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An evergreen, timely poem and offering that paints a picture of a world we can co-create, together.

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New research shows that 1 in 4 adults in the United States suffers from transportation insecurity

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New research shows that 1 in 4 adults in the United States suffers from transportation insecurity

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Access to transportation is crucial to ensuring that people can meet their basic needs and participate in society and the economy. It goes without saying that if people can't get where they need to go, they will struggle to work and learn, to buy food, to see friends and family, and to receive medical care.

When a person can't regularly move from place to place in a safe or timely manner because they lack the resources necessary for transportation, that person is experiencing transportation insecurity. Until recently, the number of people experiencing transportation insecurity in the United States had been a mystery, largely because researchers have lacked the tools to measure transportation insecurity.

Thankfully, this is no longer the case. Yesterday, my colleagues Alexandra Murphy, Jamie Griffin, Karina McDonald-Lopez, Natasha Pilkauskas (all of the University of Michigan), and I published new findings that use a novel measurement tool-the Transportation Security Index -to quantify the prevalence of transportation insecurity in the United States.

Modeled after the Food Security Index, the Transportation Security Index identifies those experiencing transportation insecurity by looking at their symptoms, such as feeling stuck at home because of a lack of access to transportation or arriving early or late somewhere due to transportation scheduling issues. Researchers can administer a questionnaire, score responses to each question, and add up the scores to come to a quantitative measure of a person's overall level of transportation insecurity. (See Table 1.)
Table 1

When my co-authors and I administered the Transportation Security Index questionnaire to a nationally representative sample of 1,999 adults aged 25 and older in the United States, the results were striking. In 2018, the year of the data collection, about 1 in 4 adults experienced transportation insecurity, with nearly 1 in 10 experiencing moderate or high levels of insecurity. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1

As one might expect, my co-authors and I find that transportation insecurity and poverty are highly correlated. Indeed, we find that more than half of adults who experience poverty are also experiencing transportation insecurity-a relationship that remains strong even when controlling for factors such as car ownership, race, education level, and urbanicity. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2

Perhaps less intuitively, though, our results suggest that car ownership and transportation insecurity are not as correlated as one might expect. While car owners are much less likely to experience transportation insecurity than people who do not own cars, car owners are not immune from transportation insecurity-perhaps because cars, while helpful for getting around, are not effective tools if their owners cannot afford gas, insurance, or repairs, or if they must share the car with many other family members. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3

As is the case with other forms of material hardship, my co-authors and I find that transportation insecurity rates in the United States are highest among the racial and ethnic groups that also often experience racism and discrimination: Black and Hispanic adults. (See Figure 4.)
Figure 4

This creates a vicious cycle, in which experiences of discrimination in institutions, such as the labor market, education system, and financial system, as well as in city planning, lead Black and Hispanic adults in the United States to have fewer resources to access adequate transportation. Transportation insecurity, in turn, prevents them from accessing more and better economic opportunities and even from meeting their basic needs.

In sum, our research demonstrates that transportation insecurity can be measured-and shows how prevalent it is in the United States.

Future research is needed, however, to determine how rates of transportation insecurity in the United States have changed since 2018. For instance, transportation insecurity levels may have fallen as staying home and working from home became more common amid the COVID-19 pandemic-or they may have risen as the price of used cars and gas increased. Likewise, further research is needed to examine the causal links between transportation insecurity and outcomes that are crucial to the functioning of the U.S. economy, including labor force participation, access to healthcare, school attendance, and consumption patterns.

Such research would help guide policymakers as they seek solutions to address widespread transportation insecurity and its impacts on U.S. workers and their families.

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New research shows that 1 in 4 adults in the United States suffers from transportation insecurity - Equitable Growth

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Access to transportation is crucial to ensuring that people can meet their basic needs and participate in society and the economy. It goes without saying that if people can't get where they need to go, they will struggle to work and learn, to buy food, to see friends and family, and to receive medical care.

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Movements and leaders have seasons — it’s important to know which one you are in

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Movements and leaders have seasons — it’s important to know which one you are in

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Seven charts that show what's behind the racial wealth gap in Boston

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Seven charts that show what's behind the racial wealth gap in Boston

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It was2020, and the so-calledracial reckoning following George Floyd's murder by Minneapolis police was underway. That year, Boston leaders declared racism a public health threat, and launched a slew of initiatives and investments aimed specifically at closing what is referred to as the "racial wealth gap."

Tens of millions of dollars were directed to public health programs, affordable housing programs, and for police reforms; the city boosted funding for immigrant support services, and for businesses owned by women and people of color.

Still, disparities persist. For example, a recent report by Boston Indicators, the research arm of the Boston Foundation, found that the state has a long way to go to close the wealth gap, despite city and state support for affordable housing programs and first-time homebuyers increasing.

Why is it so? What created the gap, what contributes to it? And why does it endure? Understanding the individual disparities that make up Boston's overall racial wealth gap could be the key to understanding the various efforts to close it.

While many studies have dissected the numbers behind Greater Boston's racial wealth gap, they all come to the same conclusion: The gap is real.Years after the controversial 2015 Boston Fed report placed the average net worth of a Black households at a mere $8, a 2022 Urban Institute analysis estimated that Black residents have a net worth of $11,000.

While the methodology and the sampling for each of the studies were conducted differently, both show a more than 180 percent difference between the net worth for Black and white residents.

Wealth, or net worth, is the total value of a person's assets, minus their debts. Breaking this value down, there are many factors that contribute to a person's or household's overall wealth. In Boston, the financial well-being of white residents compared to Black and Latino residents is disproportionate in nearly every indicator:

Assets, or high-value things people own such as homes, are significant forms of financial security that can remain in families for generations. For centuries, home ownership has been a primary avenue for obtaining and building wealth in America. However, a history of racisthousing policies and de facto segregation have kept generations of Black and Latino residents from buying and selling homes in profitable neighborhoods. This has contributed to the wealth gap.

After home ownership, business equity accounts for the second largest form of non-financial assets, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. But in Boston, racial disparities exist in business, too. Black and Latino business ownership lags behind white business ownership, and generates less revenue. Researchers say people of color seeking to start businesses in Boston face a series of barriers, including limited access to startup capital and racial discrimination.

Another way to build wealth is to save income or use it to acquire assets. But even at this financial starting point, there is disparity.

In the U.S., there is a 31 to 48 percent difference between what the average white household earns in income and what the average Black and Latino households earn. The gap is wider in Boston.

Income becomes wealth when it's saved or invested. But many Black and Latino residents in Boston are not saving as much money as white residents. Nationally, banking disparities are linked to redlining and Black and Latino neighborhoods having fewer options and access to high-quality banking.

Debt, such as student loans, medical bills, and credit card debt, prevent people from maintaining wealth and financial security. In America, 57 percent of households in 2019 had unsecured debt, according to the U.S. Census, but for Black households alone the rate was 64 percent. In Boston there are similar disparities.

Other forms of wealth building include assets transferred from family wills, inheritances and trusts, and college funds. Nationally, white Americans are more likely to have access to these resources, according to several studies, including one from Boston College.

Research shows a connection between financial literacy and wealth, but gaps exist along racial lines. Black and Latino teenagers in Massachusetts score lower in financial literacy proficiency tests, according to 2015 data, the most recent available from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental organization focusing on economic development.

Meanwhile, Black and Latino communities have higher rates of being underbanked, or having inadequate access to financial services such as checking and savings accounts, credit cards, or loans. In 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston estimated that only 55 percent of U.S.-born Black residents in Boston owned savings accounts, compared to 74 percent of white residents.

Vince can be reached at vince.dixon@globe.com. Follow him @vince_dixon_.

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Seven charts that show what's behind the racial wealth gap in Boston - The Boston Globe

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Understanding the individual disparities that make up Boston's overall racial wealth gap could be the key to understanding the various efforts to close it.

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Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale

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Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale

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This guide is meant to advance equity in the transportation field. Across the nation, there is growing recognition that transportation policies and investments have harmed, and been used as tools to marginalize, Black and brown neighborhoods, people with disabilities, and other groups. Initiated and funded by the Barr Foundation, this guide seeks to help public agencies, and the advocates and organizers who influence them, to make decisions that advance transportation equity.

This guide reviews six of the nation's leading tools for assessing potential equity impacts of new transportation policy decisions, explains the context and preconditions for the effective use of these tools, and suggests complementary activities. People who work at transportation public agencies at all levels are the primary audiences for this tool, as they have the power and responsibility to change their behavior; advocates, organizers, and community groups can also use this guide to encourage their public agency partners to use the tools profiled here.

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This collection includes publications and resources from our partners and in our program areas, both current and legacy. These resources are completely free to access and download. Most of these works were funded by the Barr Foundation. We may occasionally feature items relevant to our program areas which were not funded by Barr.

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Transportation for Mental Health and Happiness

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Transportation for Mental Health and Happiness

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What A Lifetime of Car Ownership Costs - And Who Pays

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What A Lifetime of Car Ownership Costs - And Who Pays

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The sticker always hides the true cost of car ownership ... on the owner and society.

The average motorist will pay a whopping $650,000 on the low end to own a car over his or her lifetime, and society will pick up over 40 percent of the tab, a new study finds - and because those numbers are based on German travel behaviors, costs are likely even higher in America.

In a new study in Ecological Economics, an international team of researchers comprehensively modeled the costs of automobile ownership over 50 years, accounting not just for the price the driver pays to keep the car running, but the cost that society pays as a direct result of that driver's choice of mode.

Both categories, unsurprisingly, were pretty expensive. With fuel, insurance, repair, the price of the vehicle itself, its depreciation over time, and even occasional costs like car washes, licensing fees, and parking fees, the average German driver can expect to pay about $404,375 for a lifetime of driving - provided she sticks to small models like the Opel Corsa (an economy-class electric hatchback that's around the same price and length of a Mini Cooper SE) and drives it less than 9,320 miles per year, which is roughly the German average.

That same drivers' neighbors, though, will collectively have to pay about $245,600 in public subsidies over the course of that driver's life, between the costs of building and maintaining autocentric infrastructure, public health costs for which the driver is not directly responsible - think uncompensated crash damages, air pollution, and noise pollution - the rising costs of climate change, and, of course, free parking. And again: these estimates are based on an electric car.

The study did not model the comparative costs of active and shared transportation, but earlier research has showed that biking generates a net benefit to society of 32 percents per mile, while costing the rider herself next to nothing; transit users, meanwhile, generally enjoy a higher per-mile social subsidy than drivers, depending on how you calculate those subsidies, but actually end up costing society less over time, because U.S. motorists travel so much further every year.

Of course, the financial toll of vehicle ownership goes up the more expensive, heavy, dangerous, and dirty a car is.

To get a sense of just how much, the researchers also modeled the lifetime costs of a Mercedes GLC SUV, which topped out at over $1.09 million over the course of the motorist's lifetime, 29 percent of which was borne by society on the whole. The researchers say their methodology could be applied to virtually any car on the market, if it's adjusted for national trends.

That gives some idea of the lifetime costs of a typical (read: gigantic) American vehicle, but there are still critical - and depressing - differences between the countries' travel behavior that would need to be accounted for.

The average American, for instance, drives 13,476 miles per year, or about 44 percent more than her German counterpart - and it's probably not because she's circling the block looking for a free parking space. Transportation research firm INRIX estimates that the average German motorist spends 41 hours per year searching for a spot; in America, that estimates is just 17 hours.

Regardless of the precise dollar figure, though one thing is clear: countless Americans would benefit from a transportation network that doesn't require them to take on the onerous costs of private vehicle ownership in order to participate in society, or to subsidize the choices of their neighbors who do.

And particularly for the poorest Americans, those costs can mean the difference between thriving and barely surviving.

In a recent study from Inequality.org that was re-published by Streetsblog, researchers found that "for the poorest 10 percent of U.S. households, the share of after-tax income going to vehicle costs (22.6 percent) is 7.5 times as large as the share spent on vehicle costs by the richest 10 percent" - and that wasn't accounting for all the money that diverted from those households' taxes to pay for the societal costs of driving.

"U.S. transportation policies privileging roadways and personal vehicles over all other modes of travel have not served the economic and transportation needs of all," wrote study author Basav Sen. "They are a public subsidy for disproportionately white, wealthier households, at the expense of the rest of the population."

Correcting for those inequities would be a revolution in transportation - but experts say it might be easier to accomplish than you'd think.

"In our research, we're not saying you should start taking away cars from people," the study's lead author Stefan Gössling told Forbes. "We're just saying it's probably more prudent, economically, to invest in those infrastructures that are less costly - such as for active mobility - and where people will make a switch voluntarily."

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STUDY: What A Lifetime of Car Ownership Costs - And Who Pays

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The average motorist will pay a whopping $650,000 on the low end to own a car over his or her lifetime, and society will pick up over 40 percent of the tab, a new study finds - and because those numbers are based on German travel behaviors, costs are likely even higher in America.

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Improving public transit makes it easier for people to stay healthy

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Improving public transit makes it easier for people to stay healthy

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We don't commonly think of public transportation as part of health care policy, though the people who work in public health know it's important. But maybe we should, according to a new study focused on the opening of a light-rail line in the Twin Cities.

A group of researchers from the Urban Institute, Harvard Medical School, Mass General, and the University of Minnesota studied what happened to no-show outpatient appointments at a major health system when the Green Line opened in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in 2014, connecting those two cities' downtowns. The new Metro line was more reliable - less susceptible to traffic jams or bad weather - and ran more frequently than the buses that had previously covered the same route.

By looking at data from before the rail line's opening and differentiating between patients who lived near the new transportation service versus those who did not in order to establish a baseline, the authors were able to isolate the effect of the Metro line. The impact they found was significant, much more than previous studies that had attempted to measure the effects of transportation on patients' behavior.

They found a meaningful reduction in the number of no-show appointments among patients who lived near the Green Line, with the no-show rate dropping by 4.5 percent compared to the baseline. The effect was particularly profound for Medicaid patients, who saw their no-show rate decline by 9.5 percent compared to the baseline.

The researchers also found an increase in same-day appointments for patients and clinics located near the new rail line, indicating the expanded transportation options also made it easier for people to get urgent or otherwise unplanned medical care.

