We're thrilled to announce the launch of the National Equity Atlas — a unique data tool for those working to transform America's economy into one that is equitable, resilient, and prosperous.

Developed by PolicyLink and the University of Southern California's Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE), the Atlas is a comprehensive online resource that puts data on demographic change, racial inclusion, and the economic benefits of equity into your hands. With a click of the button, you can access key indicators on the largest 150 regions, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the nation as a whole.

"Dismantling racial exclusion is critical to secure the nation's economic future," said Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink. "Understanding the state of equity — region by region, state by state — is the first step."

Beyond providing data, charts, and maps, the Atlas shares policy ideas, examples of how communities are using equity data to drive policy change, and much more.

View it and explore the state of equity in your region at www.nationalequityatlas.org.
 

Houston-Galveston is characterized by overall economic strength and resilience, but wide racial gaps in income, health, and opportunity coupled with declining wages, a shrinking middle class, and rising inequality place the region’s economic success and future at risk.

Our analysis showed the region already stands to gain a great deal from addressing racial inequities. If racial gaps in income had been closed in 2012, the regional economy would have been $243.3 billion stronger: a 54 percent increase.

Download the equity profile, summary, and addendum with the GDP analysis.
 

Want proof that "ban the box" policies help people with criminal records secure good jobs while helping employers hire good workers? You'll find it in Durham, North Carolina, where government hiring of people with records has increased dramatically since the city and county removed questions about prior convictions from job applications.

In 2011, the last year before the city took that step, only 2 percent of hires had records. Under the new policy, that figure rose to 4.5 percent in 2012, 9.4 percent in 2013, and 15.5 percent in the first quarter of 2014. Since adopting a similar policy in late 2012, the county has more than doubled the number of new hires with records.

And it has happened without compromising public safety, the biggest argument against banning the box. There has been no increase in workplace crime in either the city or the county government, and no employee has been fired because of illegal activity.

The Durham results mark the latest success in a growing national movement to eliminate an employment barrier that has no benefits but enormous costs for formerly incarcerated people, their families and communities, local and state economies, and overall growth.

"Banning the box" builds stronger economies

About 70 million Americans, disproportionately African American and Latino, have conviction records. Of the roughly 700,000 people who are released from state prisons annually, as many as 75 percent will still have no job a year later — in large part because they are effectively disqualified the minute they check off an application box indicating a past arrest or conviction. Steady employment reduces the risk of recidivism, and so do "ban the box" policies.  A new study of Hawaii's 1998 "ban the box" law found it lowered the odds of repeat offending by 57 percent.

The economy benefits, too. A 2011 study found that putting just 100 formerly incarcerated people back to work would increase their lifetime earnings by $55 million, increase their income tax contributions by $1.9 million, and boost sales tax revenues by $770,000, while saving $2 million a year by keeping them out of the criminal justice system.

Evidence like this has persuaded more than 10 states, 60 cities and counties, and some of the nation's largest employers, including Wal-Mart and Target, to remove questions about arrests and convictions from initial job applications. In North Carolina, six additional jurisdictions, including the city governments of Raleigh and Fayetteville, have followed Durham's lead.  Grassroots advocates are gearing up for a campaign in 2015 to remove the box on state government job applications.

"This work is going to benefit our entire state and our entire country, because our economic vitality is at stake," said Daryl V. Atkinson, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. "It is so important to have good policies that create an environment where everyone can be successful."

Skills and talent trump past convictions

"Ban the box" policies do not prohibit employers from checking on a prospective employee's background. They simply delay it, giving applicants with records a fair shot at proving they are qualified for the job. The strongest policies (like in Minnesota) cover private employers as well as government employees. Durham's policies apply only to public employees, not government contractors or other businesses.

Under the policies, prospective employees are not asked about convictions on job applications or during interviews. A background check is conducted only after the applicant has received a conditional job offer. One reason the policies are so successful is that the vetting process includes important civil rights and privacy protections for applicants:

• They have the right to check the accuracy of the record and to submit statements about rehabilitation.
• The human resources department conducts the background check. The applicant's prospective supervisor and co-workers never learn about conviction history.
• Only a top government official may rescind an offer of employment because of a record, and only after establishing a direct relationship between the crime and the job. This almost never happens — in Durham County, 96 percent of people with records who were recommended for a job ultimately were hired, even after the background check.

