilogambros uses data from the National Equity Atlas to explore how the wages of workers in America’s 150 largest metro areas differ according to race/ethnicity and educational attainment (here and here). The Atlas provides data on median hourly wages broken down by race/ethnicity and level of education.

Overall, White workers earn more than people of color in every metropolitan area in the country—and the same pattern holds true within each category of educational attainment. (There are a handful of metro areas, most of which have incomplete data on the wages of workers of color, where Asians edge out Whites for the highest average pay.) Vasilogambros notes that “this gap in earn­ings between races and eth­ni­cit­ies is well-doc­u­mented, as are its reas­ons: Work­ing-age people of col­or tend to be young­er, have less ex­per­i­ence in skilled labor, and are less edu­cated than whites.”

While it is true that median hourly wages tend to rise with increasing educational attainment, so do racial wage inequities. According to Valerie Wilson, the dir­ect­or of the Eco­nom­ic Policy In­sti­tute’s Pro­gram on Race, Eth­ni­city, and the Eco­nomy, wage gaps have grown the most for college graduates. Data from the National Equity Atlas show that these hourly wage gaps are greatest (around $7 per hour) in cities like San Jose, San Francisco, and New York, where average levels of education and median wages are much higher. The narrowest gaps—still around $2 per hour—are seen in metro areas where the median pay for all workers is far below the national average. As Wilson puts it, “Things tend to equal out at the bot­tom, un­for­tu­nately.”

Sarah Treuhaft, the dir­ect­or of equit­able growth ini­ti­at­ives at Poli­cyLink, underscores the significance of these wage inequities, which are expected to grow as U.S. demographics continue to change. “It im­pacts the over­all eco­nomy,” says Treuhaft. “If people are not earn­ing as much pay, they have less money to save, to edu­cate their child, to spend in the eco­nomy, which fosters more eco­nom­ic activ­ity. Over­all, that ra­cial gap in wages adds up to a big gap in eco­nom­ic prosper­ity for the re­gion.”

Cross-posted from the New Economy Week

Uber recently purchased one of the largest office spaces in downtown Oakland, California, with plans to move 3,000 of its workers there by 2017. For a city facing a housing crisis and rapid displacement of Black families and low-income communities, many fear this act will accelerate gentrification pressures. It has also led to some cautious optimism for an opportunity to make Oakland a leader in what Mayor Libby Schaaf has called techquity: “fostering our local technology sector’s growth so it leads to shared prosperity.”

Tech companies can play a role in advancing an equitable economy, but they will first have to confront a deeply inequitable status quo. The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the highest levels of inequality of any region in the country, and it is growing at an alarming pace. Unequal access to business and job opportunities have deepened racial economic gaps – Black and Latino workers earn a median wage that is $10 an hour less than White workers in the Bay Area, and these racial inequities exist across all education levels. The tech-driven “innovation economy” can reverse these trends. But to understand how, it’s important to examine how the innovation economy works.

An innovation economy is based on a model of economic growth that leads with knowledge, technology, and entrepreneurship to increase productivity, and therefore business revenues and profits. It is not a particular sector of the economy, rather it cuts across many sectors and industries, such as information technology, advanced manufacturing, and energy. Increasingly, cities across the country are pursuing economic growth through innovation by creating what The Brookings Institution calls Innovation Districts – urban, walkable neighborhoods where research institutions are housed alongside start-ups, incubators, and accelerators in order to foster a network of “creative class” technologists to spur economic activity.

This economic model raises important equity questions: Who is developing these new technologies and how do they decide which societal challenges to focus on? Who owns these companies, and who is investing in (and profiting from) them? Who works at these companies, and who works in the many jobs that support them? How is the wealth they create distributed among the workers, the community, and the city where the company is located? In other words: Who benefits?