Why does this improvement in attendance matter? Patients get more reliable care, which can help head off bigger health problems down the road, and providers don't end up with a bunch of empty slots that could have been filled by other patients.

Here is how the researchers explained the significance of their findings, published in the journal Health Services Research:

Even a small decrease in no-shows benefits both patients and providers. For patients, completing appointments improves care continuity and avoids potentially harmful lapses in screening and treatment. This may be especially true for patients with chronic illness, who are also more likely to experience transportation barriers. Outpatient care can help chronically ill patients access appropriate medications, achieve better disease control, and avoid future emergency department use or hospitalizations associated with their conditions. For providers, fewer no-shows increases revenue and reduces scheduling inefficiencies.

Their study also serves as a corrective to some of the prior research on this subject. Previous studies had tried to detect any effect resulting from a mass transportation strike or the offer of ride-sharing services specifically to patients.

Neither had found much of an impact. But the first was more than 20 years old and the second dealt with a sample size of fewer than 2,000 patients.

The data set analyzed in this new study covered more than 3.5 million appointments and 370,000 unique patients. The effect they found was meaningful, especially for low-income patients (disproportionately people of color) for whom structural obstacles to health care, including transportation options, have been profound.

"By documenting a decrease in no-show appointments and an increase in same-day appointments following a public transportation expansion - especially for low-income individuals - we provide important new evidence on the importance of adequate public transportation to achieve equity in access to care," the authors state in their conclusion.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill, now signed into law by President Joe Biden, will pump nearly $40 billion into local public transit - a nice down payment, but not enough to fundamentally change the trajectory of the US's ailing public transit system, according to experts.

The Build Back Better Act being debated in Congress right now would provide some additional funding for public transit. But it won't be nearly enough to address the estimated $176 billion backlog of repairs and improvements that civil engineers believe currently exists in the United States.

There are lots of reasons to invest more money in public transit. But here is one more: It makes it easier for people, particularly those living in marginalized communities, to get to their doctor. Look at what happened in Minnesota.

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Improving public transit makes it easier for people to stay healthy

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We don't commonly think of public transportation as part of health care policy, though the people who work in public health know it's important. But maybe we should, according to a new study focused on the opening of a light-rail line in the Twin Cities.

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"The TSI is the first validated measure of its kind that is explicitly designed to capture transportation insecurity as it is directly experienced by people, regardless of where they live or what mode of transportation they use. To date, the TSI has been deployed by the City of Detroit and the City of South Bend in their respective transportation equity initiatives. . .

"The Transportation Security Index is modeled after the Food Security Index. . . The Transportation Security Index is a useful tool that can be used to determine whether people can get to where they need to go in a safe or timely manner and evaluate interventions that are designed to strengthen our economy by moving people from a state of transportation insecurity to one of security. . . The index is composed of items that ask respondents about symptoms of transportation insecurity (for example, taking a long time to plan out everyday trips, feeling stuck at home, or worrying about burdening others with requests for assistance with transportation) and can be used to assign each respondent a transportation insecurity score that ranges from 0 (most secure) to 32 (most insecure).

"By focusing on the experiences associated with transportation insecurity, this measure spares researchers from attempting the impossible task of cataloging every possible input—from bus schedules to gas prices to sidewalk presence—that could affect one’s level of transportation security. And by offering simple-to-administer survey questions, this measure allows policymakers, planners, and researchers to document the prevalence of transportation insecurity, measure racial disparities in who experiences it, and assess interventions that attempt to mitigate the condition."

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On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order titled "Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government." Recognizing that the federal government can't determine whether meaningful progress is being achieved if progress is not measured, the order requires agencies to work with the Office of Management and Budget to identify research methods and metrics that will best equip each government agency to assess equity in the issues in their purview. Accordingly, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a request for information on transportation equity data, to which we responded, encouraging them to adopt our Transportation Security Index in future planning.

Inequities in access to adequate transportation are deep-seated in the United States, and these inequities constrain the U.S. economy from functioning at its full potential, harm the well-being of individuals, and perpetuate racial disparities. In the United States, the car is the dominant form of transit, yet cars are expensive to own and maintain. The adequacy of public transit infrastructure-and even its very presence-varies by geographic location. And the ability to use walking or biking as an effective mode of transportation varies depending on both an individual person's health condition and their "built environment" (urban planning parlance for the human-made surroundings in which people live, work, and move about).

Together, we have developed the term "transportation insecurity" to describe the condition of being unable to regularly move from place to place in a safe or timely manner because of a lack of resources necessary for transportation, which we advance in an article authored by the two of us and Jamie Griffin at the University of Michigan. Large segments of the U.S. population experience transportation insecurity. This condition cuts people off from the labor market and opportunities to develop their human capital by attending school or accessing social services. When large numbers of people are transportation insecure, it prevents the government from effectively funneling resources to people to increase their consumption and stabilize the macroeconomy during economic downturns.

Despite the importance of this issue, no government agency tracks the prevalence of transportation insecurity or racial inequities in how it is experienced. Furthermore, there is a dearth of rigorous evaluations of how changes to U.S. transportation infrastructure affect the scale and distribution of this condition. This paucity of information is at least partially explained by an absence of adequate measurement tools.

When policymakers and urban planners try to measure transportation equity, which is rare today, they use metrics that measure neighborhood accessibility by examining characteristics of a locality, such as walkability scores, commute times, proportion of the population owning cars, and proximity to public transit. But these infrequently used metrics tell us little about whether individuals experience transportation insecurity. Two neighbors, for example, would be evaluated as experiencing the same level of neighborhood accessibility even if one had access to a reliable car and could use public transit while the other lacked a vehicle and could not use public transit because of a disability.

Currently used individual-level measures also suffer from serious weaknesses. Scholars of poverty and inequality typically rely on a dichotomous measure of car ownership-does the household have a car or not?-to assess the adequacy of a person's transportation situation. This is an imprecise measure because many people who experience transportation insecurity have access to a vehicle but cannot afford the gas, insurance, or cost of car repairs. And some transportation-secure people do not have access to a vehicle but can meet their transportation needs through public transit or bicycling.

To encourage the U.S. Department of Transportation to use an improved individual-level measure of transportation insecurity to gauge the extent of disparities in transportation insecurity and to evaluate attempts to ameliorate these inequities, we submitted a comment to the department that describes the Transportation Security Index. The Transportation Security Index is modeled after the Food Security Index, informed by 187 in-depth interviews with people across the transportation insecurity spectrum, and has now been validated using a nationally representative survey.

The index is composed of items that ask respondents about symptoms of transportation insecurity (for example, taking a long time to plan out everyday trips, feeling stuck at home, or worrying about burdening others with requests for assistance with transportation) and can be used to assign each respondent a transportation insecurity score that ranges from 0 (most secure) to 32 (most insecure).

By focusing on the experiences associated with transportation insecurity, this measure spares researchers from attempting the impossible task of cataloging every possible input-from bus schedules to gas prices to sidewalk presence-that could affect one's level of transportation security. And by offering simple-to-administer survey questions, this measure allows policymakers, planners, and researchers to document the prevalence of transportation insecurity, measure racial disparities in who experiences it, and assess interventions that attempt to mitigate the condition.

In this way, the Transportation Security Index can be used to measure the extent to which transportation policy is exacerbating or ameliorating existing transportation inequities.

This is an important moment for transportation in the United States. The U.S. Congress is closing in on a bipartisan physical infrastructure deal. While some transportation advocates argue that the deal could do more to invest in alternatives to auto-based transit, it takes the important step of recognizing transportation's fundamental power to connect people to goods and services and authorizing a pilot program measure of access to essential goods and services. It's time to get serious and start advancing real equity measures to understand the depth of racial disparities in access to adequate transportation and how to eliminate transportation insecurity across the U.S. population to improve individual well-being and strengthen the broader U.S. economy.

The Transportation Security Index is a useful tool that can be used to determine whether people can get to where they need to go in a safe or timely manner and evaluate interventions that are designed to strengthen our economy by moving people from a state of transportation insecurity to one of security. As a first step, the U.S. Department of Transportation-potentially in collaboration with the research arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, which has expertise in measures of material hardship-should begin collecting the data necessary to measure the prevalence of transportation insecurity and disaggregate the analyses by geographic unit and demographic group.

The Department of Transportation could further consider using transportation insecurity in its criteria for entry into competitive programs or using this information to ensure that programs it funds are in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964-the landmark law that prohibits discrimination in the United States due to "race, color, or national origin."

In short, it is only by measuring the prevalence of transportation insecurity that policymakers can begin to solve the problem of transportation inequity.
-Alix Gould-Werth is the director of family economic security policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Alexandra K. Murphy is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and a faculty affiliate at the university's Population Studies Center at the Institute for Social Research.

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The 'Transportation Security Index' can help the United States plan for a more equitable transportation future - Equitable Growth

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On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order titled "Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government."

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Beyond Inclusion: Pronoun Use for Health and Well-Being

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Beyond Inclusion: Pronoun Use for Health and Well-Being

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Beyond Inclusion: Pronoun Use for Health and Well-Being

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From email signatures and social media profiles to health forms, Zoom displays and resumes, pronouns and preferred name fields are now popping up everywhere.

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In 2011, two of us, John Kania and Mark Kramer, published an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled " Collective Impact." It quickly became the most downloaded article in the magazine's history. To date, it has garnered more than one million downloads and 2,400 academic citations. More important, it encouraged many thousands of people around the world to apply the collective impact approach to a broad range of social and environmental problems. Independent evaluations have confirmed that the approach can contribute to large-scale impact, ¹ and a global field of collective impact practitioners has emerged. Their efforts have immeasurably deepened our understanding of the many factors that can foster or stymie collective impact's success.

In the original article, we defined collective impact as "the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem." We further identified a structured process with five essential conditions that distinguish collective impact from other types of collaboration:

1. A common agenda, shaped by collectively defining the problem and creating a shared vision to solve it;

2. Shared measurement, based on an agreement among all participants to track and share progress in the same way, which allows for continuous learning, improvement, and accountability;

3. Mutually reinforcing activities, integrating the participants' many different activities to maximize the end result;

4. Continuous communication, which helps to build trust and forge new relationships;

5. A "backbone" team, dedicated to aligning and coordinating the work of the group.

We also noted that these core elements would need to be adapted to the specific circumstances of each initiative.

Over subsequent years, many practitioners and collective impact networks ² have refined and expanded on these five original conditions in helpful ways. ³ In 2016, together with the Collective Impact Forum-an initiative of FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions to support practitioners of collective impact-we published eight additional principles of practice for implementing collective impact, which, importantly, included engaging community members and placing a priority on equity.

Reflecting on the past 10 years, we have observed through our own personal and professional journeys and the experience of others that the single greatest reason why collective impact efforts fall short is a failure to center equity. Thus, we believe that we must redefine collective impact to include centering equity as a prerequisite. In this vein, we propose a revised definition of the concept: Collective impact is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions that advance equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change. To center equity, collective impact efforts must commit to a set of actions that we will explore in this article.

What Is Equity?

In committing to centering equity, we first confront the problem of inconsistent understandings of what equity means. Among many alternative definitions, each with its own virtues, the one we have found most helpful comes from the research and advocacy organization Urban Strategies Council: Equity is fairness and justice achieved through systematically assessing disparities in opportunities, outcomes, and representation and redressing [those] disparities through targeted actions. ⁴ This definition speaks to the needs of many different groups and populations that function daily under structural constraints that have for generations curtailed their ability to thrive, resulting in severe and compounding marginalization and oppression, regardless of where they live in the world. Only when collective impact efforts take the time to understand who has been marginalized and why and how they are experiencing marginalization, and, after such investigation, take targeted action to create policies, practices, and institutions that address current and historical inequities, will these communities be liberated to achieve their full potential.

In what follows, we focus on racial equity, as people of color are often the most structurally, institutionally, and interpersonally marginalized in the United States and many other countries. ⁵ We believe, however, that focusing on racial equity also enables us to introduce a framework, tools, and resources that can be applied to other areas of marginalization-including disability, sexual orientation, gender, class, caste, ethnicity, religion, and more.

Exploring the marginalization of people along multiple identities can also create space for taking an intersectional ⁶ approach to the work, recognizing that those holding multiple identities (e.g., women of color) are often worse off than others. We encourage practitioners to examine local data and listen to the experiences of people in their community to understand which populations are most systematically left behind, and then to work with marginalized populations to adapt the strategies shared here to improve their lives.

Given the heightened awareness of racial equity at this moment in time, sparked in part by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd and countless other, similar victims of racist violence, the disparate impact of COVID-19 on people of color, and growing recognition of the debilitating consequences of entrenched structural racism throughout society, our intensified focus on equity will come as no surprise to most. The challenge that we and so many others are grappling with, however, is the question of how to center equity in the practice of collective impact. We hope with this article to offer specific and practical guidance to those participating in collective impact efforts on what they need to be doing differently in their work to achieve this goal.

In particular, we believe that centering equity requires rethinking the supposed facts that define the problem by recognizing that marginalized populations within any community have experiences that are very different from those of many individuals and organizations who work to help them. As outsiders, we often don't know enough to be as helpful or effective as we should be, so we need first to talk, listen, and learn.

We have also come to recognize that collective impact has lasting effectiveness only if it is focused on changing underlying systems, not just adding new programs or services. Centering equity further requires diverse representation in leadership and specific strategies to shift power, so that those with formal power-in the United States and much of the Western world, mostly white and male-are able to engage with, listen to, share power with, and act on the wisdom of the community. Finally, everyone involved must recognize and take personal responsibility for their own roles in perpetuating and correcting inequities-a process of inner change that is often overlooked.

How Equity Transforms Collective Impact

Centering equity alters the way practitioners implement collective impact. Consider the collective impact initiative Chattanooga 2.0, which launched in 2016 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and works to ensure that all children and youth receive a quality education and promising career opportunities. The effort named equity as a desired outcome from the start, but participants neither fully understood this nor proactively addressed it until the nation's recent racial justice awakening led them to recognize that an entirely new strategic plan was required.