"Skills and qualifications trump a record," Atkinson said.

He should know. As a college student in 1996, he pled guilty to a first-time nonviolent drug offense and spent 40 months in prison under Alabama's mandatory sentencing law. The consequences of incarceration followed him long after his release: his driver's license was suspended, he was denied federal student aid and admission to numerous schools, and he was turned away from jobs.

But with strong family and community support he persisted and eventually graduated from college and law school. Atkinson is licensed to practice law in Minnesota and North Carolina. Recently, he was honored as a White House Champion for Change for his work to help people with records overcome barriers to success.

"I tell my story not to give kudos to myself but to illustrate the human capacity of people who are put in cages every day," Atkinson said. "Not everyone will be blessed with the familial and community support that I had, which is why it's important that society create secondary support systems and adopt effective reentry policies like ‘ban the box' for people leaving the criminal justice system."

Read the rest of the October 9, 2014 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

Preparing and serving healthy food in a school in Washington, D.C. is more than a job for Howard Thomas. It is his salvation.

In 2007, Thomas was on the streets selling drugs when, after two of his friends were killed, he realized he needed to change his life. He received culinary training and found work he loves through the nonprofit DC Central Kitchen and its innovative school food enterprise. The venture is part of a growing movement to reshape the $16 billion school food industry by delivering fresher, tastier meals to low-income children while creating good jobs for workers, empowering communities, and building local economies.

Thomas's experience with DC Central Kitchen has been a "transformation from destroying lives to helping lives," Thomas said in a video interview.

Reinventing the school food industry is a tall order. More than any other segment of the food sector, the meal system operates under tight financing and regulatory constraints. And because school calendars dictate labor demand, jobs tend to be part time, with a three-month summer hiatus.

But advocates around the country are implementing creative models to meet the challenges. The models vary in approach, scope, and focus, but they share the goal of providing good food and good jobs where they are needed most. Today, America's Tomorrow profiles two models for change: DC Central Kitchen, which entered the school food market to advance workforce and economic development in low-income neighborhoods of color, and the successful drive by SEIU Local 99 to raise the floor on wages for cafeteria workers in Los Angeles.

DC Central Kitchen: A School Food Enterprise Strengthens the Local Economy

The 25-year-old DC Central Kitchen (DCCK) is a Washington institution — a pioneering nonprofit that fights hunger with food that would otherwise go to waste, trains unemployed adults for culinary careers, and works to create a healthy, equitable urban food system. In 2008, DCCK moved into the school food business, launching a social enterprise that has doubled the organization's size and impact.

Now the school food program serves nearly 5,000 healthy, locally sourced meals every day to 2,600 low-income children in 10 public and private schools. Almost all are located in neighborhoods of color that have the city's highest rates of poverty and obesity.  The program employs 35 men and women from the community, including graduates of the Central Kitchen's signature Culinary Job Training Program.

That program, started in the organization's earliest days, offers culinary training to people struggling to overcome barriers to employment — homeless adults, shelter residents, and people with conviction records. The program graduates 80 to 100 people annually with a job placement rate of 87 percent in 2013 and 97 percent in the first six months of this year.

By contract, the school food program must pay the school district's minimum wage. Health benefits are fully covered. All jobs are full-time and employment is available through the summer, two rare elements in the school food sector. In part because of this, job turnover is low, also a rarity in the industry. The enterprise brings in $4 million annually, almost one-third of DCCK's budget.

By hiring formerly incarcerated people and others from the community, the enterprise also brings benefits that cannot be quantified. Thomas, a culinary program graduate, has gotten to know the boys on the lunch line at the private Washington Jesuit Academy, and he hammers in the message: stay in school. He plays pickup basketball with students in the schoolyard, and he has organized healthy cooking classes for parents. It is not unusual for a graduate of the academy to drop by and thank him for his guidance and inspiration.

The social enterprise would have been confined to a few mission-driven private schools like this one, if not for D.C.'s Healthy Food Act, passed in 2010. By providing local funding in addition to federal reimbursement for healthy school lunches in the public schools, the act allowed DCCK to expand into the school lunch industry.

Strong student participation in the meals program is also important, to keep costs down. DCCK says its participation rates are above 90 percent, higher than the district average.