Throughout most of the innovation economy, and in technology companies in particular, the answer to these questions does not include Black, Latino, and low-income communities. Black and Latino residents combined make up only five percent of the tech workforce, two percent of tech company founders, and two percent of investors, even though they are nearly 30 percent of the U.S. workforce. Innovative companies spur the creation of a large number of service and support jobs – as many as four support jobs for every one technology job created – but these tend to pay low wages, even though rents and the cost of living are rising most rapidly in areas with strong innovation economies.

This presents a paradox. Today, the innovation economy is undoubtedly contributing to rising inequality and a widening racial income and wealth gap. Yet a growing body of research is showing that equity – just and fair inclusion in society – is not only beneficial for innovation, but is essential for our future economic prosperity. Diverse companies are more innovative and more profitable. Regions with greater equity have longer economic growth spells and fewer and shorter downturns. And reduced income inequality may actually lead to more inventors, who create more new technologies and drive innovation forward.

So how can we foster an equitable innovation economy?

Here are three examples of organizers, educators, and, yes, even economic developers, who are working to harness the power of the innovation economy to head towards a future of shared prosperity for all:

Raising the floor for the low-wage "invisible" workforce in Silicon Valley

Tech companies may have a dismal record on diversity among their engineers and top executives, but they employ the services of thousands of workers of color, mostly Black and Latino, who cook, clean, and guard for them. Most of these “invisible” workers earn less than a quarter of the salaries of the engineers they work with in the same building.

In Silicon Valley, janitors, food workers, bus drivers, and other low-wage workers are rising up to demand good jobs from these tech companies. Silicon Valley Rising, launched in February of this year, is a coalition of labor groups, faith leaders, and community-based organizations that is pushing for quality jobs, affordable housing, and corporate responsibility in the tech sector.

In its first ten months, it has achieved impressive results. The shuttle drivers who drive Facebook employees voted last Spring for a union contract that increases their pay by over 25 percent and includes health care, paid time off, better scheduling, and more. Facebook has also agreed to require their contractors pay a minimum of $15 an hour and provide paid time off. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other Bay Area tech companies have also improved wages and working conditions for some of their contract workers.

“We believe we can create something different here,” said Maria Noel Fernandez, campaign director with Silicon Valley Rising. “We’re working to inspire tech to rebuild the middle class with us.”

Re-directing planning and economic development tools to support manufacturing and promote equitable innovation

With an unemployment rate below four percent, some are declaring that the Bay Area has recovered from the recession. Yet this masks the reality of where the job growth has been – primarily in low-wage jobs and some high-wage jobs – and where it’s not been – mainly in middle-wage jobs that have seen a nearly 10 percent decline over the last 12 years in the Bay Area. These middle-wage jobs may not be found in tech companies, but they do exist in industries like manufacturing, and are essential to building an equitable innovation economy.

During the economic boom of the late 1990s, the City of San Jose faced enormous pressure to convert much of its industrial land in the north end of the city to housing or other development. However, these industrial spaces were some of the few places where manufacturers could locate. Instead of converting the land, the City adopted a development policy for the area that prioritized industrial uses. Today, the area is home to 25 percent of all jobs in San Jose, many of which are provided by manufacturers that supply some of the biggest tech companies in the area with custom orders for new products or parts.

San Jose is one of four cities that has joined the Equitable Innovation Economies Initiative, a project of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance led by the Pratt Center for Community Development with PolicyLink. Each of the four cities – New York City, Indianapolis, and Portland, Oregon – is designing strategies to increase access and economic opportunities within the innovation economy such as targeting investment dollars to entrepreneurs of color and women, bringing businesses back to industrial spaces in working class communities, and supporting manufacturers to hire neighborhood residents. As a part of this initiative, San Jose is now working with manufacturers and community colleges to create a pipeline for young people from low-income communities to start careers in manufacturing.

Developing the leadership and tech skills of young, Black men in Oakland.

Begun in 2012 as a labor of love by five Black entrepreneurs and technologists, The Hidden Genius Project was envisioned as a project for youth to discover their passions through technology, entrepreneurship, and leadership skills. Three years later, The Hidden Genius Project has served over 350 Black youth and young men, and was recently announced a winner for the highly competitive Google Impact Challenge Grant.