"Part of the issue was that our community didn't have a shared lexicon about what equity meant, and so often community division seemed to hinge on semantics, instead of the actual issue at hand," says Molly Blankenship, the white executive director of Chattanooga 2.0's backbone team. A new strategic planning process to set the common agenda fielded a much more racially diverse, cross-sector group of residents and leaders that incorporated community input and explicit public commitments to action on racial equity. Chattanooga 2.0 also changed its governance structure to increase racial and positional diversity and to ensure transparency. All members of the coalition were asked to sign a public letter committing to equity in both process and outcome.

Chattanooga 2.0 also restructured its measures of progress to disaggregate data by race, revealing stark differences within the community. They explicitly named and addressed power imbalances that affected communication and relationships among participants, thereby shifting the internal culture to ensure that contributions from all members of the collaborative were valued equally. They also focused on building empathy and understanding among leaders engaged in the work, especially those who lacked direct experience of the issues. "As power accumulates, the ability to relate to those who have been disenfranchised and disempowered often diminishes," Blankenship says.

Chattanooga 2.0's attention shifted from programmatic interventions to more systemic changes, such as working with the city of Chattanooga to transition from a patchwork of providers to a more coordinated and aligned early-childhood educational system. Even the backbone team had to reconceptualize its role. With the support of her executive and steering committees, Blankenship stepped into a new capacity.

"As a white leader who feels a great deal of onus in this work, I can provide cover for coalition members to do bolder work," she says. "I can utilize my privilege to make space for and elevate the voices of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] leaders and community members. And I can use my own voice-the platform and political capital I've been afforded-to speak the truths that need to be spoken, to stand in the crosshairs, where appropriate, and be helpful to our coalition's beneficiaries."

Blankenship's experience highlights the steps required by those with power to center equity in collective impact and better serve the communities they seek to help. Without explicitly articulating the work to center equity and making space to do that work, collective impact efforts will fall short in their potential to dismantle long-standing inequities, repair historical injustices, and advance better outcomes for those who have been left behind.

Five Strategies for Centering Equity

Fortunately, many collective impact efforts around the world have already made progress in centering equity. In studying equity-focused collective impact efforts across regions and issues, we see five strategies in particular emerging as critical to centering equity:

1. Ground the work in data and context, and target solutions.

2. Focus on systems change, in addition to programs and services.

3. Shift power within the collaborative.

4. Listen to and act with community.

5. Build equity leadership and accountability.

None of these strategies is new, yet they remain areas that require understanding and commitment to do well. Taken together, they form the basis for a comprehensive and integrated approach to centering equity in collective impact. Let's consider them in turn.

Strategy #1: Ground the work in data and context, and target solutions. | Grounding the work in appropriate data and context requires that participants in the collective impact initiative develop a new and shared understanding of terminology, history, data, and personal stories. Many widely accepted but false and damaging narratives in our society are used by those with power-intentionally or not-to conceal structural racism. Long before analyzing data or proposing solutions, participants must create a shared language of agreed definitions about race and equity. ⁷

Further, participants must share a more accurate understanding of the origins and nature of existing inequities. This awareness must include an appreciation of the difference between structural racism and personal blame, as well as the development of empathy beyond individual feelings of guilt among the privileged or shame among marginalized people. Effective anti-racist equity work almost always starts with a deeper understanding of history.

We see this strategy in the work of Zea Malawa, MD, a Black female public-health professional, practicing pediatrician, and mother who leads Expecting Justice, the backbone for a collective impact initiative focused on improving infant and maternal health among Black and Pacific Islander families in San Francisco. Despite the city's wealth, one in seven Black babies is born prematurely-double the rate of white babies. Since its inception, Expecting Justice has oriented its entire effort toward addressing racial inequities as the root cause of disparate birth outcomes.

"I always try to think about how we might make anti-racism seem irresistible," Malawa says. Her team begins by ensuring that all participants understand the history behind the data. "People can identify that others may be poor, and that their health is suffering because they're poor, but most times they can't tell you why," she explains. "And in the absence of being able to describe why, people come up with really racist cultural assumptions."

To reframe the issue, Malawa highlights critical moments in American history, from the time of slavery in the United States to modern forms of oppression that have denied Black people the opportunity to fairly participate in American economic progress. ⁸ Deliberate government endorsement of redlining practices in financing homeownership after World War II, for example, is the reason people of color were segregated into impoverished neighborhoods and denied access to homeownership, and thereby cut off from the primary source of intergenerational wealth for white middle-class families. Malawa shows redlining maps from decades ago that precisely trace the outlines of low-income neighborhoods today.

Malawa offers further help to those leaders in the Expecting Justice effort who do not have much direct experience with the community the initiative serves so that they better grasp the drivers of inequity. For example, she constructed four different scenarios illustrating structural barriers for women facing childbirth-on a spectrum from racially marginalized to racially privileged, and then engaged steering-committee members in developing a "map of understanding" for the expecting mother in each scenario, highlighting how the obstacles and challenges increase for racially marginalized mothers.

False narratives live not only in history but in the data we collect today. We are accustomed to describing society's problems with aggregate data: the national unemployment rate, high school graduation rates, the number of people living below the poverty line, or the percent of neonatal fatalities. Aggregate data, however, mask variations by characteristics such as race and ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, income levels, and geography. Unless the data is disaggregated, we cannot truly understand problems, develop appropriate solutions, or document progress.

For example, we witnessed the harm that can arise from the failure to disaggregate data and target solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many jurisdictions were not collecting and/or reporting infection rates or testing data by race and ethnicity and learned later about disparate and possibly preventable rates of illness. ⁹

Simply obtaining disaggregated data can pose a challenge, because they are often not collected with sufficient specificity, such as data collected for "Asians" without specifying national origin. The lack of precisely disaggregated data conceals many problems and can result in ineffective programs and policies. One important systemic change that can come from collective impact efforts is advocacy to public agencies, researchers, and other custodians of administrative data sets to improve the precision of their data collection and reporting practices to support more equitable analysis and more targeted solutions.

Disaggregated data are essential but not sufficient. Centering equity in the work of collective impact requires a more holistic understanding of the life experience of marginalized populations that can come only from interviews, surveys, focus groups, personal stories, and authentic engagement. Too often data sets, particularly data sets that are solely quantitative, fail to capture important context that only the people most impacted and those closest to them know, and groups interpreting the data do not often include those with lived experience when making sense of the data. To address this problem, many collective impact efforts begin with "data walks," in which all participants in the collective impact effort, including organizational leaders and residents with lived experience of the issues, review easy-to-understand visual data and together analyze, interpret, and create shared meaning about what the data say.

Expecting Justice has made putting data into the appropriate context a core principle of its work. A majority of its steering committee is composed of white leaders from government agencies and other large organizations, many of whom have limited direct contact with mothers and families, but it also includes several Black and Pacific Islander mothers. The backbone team recognized the need to elevate these mothers' experience as essential data and spent several months building trust and relationships with the group to create space for them to share their stories as part of the steering committee's context-building work about preterm birth.

The very act of seeking out and listening to stories from the affected group can provide a foundation for building trust with community stakeholders. Active use of stories can also serve to locate and center the narrative for change in the community. This step can shift conversations about solutions from more conventional programmatic responses to more systemic solutions focused more concretely on achieving greater equity.

Once collective impact efforts have drawn sufficient insight from historical context and disaggregated quantitative data and qualitative data outlining the experience of those being marginalized, participants must target strategies differentially to subgroups to achieve better community outcomes. The targeted universalism approach of john a. powell, of UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute, demonstrates one way to operationalize racial equity through targeting interventions to subgroups. "Fairness is not advanced by treating those who are situated differently as if they were the same," powell says. "A targeted universal strategy is one that is inclusive of the needs of both the dominant and marginal groups but pays particular attention to the situation of the marginal group."  ¹⁰

Targeted universalism importantly argues that our goal should be not just reducing disparities but moving everyone to better outcomes. If only 50 percent of white children read at grade level and 30 percent of Black children read at grade level, closing the disparity still leaves 50 percent of children below grade level. We may have a universal goal for our community, such as reading proficiency, but we need to understand the different barriers various subgroups face and tailor our strategies and resources to address those specific barriers. Failing to target interventions is likely to maintain, and sometimes exacerbates, the existing disparities.

Strategy #2: Focus on systems change, in addition to programs and services. | Equitable outcomes and solutions that focus on addressing root causes of social problems at a community, regional, or national level cannot be achieved one program at a time. They require deeper changes in public and private systems, structures, policies, and culture that consistently produce, and often were designed to produce, racist or otherwise inequitable outcomes.

Systems change is an often discussed but little understood concept. One framework that has proven useful to many collective impact practitioners is to consider system changes at three levels of explicitness. ¹¹ First is the level of structural change: shifts in policies, practices, and resource flows. This level is explicit, in that people engaged in the system can readily identify these conditions. Second is the level of relational change-specifically, relationships and connections, and power dynamics among people or organizations. This level tends to be semiexplicit in that sometimes people can see these dynamics and sometimes they happen out of sight of some players in the system. The third level of systems change is transformative change-the mental models, worldviews, and narratives behind our understanding of social problems. This level is typically implicit in the effort but has the most power to guide individual and system behavior over the long term.

When engaging in systems-change work, many people and organizations invest the bulk of their time and resources in attempting to change conditions at the first level. Such structural solutions are important. However, changing structure without shifting relationships, power dynamics, and mental models can lead to irrelevant, ineffective, unaccountable, and unsustainable solutions. This tendency particularly holds if the solutions were developed in a context where marginalized groups had no voice and power. Collective impact efforts must therefore work concurrently at all three levels of systems change in order to bring about deeper, more sustainable change.

While systems-change work is essential to achieving equity, progress is typically longer term and not visible to community members who are struggling today. Interventions that improve programs and services meet people's needs now and often keep residents and community members active in the collaborative's efforts because their impact is more tangible and relevant to people's daily lives. Programmatic work also can inform the structural, systems, and policy changes needed to achieve larger outcomes. Most high-capacity collective impact efforts work at both programmatic and systems levels in ways that center equity. Expecting Justice provides one example.

In its programmatic efforts, Expecting Justice works to strengthen and expand existing programs to meet more immediate needs of Black and Pacific Islander mothers in San Francisco. For example, Expecting Justice cultivated funding to support and expand the offerings of SisterWeb, a San Francisco community doula network. Research shows that doula care contributes to improved labor and delivery outcomes, especially for low-income women of color, and expanding this program has potential for immediate benefit for parents in San Francisco.

In its systems efforts, Expecting Justice is engaged at all three levels of systems change. At the structural level, Expecting Justice is launching the Abundant Birth Project-a pilot program to provide unrestricted supplemental income during pregnancy and for six months postpartum to Black and Pacific Islander mothers in San Francisco. This guaranteed income for mothers during pregnancy is the first of its kind in the United States, paving the way for a broader, state-funded basic income program in California, and its impacts will be studied for further policy implications for San Francisco and beyond. At the relational level of systems change, Expecting Justice has built trust among providers and community members and shifted power in decision-making. For example, mothers with lived experience have the "last word" in the steering committee before any votes are taken. And at the transformative level of systems change, Expecting Justice has worked to eliminate the racist mental models and conscious or unconscious biases of white supremacy in San Francisco's health-care and social-service systems. Through reframing the issue and disaggregating data, the organization is changing mental models of why preterm births are occurring and raising awareness of the structural, institutional, and interpersonal racist root causes of preterm birth.

As collective impact efforts seek to shift systems, they must also adapt measurement, evaluation, and learning to track and learn from changes in these systems, in addition to changes in individual outcomes. Take, for example, the Aspen Institute's Opportunity Youth Forum, which supports collective impact efforts across the United States to improve outcomes for young people who are disconnected from work and school. It tracks not only aggregate outcomes for young people (e.g., earning a high school diploma or equivalent, enrolling in postsecondary education, obtaining employment) but also shifts in systems (e.g., evidence of changes in community power, revisions of narratives, improved pathways, shifts in public policy, changes in funding). Systems-change measures identify whether the systems that hold problems in place are changing to better support equity for the target population. Often, qualitative data provide more meaningful measurements of systems change than quantitative measures, because qualitative information helps to make meaning of the complex dynamics inherent in systems and also provides insight into why changes in the system occur.

Strategy #3: Shift power within the collaborative. | Public policies, rules, and resource flows are too often controlled by individuals who don't reflect or represent the populations whom their decisions affect. Realizing equitable outcomes and achieving systems change requires shifting power to the affected.

Consider a collective impact effort from the remote town of Bourke, 800 kilometers (500 miles) northwest of Sydney, Australia. The crime and incarceration rates of Aboriginal populations as of 2017 were among the highest in the country. The politics of problem-solving in the small town where members of 21 different Aboriginal groups live are complicated by its history of forced removal and resettlement by white colonialism. Because residents were concerned that everyone else in the system had more information and power, the collective impact effort began by using data to initiate meaningful conversations among residents and service providers to build trust and establish a shared vision. Indigenous leaders then worked with statewide organizations and philanthropies to create the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project, which aims to redirect funding from criminal justice to preventative, diversionary, and community development initiatives that address the root causes of crime.

While the effort has involved all parties that hold decision-making power over children, the work is guided by the tribal council representing the 21 Aboriginal groups. Government institutions, instead of leading the way they typically have since colonization, now follow the community's lead. Aboriginal community-led teams work in partnership with service providers and make sure to account for all kids. The shift in power to community has led to better outcomes, with substantial decreases in major offenses and increases in supports that help children thrive, such as having a positive adult relationship in their life. Where previously community members had little agency in how decisions were made, they now help set community priorities, influence the distribution of public and private resources, and hold programs and systems accountable.

Too often, we focus on diversity to change who sits at the table without changing the underlying dynamics of decisions made at the table by shifting culture and power.

Many people are more comfortable talking about diversity and inclusion than about power, but without addressing power, efforts that highlight diversity only scratch the surface. Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm serving the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, defines power as "the ability or authority to influence others, to decide who will have access to resources, and to define reality or exercise control over oneself or others." Some hold power as a result of formal positions, some by virtue of controlling financial resources, others through the influence of their relationships. Those who control resources and set policies-government leaders, philanthropists, business leaders, and leaders of large institutions, such as hospitals and universities-have greater power not only in society but often in collective impact governance as well.