The organization views the school food program as a building block in a new food economy that creates jobs, strengthens the local economy, and improves community health. "We try to provide an inclusive approach that links all the different pieces of the food ecosystem," said Alexander Justice Moore, chief development officer of DCCK.

The biggest challenge for the enterprise is scaling up in a way that broadens access to job opportunities. DCCK's two commercial kitchens run at full capacity, and there have been challenges placing people with criminal records in cafeteria jobs in public schools directly.

To work around these constraints, the organization is exploring expanding into off-site food production for other school lunch vendors. "We aren't in competition with the national food contractors," explained Moore. "We just want to model what is possible and provide good jobs for people who need them."

SEIU Local 99: Raising the Floor for Cafeteria Workers

Two years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted the nation's first food-buying pledge declaring that good jobs are a basic ingredient of good food. Now the district is making good on that promise for its food service workers, under a union contract that will raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

"This contract means children can count on a stable team of caring adults to serve them every day," said Tonya Chambers, an elementary school cafeteria worker.  "It also means that those on the frontlines can have a real voice in healthier menu choices."

The agreement covers 33,000 employees, including teacher assistants, custodians, and bus drivers in addition to 3,484 food service workers. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 won the contract through a novel strategy that tied the well-being of the workers to the well-being of students, schools, and communities.

"Rather than assuming we knew what the workers wanted, we went to 600 school sites over the course of five months, had open meetings with our members, and asked just a couple of questions," said Craig Leedham, Local 99 director of internal organizing. "What concerns you about your work and your ability to provide for your family? What stresses you about your life because of your income?"

A picture emerged of workers straining to make ends meet, often working long hours in multiple low-wage jobs to feed their kids. And these challenges have a direct impact on the schools themselves — more than half of the workers have children in L.A. schools. Rather than craft a standard union proposal in cold legalese, the union amassed stories of employees who play important roles in the success of students, as parents, mentors, and community residents.

School food jobs are part time and used to pay hourly wages of $10.80 to $15.57 for the most senior employees, before the new contract. The minimum wage will climb to $15 over two years, with across-the-board increases for workers already earning that amount or more. The district also committed to redistribute the hours of workers who leave through attrition, to increase hours for current employees rather than hire more part-timers. The union will work with the district to help expand before- and after-school nutrition programs.

"It's a great example of contract bargaining that supports workers and students," Chambers said. "It creates more good jobs, ensures we have more training and job promotion opportunities, and helps address the reality of poverty and hunger in our schools."

Find out more about the places that are providing healthy food lunches and creating good job opportunities at the Healthy Food Access Portal and on the recent webinar co-sponsored by PolicyLink and MomsRising, Healthy Communities, Healthy Schools.

Read the rest of the September 29, 2014 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

The 2014 Assets Learning Conference featured a session that linked financial security, transportation, and equity. It included discussion of how transportation impacts economic mobility for low-income people and communities of color, a first-of –its-kind conversation for this annual conference. 

The session lifted up efforts in New Orleans to leverage transportation investment for entrepreneurship and wealth building, and efforts in the Twin Cities to leverage transportation to address concentrated poverty and stifled economic opportunity. In addition, the session highlighted how housing and transportation costs consume so much of the income of many low-income people and communities of color.

For too many people the lack of affordable, reliable transportation leaves them unable to connect to work, affordable housing, education opportunities, and other pathways to financial security. Debates in Congress on transportation and tax reform have yet to provide forward-thinking, long-term solutions.

During the conference, a few key policy areas were identified, including: providing equitable and sustainable federal funding for transportation, as well as advancing anti-displacement strategies that shield low-income people and people of color from housing instability that so often occurs in communities that are redeveloping around new transit. Looking ahead, equity advocates – whether they are focused on community development, affordable housing, or transportation – will need to be engaged in driving policies that allow all to participate and prosper. To connect to national networks that are moving forward this agenda, check out the Transportation Equity Caucus website and Access to Financial Security for All website.

Follow the Assets Learning Conference on Twitter using the hashtag #ALC2014.

Originally posted in the NY Times

Like too many young men in his East Oakland neighborhood, 21-year-old Shaka Perdue spent the earlier part of his youth “living like I was becoming a statistic,” as he put it. At 16, he landed in juvenile hall after robbing a pedestrian in broad daylight. Two years later a friend was shot right in front of him in a drive-by. “In Oakland, you run into all the people you have problems with,” he explained.