Based in Oakland, the project operates in the center of the Bay Area’s tech economy, yet in neighborhoods like East Oakland where few tech workers live. They plan to change that equation by involving young men in middle school and high school in an intensive, multi-year training and mentorship program to develop new tools and start companies that meet the challenges in their communities. They organize hackathons, workshops, visits to tech campuses, and provide an intensive 15-month program.

“We don’t do this work so that companies like Google can diversify its workforce,” said Brandon Nicholson, founding executive director of The Hidden Genius Project. “We do it so that Black youth can be leaders in transforming their lives and communities.”

The innovation economy can help us solve one of the most pressing challenges of our generation – rising inequality and a growing racial wealth and income gap – or it can accelerate us down our current path of low-wage jobs for the many and unimaginable wealth for the few. These local leaders are showing that an equitable innovation economy is possible. Indeed, it is necessary. Now, it is up to us all to create it.

Roberto Luis Rodriguez Rosario with his book, Corazon Libre, Cuerpo Confinado.

By David Bacon

It was a cooperative in Puerto Rico's Guayama prison that changed his life. Growing up, Roberto Luis Rodriguez Rosario was surrounded by violence, and lived most of his pre-teen years in foster homes. "By the time I was a teenager, I was filled with anger," he remembers. "I became a rebel, and lost my way in drugs and alcohol. I stopped going to school at 14, and began getting arrested at 15. By the time I was 17 I was doing things that could get you locked up for life. Then, when I was 19, I saw what a disaster my life had become."

There were arrest warrants out for him, and Rodriguez made what he calls the most important decision of his life. He turned himself in. His sentences totaled 125 years, and even served concurrently, they still added up to 35 years behind bars. "But I began to work on my life," he reflected. When he was transferred from a maximum-security institution to the medium security prison in Guayama, Puerto Rico, he joined a worker-owned co-operative run entirely by the inmates.

"I was looking for tools to help me work on my problems,” said Rodriquez. “I thought at first [the co-op] was just a way to reduce my sentence, but once I got involved, and started practicing the principles of co-operativism, I realized it was making a big change in my life."

The co-op, started in 2003, has helped dozens of inmates reduce their sentences and return to their communities. Of the 50 co-op members who have been released from prison in the past ten years, including Rodriguez, only two have gone back to prison, and one of them is again out on parole. The recidivism rate elsewhere in Puerto Rican prisons is over 50 percent per year according to Lymarie Nieves Plaza, director of marketing at a local credit union. Today, the co-op has 40 active members, in a prison with a population of roughly 300. And cooperative projects have sprung up in three other prisons throughout Puerto Rico, where they plan to make everything from children’s clothing to renewable energy products.

“These are jobs that are much better than the slave labor the prison itself offers,” said Jessica Gordon Nembhard,  professor of community justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, where she studies how cooperatives can empower communities of color, prisoners, and returning citizens (read our interview with her about her latest book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice). “There are many benefits from co-ops that extend beyond their market value. They promote leadership development, financial education and literacy, high level social skills, and collective decision-making that extend beyond the operations of the co-op.” 

The culture of cooperatives and democratic decision-making has had a big impact on the lives of many prisoners, Rodriguez explains, and cites his own history. The co-op meetings are run democratically, and every member has a voice. That creates the basis for trust in each other. "I can have an opinion in a meeting, but the members decide everything," said Nieves who has been working as a co-op educator and marketer with the prison co-ops.

“The co-op provides a different point of view,” said Gordon Nembhard. “It's not ‘me against the world’. It’s the co-op and my fellow members working and thinking together. They can now afford to pay for the things they need and help to support their families even though they are in prison. That is transformational.”