Engaging such leaders in the collective impact process is part of what can make it effective: They can make large-scale changes, have the influence to shift narratives, and bring necessary resources, yet they are often removed from the populations whom their decisions affect. In the United States and much of the Western world, those in power are typically white and male. Too often, we focus on diversity to change who sits at the table without changing the underlying dynamics of decisions made at the table by shifting culture and power. Equitable results require more equitable decision-making tables.

Power also exists in communities where individuals have relationships and influence that provide the knowledge, trust, and credibility essential to the success of collective impact. Too many early collective impact efforts reflected top-down decision-making, aggregating institutional leaders who had less connection to, authentic knowledge of, or credibility with partners and community members. Many faced community resistance, were unsuccessful at aligning needed partners, and missed the mark on outcomes, learning the hard way that lived experience and context expertise ¹² needed to better inform decisions. Having both institutional and community leaders share power in decision-making is critical to aligning resources, partners, and communities to move programmatic and systems changes. However, two problems often emerge when decision-making groups become more diverse. First, collective impact leaders don't develop or nurture an inclusive culture, so those with more institutional or resource power either dominate or receive deference. Second, those with institutional or resource power resist more inclusive processes that are less efficient and involve uncomfortable conversations or disagreements, so they either abandon the table or delegate their role to others with less influence.

In our experience, shifting power in a collaborative requires explicit attention and intention. Leaders must agree on the importance of practicing equity to produce equitable outcomes and must be willing to change their decision-making processes and give up some of their power. However, leaders must clearly define the purpose of community engagement-why it is necessary to their programmatic and systems-change goals. Otherwise, the commitment wanes and community members sense weakened determination.

Many observers believe that shifts in power occur only as the result of large, dramatic events. But change can also come from numerous small events-newly shared data and stories, relationships developed, the problem experienced directly-that cause minds and hearts to shift. Over time, power can shift toward equity in previously inconceivable ways. Backbone staff and steering-committee members can encourage the building of relationships and empathy among members by hosting meals with small groups of diverse participants to learn about each other's backgrounds, motivations, and commitment to the initiative. Backbone staff can also host meetings in community spaces; meet around small tables, instead of big board tables, to stimulate conversation; and facilitate a transparent and fair culture that names and negotiates uncomfortable dynamics and builds trust across members. These may all seem like small steps, but they can create surprising and powerful outcomes.

The Jackson Collaborative Network's experience in shifting power in a relatively conservative Michigan county is instructive. Monica Moser, the white CEO of the Jackson Community Foundation, explains that the network began with data: "The racial disparities were striking and clear, and we also brought the stories of residents to illustrate the barriers that create these disparities." In 2020, to change power dynamics and support more inclusive engagement, the network reorganized its work around addressing the root causes of inequities by substantially increasing the diversity of its steering committee and creating leadership opportunities within the committee for participants representing both grassroots and organizational leadership. Relationships and trust have been essential ingredients in the change, but they took time to develop.

"We have rich relationships with grassroots leaders we didn't have before," Moser says. "We didn't stop by just empathetically interviewing residents with lived experience-we engaged them to help design solutions and to evaluate how they worked. They saw their influence."

Strategy #4: Listen to and act with community. | When we look honestly at the roots of challenges facing many communities, we find that we must move from working in communities to working with communities and supporting work by communities. If we recognize, for example, the difficulty of reaching 12,000 women of childbearing age in six zip codes with high disparities in birth outcomes, we will grasp that those who are already in relationship with and trusted by those women are essential to producing our intended outcomes. Families, friends, neighbors, and groups already operating in the community have the knowledge, skills, and experience essential for producing equitable change.

Listening to community requires trust and engagement; it cannot happen via a one-off focus group or a quick survey. It requires knowing our intended beneficiaries and our proximity to them. Listening is often more continuous and organic when the backbone team and leadership table include people who share the backgrounds of intended beneficiaries, live in the neighborhoods served, and have direct experience with the issues being addressed. If members of the backbone, steering committee, and working groups do not include this diversity of community perspectives, they should work with partners who have the trust to bring a range of community perspectives to the table. After all, no one person can be the voice of a community, so a range of voices should be heard.

More transformative and equitable change happens, however, when we act with community, recognizing and building on the people and power it contains. This approach requires that we see communities and residents as assets, rather than as problems to be solved. ¹³ It recognizes the talent and commitment of residents, the importance of local relationships, and the value of institutions run by community members as the building blocks of change. Rejecting "white savior" approaches from the outside, such asset-based efforts ask, What problems do communities want to solve, what power do communities already have, and what solutions are they already creating that we can support? We begin to recognize, for example, that the woman who checks in on young mothers in the neighborhood is part of public health and the shop owner who mentors local boys participates in youth development. The question is not who serves or works in a community but who is trusted by members of the community.

Hope Starts Here (HSH), an early-childhood partnership in Detroit, illustrates what it means to listen to and build on trusted community relationships. Since its inception, HSH has focused on families' and organizations' ability to navigate the early-childhood system. HSH has developed an infrastructure for parent engagement that includes parent leads for each of the initiative's strategic imperatives, seven community outreach coordinators-each living in the district where they coordinate-and a team of specialists as "boots on the ground" in each district. Through these specialists, parents are trained on childhood brain development so they can influence state policy, advocate for quality early-childhood experiences for their children, and adopt best practices to use at home.

"Community is truly leading and shaping this work," says Camarrah Morgan, the Black community engagement co-coordinator. "We know how to navigate the system and how to get resources so that when funding for HSH is done, there will still be an engine to advocate for ourselves and for our children."

Strategy #5: Build equity leadership and accountability. | Our focus here is on leadership and accountability that centers equity in the work by advancing the strategies discussed in this article. This leadership must not be centralized but should be distributed throughout the collective impact effort with backbone staff and collective impact stakeholders, such as steering-committee members, working groups chairs and funders, partner organizations, and the broader community.

What does it mean for the backbone organization to lead with an equity focus? First, it means having a backbone team that reflects the diversity of the population that the group serves. For many efforts, this will require changing or expanding the backbone team and may require existing backbone team members to make greater space for different perspectives, especially the voices of people with lived experience, or funders to support expanding the team to better reflect the community.

Although many collective impact practitioners envision the backbone role as an impartial broker, the backbone cannot, and should not, be neutral when it comes to explicitly elevating the importance of equity in the group's work. Equally important, other leaders in the effort must embrace an unwavering focus on equity.

This commitment means holding people in positions of power-most often white leaders-accountable for progress in their own personal and organizational equity work. Beyond reframing the issue to recognize how structural, organizational, and interpersonal racism or other forms of oppression have contributed to the problem, leaders must do personal, deep introspection to understand their own contributions to the status quo.

Personal ownership and accountability can take many forms. For white leaders, it can mean taking a public stand to name racism, even when it feels risky. It can also involve publicly naming their or their organization's past racism and acknowledging harms done. It also means holding other leaders responsible for acting to eliminate racism.

Structurally, maintaining accountability for equity leadership can be difficult because collective impact is a nonhierarchical approach. The steering committee and backbone, for example, do not hold formal authority over those engaged in the work. As a result, only peers and shared expectations of the group can maintain accountability. In Jackson, Michigan, for example, Moser once reprimanded one of the foundation's largest donors for a racist statement he made publicly. Her board, who had together been deepening their understanding of racial equity, backed her even though they risked losing the funds. "It set a standard and measure for others that says we are serious," Moser says.

Expecting Justice has built peer accountability into its collective impact work in several ways. The effort uses racial affinity groups, or caucuses, to create a forum for participants of color to discuss issues together, and for white participants to support each other in doing their individual inner work related to racial equity. The effort also promotes the use of "accountability buddies"-finding a trusted partner with whom participants can share their personal dedication to and progress on racial equity commitments. Finally, honoring the expertise of the mothers with lived experience in the group by giving them the last word on the steering committee before a decision is made is a powerful reminder that accountability to mothers and their babies is Expecting Justice's ultimate purpose.

Our North Star

Collective impact has never been a rigid framework that guarantees success. It is an approach that must be adapted to the circumstances of each community and issue. The past decade has seen continued enthusiasm for the concept. More important, the thousands of people working in different contexts around the world have learned and refined the approach. Of the many lessons practitioners have learned, the most important by far is the importance of centering equity in the work.

We are grateful to the many partners and groups who have helped us learn and evolve our thinking about the centrality of equity, and we hope that many more will utilize the five strategies outlined here with the sense of urgency they demand. Without determined attention to these and other equity strategies on the ground, collective impact will run the risk of reinforcing, instead of eliminating, the inequities at the root of the challenges we aim to solve. If attaining equity and justice is our north star, we must begin with the end in mind.
Read more stories by John Kania, Junious Williams, Paul Schmitz, Sheri Brady, Mark Kramer & Jennifer Splansky Juster.

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Centering Equity in Collective Impact (SSIR)

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In 2011, two of us, John Kania and Mark Kramer, published an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled " Collective Impact." It quickly became the most downloaded article in the magazine's history. To date, it has garnered more than one million downloads and 2,400 academic citations.

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Interview by

Meagan Day

MD

In your book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, you compare university towns to company towns. You looked at New Haven, Hartford, New York City, Chicago, and Phoenix for examples of this dynamic, though it's hardly restricted to those places. How big of a footprint do schools have in these and other university cities?

DB

Columbia and New York University (NYU) are two of the biggest landholders on the island of Manhattan - so large that, at one point, they were actually only surpassed by the Catholic Church. University of Southern California (USC) is the largest private employer in Los Angeles County. The University of Chicago fields one of the largest private security forces in the world, with jurisdiction over fifty thousand nonstudent residents on the city's south side. Yale University and its hospital make up one of New Haven's largest landholders, and Yale deploys a private armed security force with policing jurisdiction over the entire city.

So the physical and economic footprint can't be overstated. But I also think about footprint in terms of influence. The political authority of Columbia in West Harlem, NYU in Greenwich Village, Washington University in St. Louis, and Arizona State University (ASU) in downtown Phoenix are astounding. They have the ability to either flout or rewrite zoning laws and to shelter millions of public dollars on campus acres. Ultimately, we are witnessing higher education's gaining control over not just economic development but also urban governance, a process I call the rise of "UniverCities."

MD

The trade-off for that kind of influence is supposedly that universities make cities vibrant places to live. What kinds of changes come with university expansion? Who enjoys them, and who misses out?

DB

University development often involves commercial corridors like University of Chicago's Harper Court, or USC Village, or the Shops at Yale. We can expect new construction and facilities like the gleaming towers of St. Louis's Cortex development, or Columbia's Manhattanville campus, or the glittering glass and steel that we see in the proposed partnership between Virginia Tech and Amazon in Northern Virginia.

We are witnessing higher education's gaining control over not just economic development but also urban governance.

Some of the change is undeniably worth celebrating, such as when the long-standing Pittsburgh Technology Center actually cleaned up a brownfield that had been polluted by a former steel company. And there's no question that universities bring people and ideas together and promote innovation.

But there's also a cost for those living in the shadows of these ivory tower developments. These expansions raise housing costs and displace residents in neighborhoods that are largely filled with working-class people of color. Campus police forces surveil and profile those same residents and are rarely held to public account. Higher education also has broad control over a city's labor force, which it uses to lower wage ceilings and suppress collective bargaining efforts of low-wage support staff.

"Economic impact" is a phrase that universities love to use in their press releases. They talk about increasing prosperity by boosting local economies, raising housing values, and creating secondary enterprises. But we must ask: prosperity for whom? The retail price points are targeted toward the demographic that boosters hope will be drawn to these areas, not the existing residents. The job creation is often overstated, flying above the capacity of existing residents. And housing quickly becomes unaffordable for people who already live in the area.

For example, in the 2000s, Johns Hopkins University displaced 742 black families to make way for its mixed-use biotech park. The school now brags about the $36,000 housing subsidies they offer that will allow their workers to come back and purchase housing on the site, calling this "community engagement." But the housing subsidy is precisely how gentrification is packaged at Johns Hopkins, because it underwrites inflated housing costs, which are unaffordable to previous residents who don't happen to be employed by the university.

The subsidy is also not available to the lowest-wage workers, who are subcontracted and hence not direct employees. In this case and others, "community engagement" or "community development" is a misnomer, because the area is often never returned to the "community" that lived there before the campus development washed over the area.

MD

You observe that universities have, in many cities, "become the dominant employers, real estate holders, health-care providers, and even policing agents in major cities across the country." Can you give us a brief overview of the problems with the way universities operate in each of these four capacities?

DB

When it comes to land, higher education's physical footprint is primarily tax-exempt. Meanwhile, more of the work done on campuses, in terms of research and development and even property management, is becoming for-profit. Revenue from research for private companies and the potential royalties that go back to the schools from IP (intellectual property) discoveries are all covered by tax abatement, because the work is done on campus. So, campuses have become wealthy knowledge factories, and a portion of that wealth comes from the tax-exempt status of land.

Campuses have become wealthy knowledge factories, and a portion of that wealth comes from the tax-exempt status of land.

Private enterprises know this. Eli Lilly at Princeton, State Farm Insurance at ASU - they do their business on campuses because it provides them a tax abatement and gives them a financial edge in their competitive markets. The real issue here is that the prosperity tied to universities is directly extracted from the taxes that would normally go to public services for cities, like secondary schools and public works. And then the residents eat the financial burden through inflated property taxes and increased rental costs.

University of Pennsylvania is a perfect example of this. It has a $15 billion endowment that's tax-exempt, and it has property that is tax-exempt. Meanwhile, in the Philadelphia public schools, the walls are filled with asbestos. There's a direct correlation between the maintenance upkeep that the public schools can do and the property taxes that do not come from the university. And then the university brags about its economic impact, bringing prosperity to the community.

As for labor, we need to talk about both graduate labor and low-wage labor. On the graduate side, you have these public-private contracts with companies like General Motors or Bombardier or Google or Western Digital. The company donates money, which underwrites cheap research and development for them by the brightest minds in the world. Companies would have to pay more for it if they directly employed the researchers, but as it stands, the labor gets written off as an educational cost. Meanwhile, if the research produces a lucrative discovery, schools keep 50 or sometimes 60 percent of royalties just because the work was performed on campus.