Perdue still hangs out in the neighborhood — but he now wears a stethoscope around his neck. He is one of 90 or so graduates of EMS Corps, a pioneering five-month program spearheaded by the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency that trains young men of color to be qualified emergency medical technicians. “You are the first person to approach the patients,” Perdue said of his future as an E.M.T. “The nurses and doctors get them after they’re stabilized in the field.”

Started in 2012, the corps is a novel effort to recruit, train and mentor a new generation of emergency medical professionals: young men growing up in communities in which concentrated poverty, violence and unemployment are well-documented barriers to health and longevity. Graduates like Perdue have a singular perspective on health disparities — they’ve lived them.

“The young men who are vilified as noncontributing members of society are not the problem,” said Alex Briscoe, the agency’s energetic director, who got his start as a dropout prevention counselor at a tough Oakland high school. “They’re the solution.”

A founding premise of the corps, which has received just over $1 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is to create a strong pool of professionals who reflect the neighborhoods they serve. Though participants are trained to save peoples’ lives, the corps strives to transform the young men themselves, and influence others who see them, by training them to do meaningful and decently paid work.

“Many of these young men have experienced a significant amount of violence,” said Marc Philpart, an associate director of PolicyLink, a national nonprofit research and advocacy group. “Yet they are now exposed to a profession where they become healers.”

Jimmy Jordan, another recent graduate, never knew his father and met his mother only once, six months before she died. He had a rocky adolescence, lost his first job, grew alienated from the older woman who was his guardian, and spent a number of years bouncing from sofa to sofa, shelter to shelter, occasionally sleeping in his car. “I used to be outgoing,” he said. “But once I hit the homeless part of my life I sort of shut down.”

Through a friend, he heard about the EMS Corps, which not only teaches lifesaving care but also provides a kind of life support for its trainees: five weeks of mentoring and “manhood” development — designed to strengthen leadership skills and cultivate a healthy African-American identity — followed by life coaching, individual and group counseling, and tutoring. Graduates continue to have access to counseling and are matched with paramedic mentors on the job. Each of the 50 or so young men accepted each year receives an $800 monthly stipend during training.

For Jordan, 24, the combination of mastering a skill and understanding the social context of his struggles helped him rewrite his life’s script. Today, he is a health coach at Highland Hospital in Oakland, a county medical center known for its trauma center. He has an easy bedside manner. “I’m a compassionate person, and I always felt I wanted to share emotions with people,” Jordan explained. “But I didn’t know how to work through my anger and depression and have it not affect my future.

“The corps has made me proud of myself,” he continued. “Being with patients is a maturing, humbling kind of experience. I’m not going to be another homeless teenager not knowing what to do with myself.”

Most young men learn about the program by word of mouth, as Jordan did. Applicants — about 250 a year — must have a high school diploma or G.E.D., a driver’s license with no more than two points on it and have no arrests for the past three years. The course meets six days a week and includes a volunteer component in which young trainees serve as educators at health fairs, schools and churches.

“I felt it leave,” Mohamed Diouf, 21, said of the sadness, tightness and anger that came from being physically abused as a child. “The EMS Corps teaches you about values. You go from the boy mind to the man mind.”

The program is part of a larger national movement to improve opportunities and health outcomes for boys and men of color, including President Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. In Oakland, homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men ages 15 to 34. It is a population disproportionately affected by inadequate schools, substandard housing, involvement in the criminal justice system and a lack of access to preventive care.

Rather than considering them “throwaway kids,” the corps regards its young participants as community assets, said Junious Williams, the chief executive officer of the Oakland-based Urban Strategies Council, a research and advocacy organization. “Even if they decide an E.M.T. career is not for them, they leave the program with an understanding of health careers and confidence for the next stage of life,” he said.

The $600,000 yearly tab for the program, which guarantees a job to all graduates who pass the National EMS Certification Exam, comes from a county sales tax for emergency health care.

Rachel Unruh, associate director of the National Skills Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based work force development group, said the corps incorporates many of the current best practices in what is known as “sectoral-focused employment training” — programs that tailor job training to the needs of local employers. Many programs focus on high schools: last year, for instance, the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare launched a program with a grant from the Heckscher Foundation for Children that is training 30 high school seniors and unemployed young adults to be certified as pharmacy technicians, “an occupation anticipated to have strong growth in New York City,” said Shawna J. Trager, the executive director.