Changing laws and changing lives

Creating the co-op took several years and a change in the law. In 2000, a small group of prisoners in the Guayama state prison began to create craft items in an art therapy program. Some combined clay figures of Don Quixote or of saints, on a carved wooden base, holding a brightly painted Puerto Rican flag. Some inmates were leather workers, and made portfolios, belts, hats, and sandals. Others carved boats, or made pencil portraits.

None could be sold outside the prison, however. One of the inmates, Hector Quiñones Andino, began to investigate how prisoners might organize themselves so that their work might find a market. He looked at two possibilities. One was to form a corporation. "But they didn't like that idea much," Rodriguez says, "because it focused too much on individual profit." Quiñones found a book about cooperatives, and that provided another alternative. So he asked for an orientation from the Co-operative League of Puerto Rico, according to Rodriguez.

Discovering that they faced a legal prohibition from participating in cooperatives because of their criminal history, Quiñones and fellow prisoners in the art program wrote a letter to the governor at the time, Sila Maria Calderon, asking her to modify the law. She was moved by their story, met with some of the prisoners, and in 2003 she worked with the legislature to amend the law.

The co-op they established, the Cooperativa de Servicios ARIGOS, was the first co-op ever organized exclusively by prisoners themselves, with a board of directors made up solely of inmates. To become a member, a prisoner has to buy a $20 share, and inmates without the money up-front can work off the cost in about two months. After that, each co-op member has a voice in meetings, and one vote.

Most of the craftwork is sold in assemblies or public events organized by other cooperatives or associations. Inmates themselves can go to present their work, but they must pay for transportation and the prison guards who accompany them. They have recently expanded their work to include a nursery growing cucumbers, bell peppers and tomatoes used in the food eaten by inmates.

Rodriguez is not much of an artist, he says, so he became the co-op's secretary, responsible for keeping the books and seeking new markets. Of the money received in sales, 15 percent goes to the prison for the cost of the space and services, and 10 percent is invested by the co-op in capital expenses. The other 75 percent is divided among the co-op members. "For us, this is so much better than working for the prison itself, where they only pay $25 for 160 hours you work in a month," he explains.

The co-op has to defend its existence to the prison, often in strict economic terms. Rodriguez smiles at the way they have been able to meet objections that the co-op costs the prison money. "We showed that the prison was getting $10,000-$15,000 from its share of our sales," he recalls. "That made them much more interested in supporting us."

After serving just over 14 years of his sentence, Rodriguez was released on parole, which he completed a year ago. Life outside, however, has been challenging. Rodriguez would like to start a co-op for ex-co-op members, but it's difficult to get people together, and parole restrictions bar socializing among ex-inmates, a law they hope to change soon. Rodriguez recently released a book on his experience, entitled Corazon Libre, Cuerpo Confinado (Free Heart, Confined Body).

"We've learned how to run a business, and some former inmates now have their own small businesses outside as a result,” said Rodriguez. “If you can change the way people think in prison, you can do anything. It is a model for social change."

PolicyLink is pleased to announce that Angela Glover Blackwell has been named to the newly created Community Advisory Council (CAC) of the Federal Reserve Board.

The CAC is composed of individuals with consumer- and community development-related expertise who will provide information, advice, and recommendations to the Board on a wide range of relevant policy matters and emerging issues of interest.

From its inception, PolicyLink has maintained that the nation cannot achieve equity—just and fair inclusion into a society where all can participate, prosper, and achieve their full potential—until the economy is fully inclusive.

“The Federal Reserve plays a key role in determining whether the nation achieves full employment and a healthy economy that delivers jobs and rising wages to the communities still waiting for the recovery to reach them. I am excited to have the opportunity to inform monetary policy with the aim to create an equitable and inclusive American economy.”

The first meeting of the CAC will be held in Washington, DC on November 20, 2015. A summary of the meeting will be posted shortly thereafter.

As Equity Summit 2015 approaches, America’s Tomorrow will showcase the work of a few of the 100-plus speakers and presenters featured at the Summit — inspiring equity leaders who are using innovative approaches to build an inclusive, thriving economy within their regions. 