Low-wage labor is the primary form of employment at universities. We're talking about groundskeepers, food service, support staff. In many cases, they don't receive a living wage and are employed on a nine-month cycle, which also leaves their families without year-round health benefits. Increasingly, these workers are starting to unionize, and they're winning contracts that are much better than what nonunion workers get. But over time, universities are shifting their employment strategies away from directly employing workers to hiring subcontractors, where workers don't benefit from those union contracts. Subcontracting is a powerful way to sidestep negotiated benefits and wages.

Now, let's talk about health care. University hospitals are tax-exempt, largely in exchange for offering indigent care. But in real time, these universities are closing down community clinics and ramping up boutique high-profile units specializing in cancer research and plastic surgery. Meanwhile, the hospitals make it hard to find out about the indigent care subsidies and services they do have, since it's not profitable.

Low-wage labor is the primary form of employment at universities.

In 2006, in Chicago, Damian Turner suffered from a gunshot wound just blocks away from the extremely prosperous U Chicago hospital. But they didn't have Level 1 trauma services. So he had to be transferred eight miles away to another hospital, and on the way, he died. Residents, community activists, and students protested for years, and now there is a Level 1 trauma center at the U Chicago hospital. But that was only because of protests, direct action, and campaigning, and because the optics were just so bad.

Low-wage workers in these neighborhoods often find that they can't access the care they need. Or they discover that they can't afford it, even in cases where they work for the school and get their health care from the school. So they go into debt, and then the institution will garnish checks and even pursue liens on homes. And again, the hospitals are being underwritten by subsidies contingent on providing public services for the community, which they are not upholding.

Finally, there's policing. A full 75 percent of schools have campus police. Nearly all carry guns. Nine out of ten have arrest and patrol jurisdiction off the main campus. The claim is that this is a display of their public service, their willingness to pitch in for public safety. But let's look at the reality of campus policing. The biggest problems on campuses are sexual violence and substance abuse, and campus police are utter failures in policing those crimes. What school wants to publicize that they have a campus full of white criminals? Instead, they police the perimeter neighborhoods around the campus to assuage parental and investor anxiety about being in these urban locales.

In reality, increasing public safety in surrounding neighborhoods would mean food security, housing security, trauma care, and other things that universities are actually disrupting rather than ensuring. Campus police do not meet the safety needs of neighboring communities, because that's not their goal. Their goal is to protect the school brand by keeping silent about campus crime and ensuring that residents will behave in accordance with the university's interests. These practices often set the table for expansion that will ultimately result in displacement of those same residents.

You basically have private police forces with no public accountability. The result is a two-tier policing system whereby a student and a resident can commit the same infraction, but the student goes to see the dean and the resident goes through the criminal justice system.

MD

You write that, "In times of meager state funding, colleges and universities have had to find new ways to shore up their fiscal stability. Urban development is higher education's latest economic growth strategy." Your book emphasizes that there is no ideal past when the university was a purely benevolent presence. Still, something happened to send the modern university careening in this direction. What developments led us here?

DB

In many ways, what we call the corporatization of the university, or the neoliberal turn, was a response to powerful social movements from the liberation era of the 1960s, where students and communities came together to reimagine the university as a community institution. Across the country, students and residents fought for tuition-free college, against gentrification and displacement, and for curriculum that would be of political and practical use to working-class people of color. These social movements were trying to make both public and private higher education beholden to the communities in which they were embedded.

Campus police do not meet the safety needs of neighboring communities, because that's not their goal. Their goal is to protect the school brand.

The backlash saw the shift of public dollars to private service providers. This includes the funding of individual students as consumers in the Higher Education Act of 1965, which created the private loan market instead of directly funding schools and led to a spiral of individual debt. It also caused schools to compete with one another over students by presenting campuses as amenities packages, as well as ramping up out-of-state and international student targets at a higher tuition price point.

Additionally, for the last three decades, and especially after the Great Recession, we have seen education subject to state austerity measures. So state expenditures have plummeted from covering about 60 or 70 percent of a school's annual budget to now about 20 or 30 percent. And, let's be clear, both public and private schools receive public money, so both saw no choice but to raise tuition and diversify their revenue streams - or, as they say, become "entrepreneurial."

Another aspect of these developments is the interest convergence in the 1990s, when the children of suburban sprawl, young professionals, and empty nesters began to seek out a more urban experience. City leaders started competing with one another to attract the tax base and consumer dollars of this new urban demographic.

These new residents wanted a particular urban experience: coffee shops; museums; fully wired, urban density. They associated an urban experience with university life. But schools had become bunkered in educational fortresses, creating an economic boundary between themselves and what was at that time called the "urban crisis." They were islands of prosperity in seas of poverty. And so a lot of schools actually lacked the amenities that were being associated with this desirable urban environment.

The interests of university and city leaders converged, and the college was reimagined as a palatable and profitable version of a safe urban experience. From there, they began to turn the city into a campus.

MD

Universities are broadly understood to exist for the purpose of education. Your book questions that premise. To what extent has education been supplanted as the primary mission of the modern university, and what has replaced it?

DB

One of the key reasons people have a hard time seeing the realities of higher education is the myth of the schoolhouse. We still hold on to the idea that campuses are purely sites of learning, just classrooms and educational laboratories. Now, to be sure, teaching and learning still happen, and schools still get a lot of revenue from the tuition transaction. But tuition, at this point, is not a simple payment-for-service model. Instead, it's a $1.5 trillion debt market, which enslaves not just current and former students but also a larger swath of the public due to inflated credentialization and the collapse of a healthy job market with living wages and benefits.

The purpose of this activity is not education, it's capital extraction.

On top of that, tuition is increasingly becoming just one part of the financial apparatus. We have to look at ballooning administrative costs, which have nothing to do with teaching and are focused much more on capital extraction. We're talking about the real estate, the university foundation, the development office, the office of technology transfer, the sports division, the police department - all of these noneducational divisions that are premised largely on labor and land control.

There are companies that solely focus on university-industry development. They make all their money on what they call "mixed-use innovation districts" and "knowledge communities." It's under that banner that urban neighborhoods are transformed to optimize value capture. Local governments, developers, and universities all reap rewards by turning campuses and their surroundings into a mix of luxury housing, storefronts, classrooms, and laboratories, all patrolled and regulated by private security with public authority, and covered by tax shelters of educational purpose.

The purpose of this activity is not education, it's capital extraction. And meanwhile, long-term residents have their noses pressed up to the glass, gazing in awe at these cathedrals of prosperity, only let on to the campuses to serve the food and clean the floors. But another university is possible!

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Interview by Meagan Day MD In your book In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower , you compare university towns to company towns. You looked at New Haven, Hartford, New York City, Chicago, and Phoenix for examples of this dynamic, though it's hardly restricted to those places.

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Racial Equity Tools Glossary

Words and their multiple uses reflect the tremendous diversity that characterizes our society. Indeed, universally agreed upon language on issues relating to racism is nonexistent. We discovered that even the most frequently used words in any discussion on race can easily cause confusion, which leads to controversy and hostility. It is essential to achieve some degree of shared understanding, particularly when using the most common terms. In this way, the quality of dialogue and discourse on race can be enhanced.

Language can be used deliberately to engage and support community anti-racism coalitions and initiatives, or to inflame and divide them. Discussing definitions can engage and support coalitions. However, it is important for groups to decide the extent to which they must have consensus and where it is okay for people to disagree. It is also helpful to keep in mind that the words people use to discuss power, privilege, racism and oppression hold different meanings for different people. For instance, people at different stages of developing an analysis tend to attach different meanings to words like discrimination, privilege and institutional racism. Furthermore, when people are talking about privilege or racism, the words they use often come with emotions and assumptions that are not spoken.

Many of the terms in this glossary have evolved over time. For example, given the changing demographic trends in the United States, the word "minority" no longer accurately reflects the four primary racial/ethnic groups. The terms "emerging majority" and "people of color" have become popular substitutes. Also, the terms used to refer to members of each community of color have changed over time. Whether to use the terms African American or Black, Hispanic American, Latinx or Latino, Native American or American Indian, and Pacific Islander or Asian American depends on a variety of conditions, including your intended audiences' geographic location, age, generation, and, sometimes, political orientation.

SOURCE: Project Change's "The Power of Words." Originally produced for Project Change Lessons Learned II, also included in A Community Builder's Toolkit - both produced by Project Change and The Center for Assessment and Policy Development with some modification by RacialEquityTools.org.

The main source for each definition is noted with its term below. Some definitions are paraphrased or updated. If you plan to use a couple of the terms in your materials, we encourage you to keep the SOURCE citation(s) that we have listed for them.

You can download a PDF version of this glossary . Please feel free to share the RET Glossary PDF or post a link on your site. We request that you use the following citation: Racial Equity Tools Glossary, MP Associates, Center for Assessment and Policy Development, and World Trust Educational Services, July 2022.

For guidance on evaluation terms in particular, see .

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Words and their multiple uses reflect the tremendous diversity that characterizes our society. Indeed, universally agreed upon language on issues relating to racism is nonexistent. In this way, the quality of dialogue and discourse on race can be enhanced.

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After seven years visiting and consulting with more than 100 collective impact efforts around the world, I've drawn one main conclusion: Collective impact is really, really hard. On one hand, the approach makes common sense-of course it takes a variety of leaders and groups working together to address complex social challenges that no one person or entity can solve on their own. On the other hand, it runs contrary to traditional organization-centric approaches leaders have learned and been incented to follow for decades.

Thousands of collective impact efforts have sprung up over the past decade, but many have struggled to achieve intended outcomes, and I have found some common barriers prevent success. On the flip side, my work under the hood of dozens of initiatives has also illuminated three particular lessons learned that can help groups avoid these dangers.

The 10 Dangers

1. Strategy Drift

Many groups put good work into developing a common agenda, defining clear results and strategies that require them to work in new, more collaborative, and often more ambitious ways to move the needle. But then when it comes to implementation, they do not manage the collaborative or hold partners accountable to that strategy. They become focused on activities, often taking on new ideas from partners that veer from the original strategies, and lose sight of ultimate outcomes. Of course, the collective impact strategy should respond to changes in the external environment (such as a global pandemic!) and lessons learned from evaluation results, but in general two things should drive any change: (a) data that informs us that our strategies are not meeting their intended outcomes; and/or (b) partners revise strategies by undergoing the same kind rigorous and inclusive process that informed the original agenda. Too often, partners make changes because they fail to make hard choices or want to please different individual's or organization's interests.

2. Culture Drift

Many groups build a culture that supports this kind of collaboration early on, but then abandon it over time in pursuit of efficiency. Check-ins at meetings stop, core values disappear, meetings become quick reports, cliques replace transparency, community engagement becomes an afterthought, and accountability lapses. Just when hard choices and difficult conversations become necessary, the conditions that make them possible atrophy. Even when it feels unnecessary or redundant to continue with practices that maintain a strong collaborative culture and reinforce shared values, sticking with them is essential.

3. Treating Workgroups Like Committees

Collective impact work groups exist to align and integrate partners to implement one or more strategies to move the ultimate results. Work groups often act like traditional committees, sharing information better conveyed in emails. Instead, they should follow a workplan with measurable objectives that advance their strategies, assess data on progress, identify gaps in populations and outcomes, and build commitments for improvement and alignment. Members should be authorized to speak for their agencies at the table, and the result of every meeting should influence members' daily work when they return to their organizations. When workgroups are relevant, inclusive, and productive, members show up and fully engage.

4. Lack of Transparency

Nothing kills trust in a collective faster than a belief that there is a meeting before the meeting that is the real meeting. Any sense that there is an in-group-especially if it comprises primarily white, male, executives of large institutions-poisons the culture. Backbone staff need to be fair, inclusive, honest brokers of relationships, attention, and resources, and hold everyone accountable for participation and performance. Of course, individual and small-group meetings are necessary, and participants don't always need to share their content. But they should not include information that privileges certain members of the collaborative, have implications for others not in room, or undermine decisions or work of other groups without formal authority to do so.

5. Having the Wrong People at the Table

I have seen three ways that collective impact efforts are held back by not having the right people at the right tables: (a) the governance table is too top-down with executive leaders who lack connection and credibility with partners and community members; (b) the group has big ambitions but little authority to influence partners and resources to implement their agenda; and (c) the table does not represent or reflect the community served, which holds the initiative back. Governance tables should include individuals who reflect and are trusted by various members of the ecosystem-from intended beneficiaries to leaders who control resources. Building a clear strategy, an inclusive culture, and effective backbone leadership can support this kind of diverse group to work better together.

6. Lack of Accountability

When unfulfilled commitments and poor performance are not addressed, it signals that members can over-commit and under-perform without consequence. Collective impact efforts need to balance inclusion and accountability. The desire to involve everyone can lead the collective to avoid hard choices, critical feedback, and holding partners accountable for action commitments and progress on outcomes. Groups become more committed to personalities and feelings than the change they seek. It is important for backbone staff and other leaders to always hold the ultimate result at the center of the work, and follow up on action commitments. Upholding accountability within a coalition sets expectations that the coalition is serious about its results and collaborative work.

7. Funder and Political Hijacking

Shifts in funder or public official agendas can endanger collective impact efforts. Imagine that a manager at a public agency spends six months facilitating community groups and residents to create a coalition and common agenda, and then their boss attends a conference, hears about an innovative project in another city, and instructs the manager to do that instead. Or imagine that a collective impact effort aligns organizations around a data-driven plan, and then a major funder issues a request for proposals that fosters competition among collective impact members and diverts efforts away from the common agenda. To avoid these kinds of scenarios, it is important to have philanthropic and public leaders at your table, or people who have the influence to get them on the phone when necessary to advocate for alignment with the common agenda.

8. Managing a Network Like an Organization

Most institutional leaders have mental models for governing, managing, and building organizations that do not apply to a networked collective impact effort. After an inclusive planning process to create a common agenda, a new steering committee may begin acting like a traditional board and believe it is their job or the backbone leader's job to set a vision and direction. Rather than a hierarchical organization to be centrally managed, their job is to support alignment and commitment across a network of diverse actors who participate by choice. Steering committee members are stewards of the common agenda and their role is to nurture alignment, encourage shared leadership, and hold leaders and partners accountable to it. The role of the backbone leader is not to build an organization but to facilitate, coordinate, manage commitments, build capacity, and celebrate members to advance the common agenda.