The EMS Corps began as a modest urban health initiative at Camp Wilmont Sweeney, a minimum-security residential program for adolescent males in San Leandro, Calif., run by the Alameda County probation department. The program didn’t jell until the life coaching, mentoring and manhood development elements were added, said Michael Gibson, the EMS Corps director, who, himself, grew up in East Oakland, and whose parents both struggled with addiction. Gibson spent his youth in and out of juvenile hall for drug offenses. At 16, he was sentenced to eight and a half years in the California Youth Authority (now the California Division of Juvenile Justice).

He managed to break the cycle of self-destruction with the help of mentors from an African-American male transition program. “They pointed out what I was doing — the fake sense of manhood,” he said. “They saw something in me that I didn’t see.”

He wound up with a full scholarship to Morehouse College. Now the EMS Corps members Gibson mentors mirror his younger self. “They have issues with low self-esteem, a negative attitude, and a lack of confidence due to trauma and family environments,” he said. “They are young men ready for a second chance.”

Much of the hands-on training for the Corps is provided by Bay Area EMT, a coed emergency medical worker program for 18- to 24-year-olds co-founded by two Oakland firefighters.

To date, about 75 percent of the graduates are working as E.M.T.s or in related positions. Some drop out for personal reasons and some are unprepared for the academic work. Dale Feldhauser, the chief operating officer of Paramedics Plus/California, which handles about 88 percent of the county’s 911 calls with 62 ambulances, has hired five graduates and is expecting to hire three more. They are doing well on the job, he said, adding that he’s only had to let go of one part-timer with an “attendance issue.”

A challenge for the program is that there are now more graduates than jobs, so the health services department is scrambling to identify other opportunities, such as working with hospital health coaching programs or assisting at a local detox center.More serious is a cautionary tale from Washington, D.C. A cadet program designed to train young firefighters fresh out of high school is currently under scrutiny after a 77-year-old man died of a heart attack across the street from a firehouse, where a rookie cadet at the station’s watch desk was unclear how to respond, according to a Washington Post investigation. This program has a history of problems: in an earlier incarnation, a 19-year-old cadet was arrested and booked on a first-degree murder charge, one of a number of criminal incidents.

The corps goes to great lengths to avoid similar problems, screening its candidates carefully, said Dr. Jocelyn Freeman Garrick, deputy medical director for the Alameda County EMS Agency. The mentoring and coaching are essential, she added. “We can train all day, but if the young man’s attitude, hope and vision is not re-directed, the same learned negative behaviors will continue,” she said.

Teetering between his old life and his future one, Shaka Perdue asked himself a hard question: “Are you going to be the person who inspires the next generation to be good?”

Were it not for the corps — and “the support of 20 other guys who came from where you came from,” he says that he would probably be earning minimum wage somewhere. Today, walking through his neighborhood, he often runs into the “O.G.s,” or “older gangsters,” who now treat him with respect. They don’t resent his stable income or aspirations for a better life, he said. Instead they say: “I want you to talk to my son.”

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Patricia Leigh Brown, a former staff reporter for The New York Times, writes regularly for The Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting from San Francisco. She was awarded a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has taught at UC Berkeley and Yale.
 

Kendra Brooks from Philadelphia joined a determined band of grassroots advocates who traveled to a secluded mountain resort in Wyoming in late August to deliver two messages to the nation's chief banking officials.

First, include the voices of workers and low-income communities in policy discussions. And second, keep interest rates low to stimulate job creation and higher wages for the people hit first and worst by the recession and still struggling to recover — disproportionately communities of color.

It was the first protest ever at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Summit, an invitation-only event where officials of the Federal Reserve System, the nation's central bank, join academic economists to contemplate the future of the economy. Brooks and nine other activists came as emissaries of a dynamic new national coalition of community organizations, unions, and consumer groups pushing the Federal Reserve to prioritize full employment and rising wages.

"I had the American dream but it crumbled," Brooks said. "That's what brought me to Jackson Hole. We need to do something to make sure there are more jobs."

Brooks, who has an MBA, spent 18 months searching for work after she was laid off from a longtime job directing programs for a large nonprofit organization. She went through her savings and 401K, had her car repossessed twice, and almost lost her home before she landed a position as a field manager for Action United, an organization of low-and moderate-income Pennsylvanians working to build power through organizing. She loves the job, but it pays less than half of what she used to earn.