During her mayoral campaign in 2013, Betsy Hodges ran on a platform of equity and growth, arguing that for a city with a rapidly growing population of color, but persistent racial disparities, the two couldn’t be more intertwined. Since taking office, Mayor Hodges has spearheaded a number of initiatives, including those within the city’s housing, transit, and educational systems, which will lay the groundwork for a more equitable Minneapolis. America’s Tomorrow interviewed Mayor Hodges, exploring how, as the city’s leader, she is weaving equity “into the DNA” of her administration.

Equity and growth have been common themes within your administration. What spurred this explicit focus on equity?

When I was campaigning, there really was this hunger to have a conversation on equity. We know that [in Minneapolis], demographics are changing and we’ll be a majority [people of color] sooner rather than later. But the way things are right now, Minneapolis has some of the greatest disparities between White people and people of color in the country and, if that continues, we’re not going to be ready for future growth and prosperity. We need to make sure that people of color are both equipped to take the jobs of the future and create the jobs of the future.

There are many people who are inspired by the moral argument that ending the racial gap is the right thing to do, but not everybody. A lot of people, however, are persuaded by the economic implications. If you look at the fact that 70 percent of the kids in our public schools are kids of color, and those are the kids who are failing, you realize that if that continues, in the future we’re not going to have the kind of educated workforce our economy depends on. To prepare us to be a city of the 21st century, we have to make sure people of color are not only in the picture, but at the center of the picture.

In practice, how does this focus on equity play out within your administration?

If you come to my office I have it written on the top of the white board: How does this move the dial on equity, how does this move the dial on growing the city, and how does this make the city run well?  Those are the three filters through which we view everything we do.

I’m trying to build equity into the DNA of the city, and to do that we need to apply focused, concentrated attention on it.  That’s why I created the Office of Equitable Outcomes, which will place a couple of dedicated staff in our City Coordinator’s Office — the most centralized body we have — and make it their job to look inwardly at how our city offices incorporate equity — into our hiring, licensing, civil rights work — and outwardly at how we can run our partnerships. When you add these staff to our Bloomberg Innovation team, which is looking to use data to help tackle some of the city’s challenges, you start to see this team of people who can make equity real for the future of the city.

What are some examples of equity-driven policies and programs that are in the works in Minneapolis?

I presented my budget a few weeks ago, and the theme of that was transforming how we do the basics in the city — from how we are doing our streetlights to our workforce programs to how we hire firefighters. All those things need to be reimagined for the 21st century.

So taking the firefighter example, our fire chief has a pipeline program to create a new ladder into fire department jobs for low-income youth and youth of color. It starts with talking to 10th graders to give them an imagination to be firefighters, then there’s curriculum in one of our high schools for it, an Explorer Program where kids can spend time on the ground with firefighters, and a new “cadet” designation that allows recent [high school] graduates to work in the fire department while they train to become full firefighters.

We are also one of the first 20 regions to join the White House’s TechHire program to connect people of color to jobs in the tech sector because we know our jobs of the future are going to be in tech and we know that people of color are not well represented there.  So [in my budget proposal], I’ve funded the program to do accelerated training in technology fields, as well as 30 scholarships for that program.

Another way we hope to connect youth of color to opportunity and employment is through our BUILD Leaders program, which is tied into our My Brother’s Keeper and Promise Zone work. Through this program, [which we’ve successfully piloted already], we will employ young men of color ages 18 to 24, who have gone in some ways down the wrong path, but are trying to get on the right path, to mentor middle school boys to help them stay off a bad path altogether.  This way, we give these young men employment, train them in a mentorship curriculum, give them job experience and skills, and create this positive loop of mentorship.

How do you ensure that these various individual initiatives or programs work in concert with one another, and not as siloed efforts within different sectors or city departments?