9. Insufficient Time Frames

Collective impact initiatives that set unrealistic timelines for reaching their outcomes set themselves up to fall short and lose momentum. Most efforts take five-10 years to achieve population or systems change. It usually takes two years just to build relationships, the common agenda, and the coalition needed to begin implementation. When creating a work plan, it may be helpful to identify areas for quick wins, even if the impact is relatively small, to demonstrate noticeable momentum. This can also be important for political leaders who want to see visible progress, and funders who may be impatient investing in process over outcomes. Annual work plans with clear objectives that contribute to ultimate outcomes also help collective impact efforts see their progress concurrently on present performance measures and on long-term goals.

10. Lack of Adaptive Leadership

Partners sometimes create a common agenda, and then, when the work shifts to implementation, resist the changes they need to make in their organizations and programs. Collective impact is a change management process that may require partners to:

Stop, start, or change programming;

Integrate programming with former competitors;

Cede some organizational decision making to the collective;

Have evaluation data scrutinized by peers and funders in real time;

Work concurrently on different strategies and timeframes;

Manage new interpersonal and team dynamics.

To manage complexity and change, groups need adaptive leadership skills. This includes learning to see challenges from multiple perspectives, addressing difficult interpersonal and team dynamics, and continuously learning and adapting work based on data and changes in the external environment in pursuit of ultimate results. It may also include managing one's team or organization through change by signaling early that change is coming, communicating clearly why it is important and how the decision was made, acknowledging tradeoffs or losses that may result from the change, clearly describing the responsibility team members will have in the change, and having empathy for different people's comfort or stress with change.

The Three Lessons

Through my work in collective impact, I have also seen what works, and there are three lessons that I believe help efforts avoid these 10 dangers.

Lesson 1: Clear Strategy Guides Clear Commitment

When a collective impact initiative has a clear strategy, everyone knows what to do, why they need to do it, and what metrics they must meet. When backbone staff and active partners complain about a lack of commitment in the collective, strategy is often the problem. I have found that groups that use results-based strategies tend to use clear measures to target and direct their work to support specific populations. Strategies must include both a racial equity analysis of disaggregated data and an analysis of systems-level change factors that allow the problem to persist. Instead, many groups create either overly aspirational or insufficient strategies that become collections of activities that don't necessarily advance the ultimate result and don't elicit confidence, commitment, or alignment from partners.

For example, if the goal of a collective impact effort is that in two years all third graders will read at grade level in our city, programs will likely continue their existing programs, coordinate a little more with other programs, and reading scores are unlikely to rise substantially. However, if the initiative aims to increase grade level reading from 60 percent to 80 percent in five years, which translates to 400 more kids each year, and disaggregated data show the largest disparities are among Black children at 12 schools, then partners can adopt more targeted strategies that align partners to equitably move 400 more children toward grade-level reading each year. Good strategies require that organizations focus, align, and be accountable for their contributions; bad strategies align the work around organizations' existing programs and measure activities instead of outcomes.

Having clear strategies is the foundation of commitment, but to shape the path for accomplishing them, the steering committee and work groups need to adopt clear work plans. These plans need to indicate who has to accomplish what tasks by when in order to advance their strategies. The backbone staff must then consistently track and manage partners' commitments.

Lesson 2: Form Follows Function

Collective impact efforts come in all shapes and sizes, and that is a good thing. A cradle-to-career model in a large urban area organized around five education outcomes may need seven work groups and an eight-person backbone staff. A project aimed at behavioral health outcomes in a small town might have two work groups and one full-time and one part-time person on the backbone staff. The collective should determine its structure and organization by the needle it aims to move, the community context where they are working, and who all will be needed to implement the strategies.

As initiatives progress, groups typically evolve their governance and work groups in service of the common agenda. The partners who create the collective's strategy might not be the ones who need to govern or implement it. This means letting people go. Too many collective impact initiatives try to fit the work to the partners instead of the partners to the work.

In addition, the emphasis on cross-sector leadership often results in top-down steering committees with leaders who are there because of their titles rather than their experience or commitment to the results and the community the initiative aims to serve. Cross-sector leadership is a means, not an end. Partners need to focus on centering racial equity in the practice of collective impact, and pursuing a mix of leaders whose influence and credibility can align with the diverse ecosystem of partners needed to move the results.

Lesson 3: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

Getting diverse individuals, groups, and systems to collaborate well is really hard. Partners bring dysfunctions to the collective from their own organizations, their history with other organizations, and interests born from years of competition for resources. I've often begun workshops asking audiences to create a list of conditions that prevent effective collaboration, and it is always the same: unclear goals, big egos, top-down leadership, competing interests, more talk than action, distrust, insufficient diversity, lack of community voice, and little follow through or accountability.

Building a culture that prevents these conditions begins with clear agreements on roles, responsibilities, decision making, and shared values. Importantly, values should not be vague, inspirational statements but should define specific expectations and behaviors that will hold backbone staff and partners accountable. Rather than define diversity as "our differences are an asset," a clearer definition would be: "Our work will always aim to redress rather than reinforce or exacerbate racial and other historical disparities in outcomes and representation." Shared values should always remain present, guiding decisions and accountability for behavior in the group. Ideally, they should be printed on every meeting agenda.

Backbone leaders and the meetings they facilitate also support a strong collaborative culture. Meetings should be organized around interaction and action. Having everyone sit around a big table and listen to reports stifles engagement, advantages extroverts and those with positional power, and doesn't produce shared ownership or action commitments to action. Effective meetings promote relationships, problem solving, continuous learning and improvement, and the alignment of partner's actions. Every meeting should end with clear action commitments that backbone staff specifically follow up on with partners at the next meeting. Clear agreements, values, and process build a culture that supports collaborative leadership and action.

Collective impact efforts have shifted the way many communities work to solve complex social problems, but I have seen more promise than progress in terms of achieving population-level and systems-level change. Applying these lessons and avoiding or correcting for these challenges can help position efforts for greater success.
Read more stories by Paul Schmitz.

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After seven years visiting and consulting with more than 100 collective impact efforts around the world, I've drawn one main conclusion: Collective impact is really, really hard. On one hand, the approach makes common sense-of course it takes a variety of leaders and groups working together to address complex social challenges that no one person or entity can solve on their own.

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How financially stable people have been making life difficult for their lower-income colleagues in nonprofits

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How financially stable people have been making life difficult for their lower-income colleagues in nonprofits

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[Image description: Closeup on a person pulling out a one-dollar bill from a brown leather wallet. Image by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash]

Hi everyone. Before we get started, here are a couple of awesome videos. This one by Memphis Music Initiative that includes a hilarious (and wince-inducing) skit of how Harriet Tubman would be treated by a foundation if she were to ask for support today. And this poignant musical sketch by Human Services Council vividly illustrating the lack of funding in the sector and how it has been affecting the hardworking professionals dedicated to making the world better.

OK, onto this week's topic. Will Smith just won the best actor Oscar, which reminds me of another movie where he was nominated. In "The Pursuit of Happyness," Smith plays Chris Gardner, who, along with his young son, has been experiencing poverty and homelessness, living in subway stations and public restrooms. There is scene where Chris is asked by his boss at his unpaid internship to loan him $5 in cash for cab fare. He can't afford to loan his boss $5, but he is in competition for a paid position, so he reluctantly hands over the money. To his boss, this was a simple transaction; the lack of $5 didn't mean much more than a very mild inconvenience. To Chris, it was devastating, as he may not be able to afford bus fares to get back to his son.

I bring this up because it reminds me of a pervasive phenomenon in nonprofit. I'm calling it "Higher-Income Solipsism Syndrome (HISS)." This is when people who are more financial secure, through a lack of awareness brought on by their privilege, create and endorse philosophies and actions that negatively affect people who are less financially secure. Here are examples of various ways this may manifest:

An independently wealthy person takes a paid position at a nonprofit. But because they don't have to worry about money, they don't advocate for increased compensation for themselves. This depresses compensation overall, as well as possibly make other staff look greedy for demanding raises.

Someone is on the healthcare plan of their high-income-earning spouse. They don't prioritize high-quality healthcare for the rest of team because they personally don't need to worry about it.

A financially secure board member who doesn't have children or whose children are all-grown-up blocking measures to bring paid family leave for the staff.

Someone insists that unpaid internships are okay, without realizing they have their parents financially supporting them while other interns may not

Higher-paid staff ask lower-paid staff to donate a portion of their wages back to the organization in an annual employee-giving campaign, insisting that it's "only $5" or whatever

Staff, board, or volunteers go out for lunch or dinner and splitting the bill evenly because they can afford it, not considering how it affects people who ordered less expensive items to stay within their budgets.

A colleague emailed me this message:

" I work for a mid-sized nonprofit in one of the wealthiest counties in my state, so the cost of living is very high here. We also have an abundance of wealthy do-gooders that work here (as a result of said community wealth). I can't afford the cost of putting my child on our health insurance, but when I speak up, I am told that I am the only parent there with an issue. This is because the other parents all have their kids on their spouses' insurance."

It is a serious equity issue that greatly affects low-income people, single parents, and those experiencing homelessness. There are racial, gender, and disability elements at play, as people of color, women, and disabled people on average earn less than white people, men, and non-disabled people. In the movie "Happyness," it is a homeless Black single father who has to loan a white man his last few dollars, the latter being so completely oblivious of the hardship it's causing because his multiple privileges have shielded him from being aware of how his actions are affecting people who don't have the same level of economic stability as he does.

Financial security tends to run parallel with the increase in power and authority in our world, which means higher-income people are more likely to be decision-makers. In our sector, we often have higher-income senior leaders making decisions that are often reinforced by board members who, due to the way our boards are structured to attract people with wealth, are frequently higher-income themselves.

HISS is pervasive in our sector, and it's not just the wealthy who perpetuate it. All of us are susceptible. We often don't realize it is happening because as we become more economically stable, we become less and less aware of how other people's lives are. We are also more likely to hang out and build relationships with people in similar financial situations to us, which creates a bubble that affirms our views and prevents us from receiving information about people who are not in similar situations.

All of us need to do a better job being aware of when it is happening, when we are complicit in advancing it, and taking an active role in countering it. Here are a few things we all need to keep in mind:

Assess how your privileges are affecting your positions: If you are against a proposal, for example an increase in compensation for staff, you may come up with all sorts of seemingly valid reasons for your stance. But you may not be considering that your thoughts are affected by your privileges. White privilege, male privilege, etc., but also possibly the privilege of having money and other resources (like healthcare) and not worrying about your family's basic needs being met.

Notice if people who agree with you are in similar economic situations as you. You may see patterns like everyone who agrees with you on something is a homeowner with a stable job or is a financially secure retiree, while those who disagree may be lower-paid people, single parents, etc. Think about who would be most negatively or positively affected by this decision; you and the people who agree with you will likely be least affected.

Scan to see what voices are missing and why: Because of disparity in privileges, people may be missing from important discussions that affect them. A lower-income person may not be present at a meeting where compensation is being discussed because they might be working at another job. A staff member might miss a vital debate about paid family leave because they have to take care of an aging parent. Our default practice of "whoever is there gets to make the decisions" has concentrated a lot of power into the hands of privileged people. If you don't have the voices of those who will be most affected, don't have the meeting, don't make decisions.

Take the perspective of someone who doesn't have your privileges: Try to remember what it was like when you weren't as secure in your financial situation or career, and the hardships you had to endure. Now imagine that version on you being in the room and what position that version would take. If you don't have first-hand experience, try to imagine someone else. If you can't put yourself into the shoes of a person who isn't in your economic situation, then you shouldn't partake in making decisions that would affect them at all.

Assume that one or more people are experiencing financial hardship: Just because people put on a brave face doesn't mean they're OK. Many are likely facing challenges that you don't know about, especially if you are financially stable and tend to hang out with other financially stable people. And people shouldn't have to openly disclose their situations for you to support equitable practices. If you are making decisions about money, whether it's increasing staff compensation or starting furloughs or even going out to lunch or whatever, work with the assumption that there's probably at least one person there who is facing hardship.

Be alert and speak up when you see potential inequity: For significant things like compensation. But also in everyday practice. For instance, I remember earlier in my career going out with some colleagues to an expensive restaurant for dinner. Everyone ordered cocktails, appetizers, entrees, and dessert. When the check came, someone asked to split it evenly. A colleague piped in and said, "Vu only had grilled asparagus and some water. Let's just cover his portion. Also, maybe we shouldn't take a vegan to a steakhouse again!" Everyone laughed. I was grateful for that colleague. No one knew how relieved I was that I could still make rent that month AND have groceries.

Our sector does wonderful things. Because of that, we tend to attract wealthy people who don't need to work to earn money to feed their families; they just want to make a difference in the world. If that's you, please keep in mind that your words and actions have significant consequences for people who do need to earn money to feed their families, who need healthcare and paid family leave, etc., who don't have the luxury of not worrying about these things.

And the rest of us, as we advance in our careers and hopefully obtain some measure of financial stability, we too need to be aware of our increased privileges and whether we are making life better or worse for our colleagues who are not as financially stable.

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How you can help the people of Ukraine

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How financially stable people have been making life difficult for their lower-income colleagues in nonprofit

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Hi everyone. Before we get started, here are a couple of awesome videos. This one by Memphis Music Initiative that includes a hilarious (and wince-inducing) skit of how Harriet Tubman would be treated by a foundation if she were to ask for support today.

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Gender affirming and inclusive community engagement strategies

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Gender affirming and inclusive community engagement strategies

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"Laws and programs designed to benefit vulnerable groups, such as the disabled or people of color, often end up benefiting all of society."

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One evening in the early 1970s, Michael Pachovas and a few friends wheeled themselves to a curb in Berkeley, Calif., poured cement into the form of a crude ramp, and rolled off into the night. ¹ For Pachovas and his fellow disability advocates, it was a political act, a gesture of defiance. "The police threatened to arrest us," Pachovas recalls. "But they didn't." ² It was also pragmatic. Despite their unevenness, the makeshift sloping curbs provided the disabled community with something invaluable: mobility.