"People think, wow, if you don't speak economics, you can't talk to the Fed or even understand what they do. I don't speak economics but I can break it down, connect the dots, and see how the Fed's actions would put me further in the hole or help me climb out. And not just me — I know so many people in the same situation."

We asked three people to break it down and connect the dots for America's Tomorrow: Brooks, Valerie Wilson, the director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute, and Ady Barkan, attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy, which is coordinating the campaign to reform the Fed. Here's what we learned.

Why should advocates for an equitable economy care about the Fed's policies?

Tasked with maintaining the health of the U.S. economy, the Federal Reserve is the most powerful force in determining the pace of growth. Although its work may seem arcane, Fed policies affect workers and families in countless ways, from how much we pay for mortgages or student loans to our prospects for finding and keeping a good job.

The Fed's six-year policy of rock-bottom interest rates has fueled hiring and job creation since the financial collapse. But the recovery has eluded the communities in greatest need. While overall unemployment was 6.1 percent in August, the rates for African Americans and Latinos were 11.4 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively, compared with 5.3 percent for whites. Nearly 20 percent of teens ages 16-19 are unemployed.

When the economy is growing quickly, workers have increased job opportunities and more bargaining power to demand better jobs. When the United States had robust economic growth in the late 1990s, for instance, unemployment in the African American community fell to a historic low and median incomes rose. As the most influential institution in determining how quickly or slowly the economy grows, the Federal Reserve should be on the radar of everyone who cares about equitable job creation and livable wages.

How does the Fed accelerate or slow down growth?

The number one monetary tool the Fed has is setting interest rates. When the Fed keeps interest rates low, businesses take out more loans to invest, expand, and hire more workers. And consumers borrow more to spend on goods and services, which stimulates business activity and creates more jobs. Basically, by keeping interest rates low, the Fed is stepping on the gas pedal of the economy. High interest rates slow down activity all along this chain, like pressing on the brakes.

Why is this an urgent concern for communities now?

Within the Federal Reserve System there is talk about raising interest rates in the near term, now that overall unemployment has declined. Some economists warn that if unemployment drops below a certain point, it will cause inflation by driving up wages and prices. But there is little evidence that the United States is entering an inflationary period. Meanwhile, although the overall unemployment rate suggests that America has recovered from the Great Recession, things look different for communities of color and others. Black unemployment is more than double the rate for whites. Unemployment among high school graduates is almost double the rate among college graduates.  "If the Fed decides now to pursue a more restrictive kind of policy that slows economic growth for the sake of containing inflation, that really puts the brakes on the ability of these communities to then benefit from any ongoing job creation," Wilson said.

How can worker and community representatives penetrate what has been a fortress of monetary policymaking?

The Center for Popular Democracy and dozens of partners are amplifying worker voices and concerns to the Fed. The recent protest at Jackson Hole was covered in national media, including Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, and several protestors met with Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer and Esther George, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and a proponent of raising interest rates in the short term.  The campaign is seeking conversations with the national board as well as the district banks that are more focused on local communities.

What's next for the campaign?

In the coming months, the campaign will be setting up conversations with Fed district presidents to invite them to visit communities in dire need of economic renewal. The campaign also will continue pushing for workers and communities to be included in decisions that affect their economic prospects. "It's important that decision makers in positions of power in the Fed have an understanding of what life is like in our communities," Barkan said.

Learn more about the campaign to reform the fed, read the open letter signed by PolicyLink and 70 other organizations, and sign the petition.

Read the rest of the September 11, 2014 America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model issue.

(Cross-posted from The Hill)

As Congress heads back into session, one of the first orders of business should be to raise the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage strengthens workers' purchasing power and, in turn, provides a boost to the overall economy. Raising the minimum wage would also help close the racial wealth gap, which is at historic levels.

The current federal minimum is lower in real value than in 1956. Contrary to many conservative claims, roughly half of all minimum wage workers are adults. At this wage level, people working full-time cannot afford to feed their families. A full-time minimum wage worker makes $15,080, $4,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

Increasing the minimum wage is important not only for economic stability for families, but also for the overall economy. The minimum wage is so low that a full-time worker cannot afford to feed her family and must rely on programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to make ends meet. Raising the minimum wage so families are economically more self-sufficient would reduce government spending, saving billions of dollars over just 10 years.