The work that I’m doing — the more I do it, the more it overlaps. I can see this bigger picture of where our youth violence prevention blueprint overlaps with my cradle to kindergarten initiative, which overlaps with the Promise Zone work, which overlaps with the Generation Next initiative around the achievement gap, which overlaps with the My Brother’s Keeper focus on boys and young men of color. The things that we do in any one area have a multiplicative effect on the other work we’re doing, and I’m very excited about that.  You pull a thread and you start to see that it’s connected to every other thread in the fabric.

What do you hope to gain from speaking at and attending the Summit?

I’ve done my best to move heaven and earth to be at the Summit because I know that some of the sharpest minds and most open hearts are going to be there. I know there will be good, practical, on-the-ground ideas about things I can do in my city. I also know there will be a lot of strategic thinking about the barriers we’ll face, how we manage them, and how we productively enter into a conversation on equity within our communities. To the extent that the work that we’re doing in Minneapolis and the perspective I carry as a leader — particularly a White leader doing this work — can be useful to people, I hope to bring that to the Summit so we can learn from and inspire each other.

Read the rest of the September 11, 2015 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

Cross-posted from Next City

For six of the past seven summers, Alexandra Odom, a 20-year-old African American college senior from Baltimore, has been employed by the city’s YouthWorks program. She has cleaned up parks, worked in the mayor’s office, and helped build a website at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. This summer she is working at a landscape architecture and urban planning firm, helping a local school to build an outdoor classroom. 

The jobs have put money in her pocket, taught her valuable skills, and burnished her résumé and confidence. “My experiences have opened my eyes to different things I can do and given me a sense of security going into the workforce,” she said.

Summertime youth employment, a critical entry point to the work world, has declined 40 percent in the past 12 years, and the hardest hit are youth of color and low-income youth, according to a recent report by JP Morgan Chase & Co. In 2013, a white male teen from an affluent family was five times more likely to have a job than a black male peer from a low-income family. Teens from families in poverty were nearly 20 percentage points less likely to be employed than teens with a family income of $60,000 or more.

Read the full article in Next City>>>

Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath made it impossible for the world to ignore the entrenched racial disparities within New Orleans. Now 10 years and $71 billion in federal recovery resources later, it is incumbent on us to ask: have the recovery efforts made New Orleans a more equitable city?

Unfortunately, the answer is: not enough. New Orleans and the nation missed a vital opportunity to use the influx of federal investments post-Katrina to address the city’s long-standing racial inequities, resulting in an uneven recovery that has disproportionately left Black residents across the income spectrum behind. In a recent survey, 78 percent of White residents say that New Orleans has mostly recovered, but almost 60 percent of Black residents feel the opposite. Similarly, 61 percent of Whites feel that the local economy is better now than before Katrina, but only 10 percent of Blacks do. This is not surprising when you consider that 52 percent of working-age Black men are jobless, 51 percent of Black children are living in poverty, and the gap between the median income of Black and White residents has grown by 18 percent since the storm, according to recent data from the National Urban League. About 100,000 fewer African Americans are now living in the city.

Why did recovery investments help some residents and not others? While there were concerted efforts from philanthropy, public sector leadership, Black communities, and equity advocates to ensure that Black residents could recover, contracting practices determining how the majority of federal recovery dollars were spent colluded against this. The majority of recovery dollars went to large-scale, out-of-state contractors, not to local contractors who would have spurred job growth and provided recovery-related career paths for local residents. In the year following the storm, even fewer public contracts went to businesses owned by women and people of color than usual, in part due to a decision by the Department of Labor to suspend federal affirmative action regulations. The result was that only 1.5 percent of the major federal contracts in that first year went to such firms, instead of the 5 percent customary in previous years. Overall that year, small businesses received just 13 percent of contract dollars granted by FEMA, with local businesses (those headquartered in the three states worst-hit by Katrina) only received 16.6 percent of FEMA dollars, while 30 percent went to businesses in Virginia.

