New Ford Foundation Project
With grant support from the Ford Foundation, FutureWorks is undertaking the design and management a new initiative, Regional Economic Development and Opportunity for All. The goal of this program is to demonstrate new regional development strategies to create and improve jobs for low-income people. In carefully selected metropolitan regions throughout the U.S., FutureWorks is assisting partnerships of business, community, labor, philanthropic, and other stakeholders to develop and put in place regional economic development strategies that advance the goal of increasing economic opportunity for low-income people as they promote regional prosperity.
In shaping this initiative, FutureWorks identified three major barriers to regional development approaches that focus on both the “equity agenda” and the “regional prosperity agenda.” First, fragmentation of civil jurisdiction across economic regions almost always limits consensus and retards sustained cooperation among political leaders on the complex issues embedded in the equity agenda. It is not necessarily easy for competing governments in a region to cooperate on traditional, recruitment-based development strategies, but it is much tougher still for political leaders to jointly address region-wide problems of poverty and disparity.
Second, leaders in non-government sectors – business, community, and labor– who might step up to region-wide multi-jurisdictional issues are often inexperienced in forging effective and enduring alliances. Business leaders in many regions may be uncertain of their collective responsibility for issues associated with equity and have little history in partnering with government, labor and community to address them. Community-based organizations with a historic mission of poverty alleviation may be suspicious of the business interests and the region may lack forums appropriate to sorting out these issues and building trust across sectors.
Third, practitioners in regional economic development have themselves been slow to embrace strategies and policies that link regional prosperity to wider opportunity for low-income people in the region. The practice of regional economic development is too often “stuck” in traditional business recruitment approaches with poor linkages to workforce development and other strategies that might contribute to wider economic opportunities. Not infrequently, economic development strategies assume that a rising tide of business prosperity will lift all communities in the region; these development strategies do not address long-standing barriers to fuller participation and wider opportunity.
There are, of course, some regions where civic leaders are forging new and effective mechanisms for governmental cooperation across multiple jurisdictions. There are effective new regional partnerships in a few metropolitan areas among diverse non-government sectors and there are certainly regions where the practice of regional economic development is rooted in a widely shared consensus that prosperity and equity are tightly linked. But these are best examples and best practices, not common ones.
The Regional Economic Development and Opportunity For All initiative will demonstrate how to bring these emerging new models of multi-sector cooperation and best economic development strategies together in concrete ways in major economic regions. The metro regions working under this initiative will integrate the best of the emerging models and strategies and innovate new ones. Their success will have a strong impact nationally, showing other regions how better to connect the prosperity agenda and the equity agenda, and developing implementing policies and tools that can be emulated widely. In particular, this initiative will showcase how private sector leaders can come together on a regional scale, in partnership with other stakeholders, to promote economic development strategies and policies grounded in an understanding that prosperity and equity are not just inextricably linked but also are mutually reinforcing.