Low-wage workers are also more likely to immediately spend any additional earnings on basic needs and services that they previously could not afford. In turn, demand for local businesses and services rises, strengthening local economies and offsetting any cost increase for businesses. A recent report from the Economic Policy Institute found that increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2015 would result in a $32.6 billion net increase in economic activity over the phase-in period and generate approximately 140,000 new jobs.

Raising the minimum wage is also necessary to close the racial wealth gap. One of the biggest drivers of the racial wealth gap is household income. People of color are overrepresented among low-wage workers. While they made up only 32 percent of the workforce, they represented 42 percent of low-wage workers in 2013. Increasing the minimum wage would particularly benefit workers of color by raising their household income and helping workers of color reach parity with their white counterparts.

The Fair Minimum Wage Act would increase the minimum wage to $10.10, index the wage to inflation and raise the tipped minimum wage for the first time in 21 years. An increase to $10.10 would raise the wages of roughly 30 million people and bring nearly 6 million people out of poverty, including 3.5 million people of color. In addition, raising the minimum wage would likely raise the wages of those that earn just above the minimum wage. This last point is particularly important given that wages have stagnated for every education level and for workers at nearly every income level.

Finally, raising the minimum wage enjoys remarkably strong public support. Recent polls have found that 73 percent of people support raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour and 78 percent believe the minimum wage should be high enough so that no family with a full-time worker falls below the poverty line.

This Congress has a chance to take a simple step to help working families across the nation. Raising the minimum wage helps families reach economic security, provides a boost to the overall economy, and enjoys wide popular support. It's a legislative no-brainer.

Cha, J.D., Ph.D., is an associate director at PolicyLink and an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School. She is a participant of The OpEd Project Global Policy Solutions Greenhouse.

• Read the letter on WashingtonPost.com (also en Espanol) or read the text below.
   
• Stand with the  signatories of this letter and urge President Obama to address the issues of police and community relations with communities of color across the country. 
   
• Add your name to the growing demand for accountability, transparency, and trust;  and ask President Obama what's #BeyondFerguson? 
   
• Share this letter on social media and encourage others to do the same. Here is a sample tweet:  "From policing to incarceration, it is time for the country to counter systemic racial bias: http://plcylk.org/1tNIxrO #BeyondFerguson" 

• Training: Racial bias is real. Whether implicit or explicit, it influences perceptions and behaviors and can be deadly. Law enforcement personnel in every department in the country, under guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), should be required to undergo racial bias training as a part of ongoing professional development and training.

• Accountability: Police departments should not be solely responsible for investigating themselves. These departments are funded by the public and should be accountable to the public. Enforceable accountability measures must be either established or reexamined for impartiality in circumstances where police shoot unarmed victims. DOJ must set and implement national standards of investigation that are democratic (involving independent review boards broadly representative of the community served), transparent, and enforceable.

• Diversity: Police department personnel should be representative of the communities they serve. Police departments must adopt personnel practices that result in the hiring and retention of diverse law enforcement professionals. Using diversity best practices established in other sectors, DOJ must set, implement, and monitor diversity hiring and retention guidelines for local police departments.

• Engagement: Too often law enforcement personnel hold stereotypes about black and brown youth and vice versa. Lack of familiarity breeds lack of understanding and increased opportunities for conflict. Police departments must break through stereotypes and bias by identifying regular opportunities for constructive and quality engagement with youth living in the communities they serve. The Administration can authorize support for youth engagement activity under existing youth grants issued by DOJ.

• Demilitarization: Deterring crime and protecting communities should not involve military weaponry. Effective policing strategies and community relationships will not be advanced if police departments continue to act as an occupying force in neighborhoods. The Administration must suspend programs that transfer military equipment into the hands of local police departments and create guidelines that regulate and monitor the use of military equipment that has already been distributed.

• Examination and Change: It is possible to create police departments that respect, serve and protect all people in the community regardless of age, race, ethnicity, national origin, physical and mental ability, gender, faith, or class. The Administration must quickly establish a national commission to review existing police policies and practices and identify the best policies and practices that can prevent more Fergusons and vastly improve policing in communities across the nation.