By 2010, New Orleans’s leaders started to push back against these practices, implementing city-level efforts to connect local firms to recovery project investments, and finally turning attention to businesses owned by people of color. Where these commitments to equitable contracting were made, the results have been transformative. For example, the Board of Commissioners of the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) of New Orleans opened their books in 2010 to an evaluation of their contracting practices in hopes of installing more equitable policies. As a result of this evaluation, RTA nearly tripled the percentage of their contracts that went to businesses owned by women and people of color — an influential move at a time when the city was working to rebuild streetcar lines and reestablish transit service throughout the city. Next, the RTA focused on ensuring that the transit needs of low- to moderate-income workers in the city were addressed. They found that the bus routes failed to provide adequate service for shift workers in two of the largest sectors — health care and hospitality — prompting an investment of $5.9 million in additional bus services, allocated this year, to fill the gaps in service. Other equity-based efforts by RTA have included workforce development programs for unemployed and underemployed youth and a Riders Advisory Committee that gives transit-dependent residents a voice in transportation decisions.

In addition to RTA’s work, the city — under the guidance of Mayor Mitchell Landrieu — launched an effort to increase the number of Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBEs), a demarcation that includes businesses owned by women and people of color, that could compete for and win public contracts. From 2010 through 2014, DBE firms were awarded more than $400 million in business opportunities with the City of New Orleans, New Orleans Aviation Board, Sewerage and Water Board, and the Regional Transit Authority. The number of certified DBEs doubled from about 300 to more than 600 local businesses, and participation by DBEs in public contracts rose from 16 percent to 34 percent by 2014. These changes are part of larger efforts to embed equity into economic development within the city through the Mayor’s ProsperityNOLA five-year development plan.

City-led efforts such as these are a critical step in the right direction, but come too late for delivering the kind of impact that was possible had all of the federal recovery dollars been targeted to support equitable growth from Day One. It is essential that other cities heed the lessons learned from New Orleans’s first 10 years of recovery. If efforts to rebuild are not initiated, targeted, and implemented with the intention of equitable development, “recovery” may only deepen existing inequities. With inclusive growth, however, cities can chart a course toward more resilient local economies that not only weather the trials of recessions and disasters, but provide the scaffolding around which strong, healthy, thriving communities can grow. May New Orleans see more of this kind of development in its second decade of recovery, and may the African American community be its first architects and beneficiaries.

Kalima Rose is the Senior Director of the PolicyLink Center for Infrastructure Equity. From 2005 until 2010, Kalima led the organization’s Gulf Coast recovery work to shape a more equitable post-Katrina rebuilding of New Orleans and Louisiana.

Read the rest of the August 28, 2015 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

As Equity Summit 2015 approaches, America’s Tomorrow will showcase the work of a few of the 100-plus speakers, presenters, and performers featured at the Summit — inspiring equity leaders who are using innovative approaches to build an inclusive, thriving economy within their regions.

This summer, Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation (CDC) in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, broke ground on transformative housing development — the first phase of a project that hopes to be a model for Native and rural communities in building sustainable communities that deliver a triple bottom line: people, prosperity, and the planet. America’s Tomorrow interviewed Nick Tilsen, executive director of the Thunder Valley CDC, about how he is working to cultivate a new generation of Native American leaders to reverse decades of disinvestment and failed government policies and build culturally and economically thriving tribal communities.

What spurred the creation of the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation?

The Thunder Valley CDC was born out of a movement of young people here in Pine Ridge reconnecting to our culture, our spirituality, and our identity as Lakota people. This reconnection created a sense of empowerment, and a sense of responsibility. Here we are in a place that is rich in culture and spirituality, but it is also one of the poorest communities in America, with 48 percent of our residents living below the federal poverty line and an unemployment rate of 89 percent. We also have high suicide rates and poor health outcomes that are negatively impacting our community. We felt that it was our responsibility to organize ourselves to uplift our communities, to change our reservation from within.

What role did economic development play in your vision for revitalizing Pine Ridge?