At the time, getting around Berkeley-or any American city-in a wheelchair was not easy. The Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 required government buildings to make themselves universally accessible, but traversing the streets in a wheelchair resembled the running of an obstacle course: Wheel to the driveway in an alley or at a loading dock; roll into the street until you reached another driveway; hope all the while that a truck didn't pull out. Students with disabilities at the University of California, Berkeley, housed in Cowell Hospital-the only space that could accommodate them ³ -planned their class schedule according to which class was downhill from the previous one.

Yet this was Berkeley in the era of political activism. There was a Free Speech Movement, an antiwar movement, a civil rights movement. Why not a movement for movement? Pressed by disabled activists, in 1972 the city installed its first official "curb cut" at an intersection on Telegraph Avenue. ⁴ It would become, in the words of a Berkeley advocate, "the slab of concrete heard 'round the world." ⁵

Curb cuts were not an entirely new invention-the first appeared in 1945, in Kalamazoo, Mich. ⁶ But the one on Telegraph changed the way the country thinks about access and opportunity for a population that has faced barriers at every turn. This turnabout and the remarkable ripple effects are salient today, as the nation confronts the anguish of rising inequality and the mounting barriers to economic mobility.

Hundreds more curb cuts followed Berkeley's. Then hundreds of thousands, all across the country. Disabled advocates continued to push for access to the basics that many Americans take for granted-sidewalks, classrooms, dorm rooms, restrooms, buses. At last, on July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibits disability-based discrimination and mandated changes to the built environment, including curb cuts. "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down," he proclaimed. ⁷

Then a magnificent and unexpected thing happened. When the wall of exclusion came down, everybody benefited-not only people in wheelchairs. Parents pushing strollers headed straight for curb cuts. So did workers pushing heavy carts, business travelers wheeling luggage, even runners and skateboarders. A study of pedestrian behavior at a Sarasota, Fla., shopping mall revealed that nine out of 10 "unencumbered pedestrians" go out of their way to use a curb cut. ⁸ As journalist Frank Greve has noted, the barricades stormed by disabled advocates in Berkeley 40 years ago were a few inches high, "yet today millions of Americans pass daily through the breaches." ⁹

An economist might call it a "positive externality." A military officer might call it a "force multiplier." I like to think of it as the "curb-cut effect"-and it's changing the way the country thinks about the struggles of the most vulnerable communities.

Access, Opportunity, and the New Demographics

There's an ingrained societal suspicion that intentionally supporting one group hurts another. That equity is a zero sum game. In fact, when the nation targets support where it is needed most-when we create the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully-everyone wins. The corollary is also true: When we ignore the challenges faced by the most vulnerable among us, those challenges, magnified many times over, become a drag on economic growth, prosperity, and national well-being.

This has become painfully evident as inequality has reached toxic levels in the United States. Since 1979, the income of workers in the top 10 percent has grown nearly 15 percent. ¹⁰ For workers in the bottom 10 percent, incomes have fallen more than 11 percent. ¹¹ The top 25 hedge fund managers earn more than all kindergarten teachers in America put together. ¹² Only 9 out of 100 children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution can expect to rise above their circumstances, the cornerstone of the American Dream. ¹³

A wave of recent publicity has focused attention on the toll that these trends are taking on white America. In a paper published in November 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton revealed that the death rate for middle-aged whites without a college education jumped more than 20 percent from 1999 to 2013, ¹⁴ a staggering increase attributable largely to drug- and alcohol-related deaths and suicides. Case and Deaton see the spikes in addiction and suicide as a response to financial insecurity and economic despair. They write: "After the productivity slowdown in the early 1970s, and with widening income inequality, many in the baby boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents."

The point is not to argue about who is suffering more, but to identify the best solutions to remedy these inequities. And here, another number should command attention: 2044. That is the year in which people of color are expected to become a majority of the US population. ¹⁸ The nation-80 percent white in 1980, 63 percent white today ¹⁹-is already well on its way. Since 2012, the majority of babies born in the United States have been children of color. ²⁰ By the end of the decade, the majority of Americans under age 18 will be people of color. ²¹

These demographic shifts matter to every American. Not because there is something frightening about a nation where whites are no longer the majority. Rather, it is because the costs of society failing people of color are climbing as the population grows-and because the benefits of strategies that expand opportunity for people of color would extend to all. Knock down walls of exclusion and build accessible pathways to success, and everyone gains.

The curb-cut effect applies to America's new demographic profile in two important ways. First, curb-cut thinking is animated by the idea of equity. This should not be confused with the formal legal equality conferred by landmark laws such as the Civil Rights Act. Equality gives everyone the right to ride on the bus. Equity ensures that there are curb cuts so people in wheelchairs can get to the bus stop and lifts so they can get on the bus, and ensures that there are bus lines where people need them so they can get to wherever they need to go. Equity means promoting just and fair inclusion throughout society and creating the conditions in which everyone can participate, prosper, and reach his or her full potential.

Second, the curb-cut effect illustrates the outsize benefits that accrue to everyone from policies and investments designed to achieve equity. The country must choose: Will we make these investments? Will we make sure that everyone has access to the essentials for living productive lives-things like jobs and reliable transportation? Or will we neglect entire communities and waste the talents and potential of tens of millions of people?

There's really no choice. Continuing to write off poor people and people of color is not an option. Not when the American Dream is nearly unattainable for all low-income people, regardless of their ethnicity. Not when age-old health disparities between whites and people of color are narrowing because whites are sicker than they used to be and more are dying younger. Not when popular fury is growing over an economic system in which a single American family (the Waltons) has more wealth than 41 percent of Americans combined. ²²

Policymakers tend to overlook the ways in which focusing on one group might help all groups and strengthen the whole nation. Cut into the curb, and we create a path forward for everyone.

Curb-Cut Effects, from Streets to Schools to the Sky

Once you know what you're looking for, the curb-cut effect is on display all around. It happened when seat belt legislation, adopted initially to protect young children, led 49 states to adopt seat belt laws that have saved an estimated 317,000 lives-children and adults-since 1975. ²³ It happened when affirmative action was created to open the doors of higher education to black people-and ended up emboldening vast numbers of white women, and other racial and ethnic groups, to push for greater access as well. It happened when fed-up flight attendants spearheaded a national fight to end smoking on planes, setting in motion a decades-long public-health campaign that has largely banished smoking from public spaces and cut tobacco consumption in half since the 1960s. ²⁴

And it happened, spectacularly, with another improvement to America's streets: bike lanes. After years of enduring injuries and fatalities, beleaguered bicyclists-backed by environmental advocates-have pressured a number of cities to install protected bike lanes. As of 2014, New York City had added roughly 30 miles of these lanes. ²⁵ My hometown of Oakland is installing a similar amount. ²⁶

The Making of a Middle Class

The most illuminating example of the curb-cut effect is the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the GI Bill. It's no overstatement to say that the legislation created the white American middle class. The sponsors of the bill, initially scrawled by an American Legion lobbyist on a piece of hotel stationery, didn't expect to do more than provide job training to some World War II veterans looking to reintegrate into society. ³⁶ Supporters of the legislation predicted that just a few hundred thousand of the 16 million returning veterans would use it to go to college. Even that was too much for educators like Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, who direfully predicted that campuses would be turned into "hobo jungles." ³⁷

The results of the bill, however, could have been even better. The GI Bill included black veterans in the deal but let local governments decide how to allocate the money. All too predictably, black GIs received much, much less generous subsidies. ⁴¹ The bill that opened doors of opportunity to so many people who had previously been left out effectively barred entry for too many others.

Despite its shortcomings, the GI Bill demonstrates the transformative effects of smart, targeted investments. The beneficiaries did not just rejoin society; they remade it. The second pillar of the GI Bill, low-interest home loans, boosted homeownership from 44 percent before the war to 60 percent by the mid-1950s. ⁴² (Here, again, black GIs were largely excluded.) This, in turn, spurred the tremendous growth of the suburbs and buoyed an already-booming economy. All told, historians estimate that for every $1 invested in returning World War II veterans, the country recouped $8. ⁴³ But the true benefits are incalculable.

Creating a Prosperous Future

Many years ago, trying to get across Los Angeles to a job interview in Watts, I budgeted an hour and a half to take the five buses from my house to my destination. Two and a half hours later-well after my interview would have ended-I got off bus number four and turned around, defeated.

Frustration like this-to say nothing of lost opportunity-reflects a reality still common to people of color living in low-income neighborhoods. Connections to jobs, schools, hospitals, and grocery stores, and often to each other, are few and far between. One in five African-Americans-and 12 percent of Latinos-live in households without access to a car. ⁴⁴ Two-thirds of the roads on Native American reservations are unpaved. ⁴⁵ Half of the people who use public transit are people of color, yet far too many cannot get where they need to go. ⁴⁶ In Chicago, four out of five residents cannot reach their jobs in 90 minutes or less using public transit. ⁴⁷

"Transportation touches every aspect of where we live, work, play, and go to school, as well as the physical and natural world," writes author and scholar Robert Bullard, often described as the father of the environmental justice movement. ⁴⁸ "Transportation also plays a pivotal role in shaping human interaction, economic mobility, and sustainability."

If the United States can get equitable infrastructure right, the benefits will ripple far and wide. Transportation investments, particularly public transit projects, create many jobs and contracting opportunities building and maintaining infrastructure. With the right policies in place, those investments can do the double work of building the physical infrastructure that connects residents of underserved neighborhoods to economic opportunities while also delivering jobs and business opportunities to those residents.

Over the next five years, the country could generate more than one million transit-related jobs if the 20 largest cities in America merely shifted half of their transportation budget from funding highways to funding transit. ⁴⁹ No new spending, just shifting our priorities.

The ripples don't end there. When people have access to public transit, they can more easily attend good schools and take advantage of higher education, which creates a more prepared workforce for the region. They can more readily get to health clinics and hospitals, allowing for greater preventive care and lower health care costs. Evidence also suggests that public transit leads to a decrease in crime. Simply put, better transit means better access to opportunity. Indeed, the pioneering Stanford University economist Raj Chetty has identified the top 10 cities for upward economic mobility. Five of them-New York, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Seattle-are also in the top 10 for physical mobility. ⁵³

To maximize benefits like these, metropolitan regions around the country are rethinking their transportation strategies and investments. The neighboring cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul offer a glimpse of how this is playing out. People of color-more than a quarter of whom are poor-have long been concentrated in disinvested neighborhoods and cut off from opportunity. ⁵⁴ Initial plans for a new Green Line light-rail corridor overlooked these neighborhoods-reminding me of Bullard's observation, "Follow the transportation dollars and one can tell who is important and who is not." ⁵⁵ But local activists worked with the federal government, city government, and others to rewrite the old rules. ⁵⁶ Now, when the city evaluates the viability of a transportation project, planners assign points based on whether the proposed road or rail will enhance racial equity. ⁵⁷ In other words, equity-not just safety or usage statistics, the traditional metrics for transportation considerations-has become central to transportation decisions.

The Green Line is a model of inclusive growth. People of color have made up nearly a fifth of the work hours on the project. ⁵⁸ Women- and minority-owned small businesses have earned nearly 20 percent of construction contracts, worth $115 million. ⁵⁹ The light rail now stops in previously neglected neighborhoods, connecting those residents to the more robust job markets in downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The nation can apply curb-cut thinking far beyond transportation infrastructure, to strengthen the entire economy. The misshapen way in which the economy has grown is a problem not only for those at the bottom. As everyone from the OECD ⁶⁰ to the International Monetary Fund ⁶¹ has concluded, widening inequality leads to declining economic growth. When a country fails to include a large number of people in its economy-when it restricts the circle of opportunity-the economy is weakened and the whole nation suffers.

There's no mystery about how to decrease inequality and increase economic growth. The answer is not easy credit or subprime mortgages or the privatization and parceling off of the social safety net. The antidote to inequality is equity. That means growing good jobs and improving the pay and quality of low-wage jobs. It means building human capabilities by upgrading the education and skills of today's workforce, and tomorrow's. It means eliminating barriers to economic inclusion and civic participation-for example, by revamping a criminal justice system that has trapped seven million people, the vast majority of them black and brown. ⁶² And it means expanding opportunity by investing in the most distressed places in America, and in the people who live there.

If the chasm between the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan and the barrios of East Los Angeles is holding the entire country back and limiting American economic potential, just think what closing that chasm with well-chosen policies would do. In 2012, blacks, Latinos, and Asian businesses grew more than three times faster than whiteowned businesses ⁶³-so imagine the entrepreneurial energy waiting to be unleashed if the country strengthens programs to boost business owners of color. Imagine the impact of connecting poor people and young people of color to high-growth industries like technology. The term "equity" in a corporate context is currently defined as a mere tally of assets and liabilities. But with racially diverse companies 35 percent more likely to outperform their peers, ⁶⁴ imagine the rewards to be reaped if equity came to mean so much more.

Shrinking the racial gap in the US economy-simply employing and paying workers of color at the same rates as white workers-would boost the total GDP of America's 150 largest metro areas by nearly a quarter. ⁶⁵ New York City metro would add 31 percent-$409 billion-to its GDP. Miami's GDP would grow 41 percent, adding nearly $113 billion. In Brownsville, Texas, GDP stands to grow 131 percent. In total, building a racially equitable economy would add $2.1 trillion to America's annual GDP.

The curb-cut effect underscores the foundational belief that we are one nation, that we rise or fall together. Without equity, there can be neither progress nor prosperity. Despite years of politicians insisting otherwise, the laws of economic gravity have always run in reverse. Opportunity doesn't trickle down; it cascades out and up.

The initiatives described here are not handouts or giveaways; they are investments in the broader well-being of society. They are highly efficient. They are not a sweeping takeover by the federal government. In fact, many-if not most-rely on policies implemented at the state and local levels.