• Oversight: If somebody isn’t tasked with ensuring the implementation of equitable policing in cities across the country, then no one will do the job. The Administration must appoint a federal Czar, housed in the U.S. Department of Justice, who is specifically tasked with promoting the professionalization of local law enforcement, monitoring egregious law enforcement activities, and adjudicating suspicious actions of local law enforcement agencies that receive federal funding.

Developing an inclusive economic growth strategy should be an important goal for all city leaders given the rise in urban income inequality. At a recent roundtable discussion in Washington, D.C., hosted by JPMorgan Chase & Co., ICIC joined a prominent group of discussants that included the SBA’s new Administrator, Maria Contreras-Sweet, Senator James Risch, Senator Maria Cantwell, and over 40 leaders from public and private sectors, to better understand the power of clusters to promote small business growth and job creation. At ICIC, we have spent the past two decades studying how clusters create economic opportunities for residents of inner cities, the nation’s most economically distressed urban areas.

In ICIC’s new research report, supported by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, we analyzed traded clusters, small business development strategies and economic growth in America’s ten largest cities.

Traded clusters—groups of industries that export goods and services out of the region—are particularly important for economic development because they are associated with greater growth in business establishments, wages, innovation and productivity and represent a region’s specific competitive advantages.

Research suggests that city leaders interested in fostering inclusive economic growth would do well by focusing their small businesses support in traded clusters that can effectively leverage inner city assets. In the ten metro areas that we analyzed, we found six traded clusters that had a greater-than-proportionate share of the metro area’s employment and total establishments in their inner cities. They are: apparel, education and knowledge creation, environmental services, footwear, recreational and small electronic goods, and water transportation. Los Angeles’s inner city as a whole, for example, represents eight percent of the metro area’s employment and eight percent of its total establishments. For the apparel cluster specifically, however, Los Angeles’s inner city represents 44 percent of the metro area’s employment and 54 percent of its total establishments in that cluster.

These six clusters may benefit from the competitive advantages of inner cities. For example, the apparel, footwear, and recreational and small electronic goods clusters include manufacturing, a sector which typically has a strong presence in inner cities. This is due in part to the proximity of many inner cities to a variety of transportation options, including water ports, intermodal facilities, and airports. Per square mile, the average inner city has roughly 100 times as many of these assets as the rest of the U.S. ICIC research shows that manufacturing and other industrial jobs, in turn, are particularly important to inner cities because they offer livable wages with relatively low educational barriers.

The education and knowledge creation cluster includes colleges, universities and junior colleges, which also are concentrated in the inner cities. For example, in New York City, 29 colleges, universities and junior colleges are located in its inner city. ICIC research shows that some 925 colleges and universities, or roughly one in eight, are based in the 100 largest inner cities.

To maximize the impact of small business growth and job creation in inner cities, regional cluster strategies must incorporate an inclusive approach. An inclusive regional cluster strategy supports traded clusters that both leverage inner city assets and complement the growth of strong local clusters. Such a strategy also would create strong connections to inner city anchor institutions, such as universities and hospitals, and minority-owned business enterprises.

Eight out of the ten cities that we studied have relatively robust initiatives that support minority- and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs). We also found examples of programs for MWBEs connected to cluster growth strategies. Most focus on the construction and contracting industry. The Federation of Women Contractors in Chicago, Kingdom Builders Construction Contractors’ College’s program in conjunction with Capital One in Houston, and Blueprint for Success in New York City were all cited as effective examples. Because the strength of women and minority-owned businesses is especially important in inner cities, cities should align their programs that support these businesses with those clusters that find competitive advantages in inner cities.

Our analysis of the nation’s 10 largest cities shows that clusters are important drivers of urban economic growth, and also suggests that city governments play a prominent role in driving cluster growth. All 10 cities include a cluster growth strategy as part of their current economic development plans, although the implementation and integration of these strategies greatly varies. In order to create an urban economic development plan that benefits all urban residents, city leaders need to make sure that their cluster strategy is designed to directly impact their inner city.

Visit www.icic.org to access the complete report, The Missing Link: Clusters, Small Business Growth and Vibrant Urban Economies.

Kim Zeuli is the senior vice president and director of the research and advisory practice at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a national nonprofit founded in 1994 by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter known as the leading authority on U.S. inner city economies and the businesses that thrive there.  At ICIC, Kim designs and oversees a research agenda to promote business development and job growth in U.S. inner cities. She holds a master's degree and a doctorate in applied economics from the University of Minnesota.