When we started, at the beginning, we wanted to address the root causes of creating perpetual poverty in our communities — it boiled down to the lack of financial, political, and governance structures that create the physical infrastructure and investments that ultimately create jobs. If we don’t have roads, sewer, electricity, then no wonder there’s no development being done here or jobs being created. Thunder Valley CDC decided that to become a catalyst in the region, we had to set out a bold…new plan of development on the reservation. So our organization has purchased 34 acres of property and did a huge amount of community engagement to create a vision for what kind of communities we as Lakota want to live in in the 21st century. How can we live in the past, present, and future, and do everything through the cultural lens of who we are?

What specific strategies are you pursuing for creating a more sustainable, prosperous economy?

As part of the funding for the CDC, we received a Sustainable Communities Regional Planning grant from the department of Housing and Urban Development that really challenged us to assess the economic picture of the reservation. We conducted an Equity and Opportunity Assessment, partnering with PolicyLink and the Kirwan Institute, that helped us understand what was perpetuating poverty on the reservation. For example, we realized that 51 percent of our existing workforce is not living on the reservation, and there isn’t one house for sale or for rent to allow them to move here. So all of a sudden, that became our niche: we needed to make sure our earners, the people who will rebuild our economy, can live here. Because otherwise, because we are so rural, they are commuting 50–120 miles each day, just working so they can put enough gas in their car to get to work again, getting stuck in perpetual poverty just because the community they can find a house in isn’t the one they work in. That’s why creating housing and home ownership for the existing workforce became one of our priorities.

Second, we are focusing on creating job opportunities on the reservation and workforce development. We are ensuring the jobs created by the [construction of the community housing] development, which is a 10-year $60 million development, stay within the community. In that process, you create community wealth that ultimately alleviates poverty. People in our community are more interested in the idea of communal ownership and building community wealth instead of just individual wealth, so we are looking to social enterprise, nonprofit models to create a worker-owned construction company, and perhaps property management and technology-related companies [down the road].

What role do you see the youth population playing in this vision?

The very history of our organization is based in this very strong belief in youth entrepreneurship and youth employment — 25 of the 71 CDC employees right now are high school age youth and under. You have to empower young people to come up with creative solutions themselves. Through guidance, mentorship, structure...our youth are becoming changemakers, creating opportunities for connection and engagement for other youth in the reservation, building community gardens, running sports events, and other activities.

What do you hope to gain from speaking at and attending the Summit?

We’re in one of the most isolated places in America, and a lot of times we feel like we’re completely forgotten. The Summit is a place where people are defining what it means to build an equitable America, and Native American people have to be part of those conversations. Also, we’ll get to meet and learn from all these different people from different backgrounds, grassroots people rolling up their sleeves to achieve equity in their communities — being around that reminds us that we are all connected, we are all part of this movement.

To learn more, visit the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation website and watch this short video about their work.

Read the rest of the August 28, 2015 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

(This blog post is cross-posted from CitiesSpeak and is the first installment in a series focused on NLC’s 2015 Cities and Unequal Recovery report, which highlights the findings of the 2015 Local Economic Conditions survey.)

NLC’s 2015 survey of local economic conditions paints a clear picture of unequal growth in America’s cities, underscoring the need for bold, focused strategies to firmly link low-income communities and communities of color with regional (and global) economic opportunities.

Two years ago, New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio captivated voters with his “tale of two cities” narrative summarizing the dynamics of rising inequality in America’s largest metropolis. NLC’s 2015 survey of chief elected officials reveals how uneven growth is not isolated to high-tech boomtowns, but widespread among the nation’s cities.

The survey illustrates the challenge of poverty amidst plenty: While 92 percent of city mayors said economic conditions improved in the past year, 50 percent reported an increase in demand for survival services like food and shelter, 36 percent saw an increase in homelessness, and 24 percent reported a decrease in housing affordability.

Read the full blog post on CitiesSpeak>>>