This is not a liberal or a conservative issue. It is not strictly a question of morality or efficiency. All of us-Democrats and Republicans, businesses and nonprofit organizations, city dwellers and suburbanites alike-have an interest in developing targeted, achievable reforms that yield real results and make noticeable differences in the lives of our most vulnerable. The inescapable conclusion is that it is right and smart to let hard-working Americans see more of the benefits of their hard work. It is right and smart to give more Americans, indeed all Americans, the chance to contribute to this country. It is right and smart to build a future in which every American, regardless of skin color or economic quintile, can participate and prosper. What is called for is nothing less than a return to the notion of a common good.

Half a century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically wrote from a Birmingham, Ala., jail cell, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." ⁶⁶ Outside that building today, a plaque commemorates its most famous inmate. Along the sidewalk, at regular intervals, are curb cuts.
Read more stories by Angela Glover Blackwell.

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One evening in the early 1970s, Michael Pachovas and a few friends wheeled themselves to a curb in Berkeley, Calif., poured cement into the form of a crude ramp, and rolled off into the night. 1 For Pachovas and his fellow disability advocates, it was a political act, a gesture of defiance.

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Public Transportation In The US: A Driver Of Health And Equity

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Public Transportation In The US: A Driver Of Health And Equity

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Pathways to Population Health Equity (P2PHE) Compass

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Pathways to Population Health Equity (P2PHE) Compass

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ASSESS

Take the Compass to see where your health
department is on its population health and equity journey.

Photo Credit to Jordan Madrid

The P2PHE Compass is a tool to help public health change agents see where they are in their health equity journey. Like any good compass, it can be used to enable individuals to look ahead and chart a path forward. This should ultimately be done in collaboration with communities that are not thriving. In the early stages of implementation, a health department might use it to prepare for a more comprehensive equity journey.

CORE TRANSFORMATION SKILLS

​Community Collaboration

Budgeting and Payment

PHYSICAL AND/OR MENTAL HEALTH OF PEOPLE

ROOT CAUSES

Power sharing

Growing community leadership and voice

Institutional/ health department policy

Public policy and context

Directing fiscal and human resources

Aligning and leveraging assets

SOCIAL AND/OR SPIRITUAL WELL-BEING OF PEOPLE

The Compass is for any public health change agent. A public health change agent is anyone working to improve the health and well-being of the public! You can take the Compass just to assess your health department or to advance a broader health equity community collaboration.

​

The P2PHE Compass can be used by:

an individual taking this assessment to assess their health department they are getting started

a health equity team working within a health department or agency

a community or state collaboration including multi sector leaders and community residents

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The online assessment makes it easy for a group of people to take the Compass together, learn from diverse perspectives and chart a path forward together.

Take the Compass

Remember: there is no right answer. Just choose "don't know" for any questions you feel unprepared to answer.

Talk it Through

If you took the Compass as a group (recommended), discuss questions for which you might have a difference of 4 or more in your scores to understand each other's perspectives. Arrive at a common score based on your conversation.

Set goals and chart a path forward.

Identify up to five priorities (questions) to work on and develop a transformation plan. Decide on a goal for each of these items. Create an improvement plan for each of these priorities (see Act)

Reassess

Reassess your progress every 3-6 months for just the improvement questions you chose. Take the full Compass at least once a year.

(Note: These are *NOT* the links to use for an ARISE application. Please contact your assessment leader to get the right one.)

In my community
collaboration:

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Assess | Pathways to Population Health Equity

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ASSESS Take the Compass to see where your health department is on its population health and equity journey. Photo Credit to Jordan Madrid The P2PHE Compass is a tool to help public health change agents see where they are in their health equity journey.

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Five ways to bridge polarizing conversations

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Five ways to bridge polarizing conversations

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What if journalists didn't simply parrot knee-jerk opposing viewpoints, but instead covered controversial issues differently - based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious? We at the Solutions Journalism Network first asked this question two years ago, when we commissioned research and published a powerful essay by journalist Amanda Ripley titled " Complicating the Narratives."

Digging into this question, we found that journalists could learn a lot from those who navigate the complexities of conflict on a regular basis.

From there we developed training and interviewing techniques expanding on this research. Our goal was to help journalists better understand "how to get people to open up to new ideas, rather than closing down in judgment and indignation."

The response from the journalists we've worked with has been enthusiastic, to the point where we realized it might be helpful to distill the main elements of this approach and share them more broadly, for anyone to use when navigating conflict.

As we barrel down the road towards more and more polarization it can feel emotionally exhausting and frustrating to engage with people who have opposing views, especially when those views perpetuate harm, prejudice and misinformation.

People can have a hard time listening when they don't feel heard, so it's important that we ask questions that uncover motivations because "the way to counter the kind of tribal prejudice we are seeing is to expose people to the other tribe or new information in ways they can accept. When conflict is cliché, complexity is breaking news."

Here are five questions to help unpack people's motivations in order to foster constructive discussion and active listening.

Why is this personally important to you?

I can tell this is important to you. Which life experiences have shaped your views? (OR) Out of curiosity, which life experiences have shaped your views?

For those who disagree with you, what would you like them to understand about you?

What do you want to understand about those with whom you disagree?

Imagine for a moment that you got what you wanted in regards to this issue. How would your life change?."

And here are two stories demonstrating constructive discussion and active listening in practice.
A blues pianist tackles prejudice head-on by getting at the systemic root causes of hate. "Racists are so used to being combative, especially with someone they oppose, like me," he says. "They're not expecting me to listen to them. ...They would expect me to fight - but I'm saying: Tell me more."

Community collaboration in Ohio allows folks to step out of their comfort zones to examine topics like race and revisionist history and motherhood. "Using the principles of solutions journalism, these facilitated conversations bridge the gaps that exist between races, ages, and socio-economic groups. By complicating individual narratives, better communication happens and we end up closer together instead of further apart."

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Five ways to bridge polarizing conversations

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What if journalists didn't simply parrot knee-jerk opposing viewpoints, but instead covered controversial issues differently - based on how humans actually behave when they are polarized and suspicious? We at the Solutions Journalism Network first asked this question two years ago, when we commissioned research and published a powerful essay by journalist Amanda Ripley titled " Complicating the Narratives."

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Grounded and Interconnected in the Pandemic: Community engagement and organizing adaptations from COVID response efforts in Metro Boston

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Grounded and Interconnected in the Pandemic: Community engagement and organizing adaptations from COVID response efforts in Metro Boston

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Health Care Institutions Must Acknowledge Their Role in Neighborhood Change

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Health Care Institutions Must Acknowledge Their Role in Neighborhood Change

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Over the course of my medical training I have worked in cities that hold the dual distinctions of being both home to some of the largest medical institutions in the country as well as the sites of increasingly untenable affordable housing crises. I have seen countless patients bear the consequences of unsafe or unstable housing on their bodies and minds: the mold exacerbating their asthma, the medication missed because of stays in shelter leading to uncontrolled diabetes, the missed rent payments and threatening landlords leading to gnawing anxiety. These realities make clear that safe, affordable housing is a necessary foundation for good health, a fact that is now only further emphasized by the need for safe places to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, as I pursued my training in Baltimore and New York City, it also became clear that medical institutions and health systems bore some responsibility in creating the pressures that drove displacement in the first place. Just as it was impossible to ignore the health impacts of poor housing, it was also increasingly difficult to ignore announcements of new multimillion dollar developments bearing the health systems' names, the contrast between steel and glass research buildings and the rows of vacant houses just beyond their lawns. Participating in grassroots efforts to support fair development and sustainable affordable housing, led by groups such as the Baltimore Fair Development Roundtable and Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, I heard stories from those living in the shadow of the hospital of rising rents and changing neighborhoods; I saw the looks of suspicion on community members' faces when the hospital's name arose in conversation.

Over the last few years there has been a growing commitment from health care institutions to the development of affordable housing. It's a prospect that is both exciting and long overdue: the added financial and political weight of these anchor institutions as well as the opportunity for new collaborations between housing and health providers could improve access to both essential needs.

In moving forward with these initiatives, however, it is important that we consider the ways in which health care institutions already shape the communities in which they find themselves. The way that medical institutions actively engage in development, how their workforce shapes the characteristics of the neighborhoods around them, and how changing dynamics of health care service provision affect the vitality of neighborhoods must be reckoned with if health care systems decide to commit themselves to supporting true affordable housing.

While health care institutions may just now be entering the world of affordable housing, they are by no means new to community development. In 2001, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions partnered with the city of Baltimore under then-mayor Martin O'Malley to form a $1.8 billion plan to redevelop the neighborhood surrounding the medical campus, known as the Middle East. Through the formation of East Baltimore Development Incorporated, the hospital and the city embarked on an 88-acre redevelopment plan on land that was then occupied by close to 800 households, home to those who lived in the shadow of the hospital.

The plans were met with vocal opposition from community members. As Maricela Gomez, organizer with Save Middle East Action Committee (SMEAC) wrote in this Shelterforce piece, SMEAC engaged in community surveying and door-knocking campaigns as well as direct actions to highlight the potentially disastrous impact this development would have on the primarily poor, Black communities surrounding the medical campus. Ultimately, however, the hospital and the city used eminent domain to push through their development plans. In return, compensatory payments were made to those who were forced to move, which organizers were successful in increasing from the original proposed amount of $22,500 to as much as $250,000.

As a medical student on the Johns Hopkins campus in the aftermath of this struggle, I saw new research buildings seemingly rise up overnight while down the street neighbors struggled to pay their ever-increasing rent. To the locals who know the hospital as much for its clinical care as for its exploitation of unwitting Black and Brown patients, the sight of an expanding campus seemed yet another chapter in the hospital's long history of extracting resources from its surrounding neighborhoods.

This is by no means the only example of a hospital's development plans drastically altering the neighborhood around it. In April 2019, Yale New Haven Hospital announced an $800 million plan to develop a new neuroscience center that would be completed by 2024. Residents who live near that project also raised similar concerns about displacement and the potential environmental effects of new development, according to the New Haven Register.

Health systems across the country engage in similar development projects, driven by the desire for ever newer clinical spaces and research facilities. Simultaneously embarking on new affordable housing projects does not negate these existing development efforts. Making a true commitment to addressing the housing crisis would mean not only dedicating resources to new housing, but also critically examining ongoing development practices to ensure that they are not further exacerbating displacement.

Even medical institutions that do not actively engage in neighborhood-altering development practices inevitably shape the composition of the communities around them. Each of the stages of my medical training necessitated my move into a new city, and the same holds true for many of the thousands of medical trainees who are matched to new institutions each year. What's more, these stages of training are by their nature finite: once finished, some trainees may choose to stay, while others move either to pursue further training or job opportunities. What this process creates is a changing cohort of new, relatively high-earning individuals, often with little connection to the community in which they find themselves. It's a situation ripe for the phenomena that we associate with gentrification: housing markets, retail markets, and businesses shape themselves to the wills and desires of this new group. The observation that large employers can drive shifts like this is not new. However, it is one that must be acknowledged as health institutions seek to engage in community development. Specifically, if those of us in health care are seeking to develop new ways to help our patients stay in their homes, part of that must also be finding ways to temper our own unintended impacts on the communities that we inhabit.

Losing Local Hospitals

The changing dynamics of health care service provision also pose a threat to the viability of changing communities. Across the country, the last few decades have seen the acquisition and subsequent closure of numerous local hospitals, many of which served as the main source of medical care for the primarily poor communities surrounding them. In New York City, closures of up to 18 hospitals have led to the loss of approximately 20,000 hospital beds, and further closures are still planned. These closures-done with the backing of state and local policymakers-follow a clear pattern of de-prioritization of low-income communities. What is also clear is that these decisions alter the landscape of medical resources available to those who remain in the surrounding neighborhoods. Many of these hospitals are being replaced by standalone urgent care centers, emergency departments, or ambulatory surgical centers that offer the promise of more advanced care, but at a more prohibitive cost. Furthermore, there is a question whether these private entities are bound by the same regulations that require Medicare-funded institutions to provide care to all patients regardless of ability to pay.

Ultimately these shifts in health care provision are altering the availability of medical services in neighborhoods across the country. In combination with increasing costs of living and ever-rising rents, this shift in services is part of a pattern that makes it increasingly difficult for poor people to stay in their homes. A real commitment from health care institutions to keeping people in their homes would mean reconsidering how health systems prioritize the medical services they provide in low-income neighborhoods, so that staying housed also means having ready access to necessary resources, including medical care.

The federal eviction moratorium will expire at the end of the month. At that point, hundreds of thousands of families will be at risk of losing their homes in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Now more than ever the health consequences of unstable housing are clear, and so it is both an exciting and necessary development to have health care institutions engaged in working toward new solutions for the creation of sustainable, long-term affordable housing. At the same time, health care institutions must be able to acknowledge and reckon with their own role in creating the housing crisis.

Above all, this means engaging with local community organizations in supporting their priorities. Many of these organizations have spent years exploring how development in their communities can proceed equitably and that expertise must be taken into account. Health care institutions should thus find ways to support community-based solutions for fair development, for example, making capital investments-either funding or hospital-owned land-in community land trusts and other mechanisms that prioritize community control and long-term affordable housing. Partnerships with local organizations can also guide how hospital affiliates can relocate responsibly, in ways that don't harm neighborhoods. New hospital-driven development projects should also include explicit commitments to including truly affordable housing, with measures of affordability tailored to the realities of the local community. Finally, maintaining the viability of affordable housing also means ensuring the availability of necessary resources for the residents of that housing, including supporting, rather than closing, the local hospitals serving those communities.

Through profit-motivated development practices that have affected neighborhood composition, and dictating the medical services available to communities in need, health care institutions have long played a part in development and neighborhood change. A true commitment to stable affordable housing thus means not only a proactive engagement in developing new housing, but also revisiting ongoing practices to ensure that that housing and those neighborhoods remain viable and healthy.

Marc Shi is an internal medicine physician working in the Bronx, New York.

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Health Care Institutions Must Acknowledge Their Role in Neighborhood Change

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Over the course of my medical training I have worked in cities that hold the dual distinctions of being both home to some of the largest medical institutions in the country as well as the sites of increasingly untenable affordable housing crises.

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City Life Is Too Lonely. Urban Planning Can Help.

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City Life Is Too Lonely. Urban Planning Can Help.

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