As my America Achieves colleagues and I close out the year, there is much to be grateful for and even more to be hopeful about. Recently, I read Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us, and in it, she discusses the concept of a solidarity dividend, whereby gains in economic growth and generational wealth are made when communities come together across race, geographic boundaries and historical divides, and the outcomes benefit everyone.
This framing is something that has come to life this past year in communities across our country as federal funding has galvanized a new paradigm for economic development. A recent infusion of federal funding – including the Commerce Department’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge and Good Jobs Challenge initiatives, as well as the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines and the CHIPS and Science Act – is creating momentum for economic growth that is equity-centered and workforce powered. In the new year, I am hopeful that even more coalitions across our country will lean into a solidarity dividend as they feel incentivized to do even more, particularly as more models of success proliferate and as those coalitions recognize the urgency, imperative and mutual benefits of increasing the pie.
When I think of the opportunity ahead, I am inspired by the progress that is sprouting in communities across our country. This includes the community in Port Arthur, Texas, where the stress on its healthcare system in a mostly rural area means emergency response takes an average of 30 minutes, in stark contrast to the industry gold standard of a less than 5 minute response time. A severe shortage in nursing and healthcare workers is the root cause of the problem, so the Lamar State Community College is working with four local universities and a coalition of partners to build a robust apprenticeship program to deepen and expand the pipeline of individuals entering the healthcare field, with a focus on communities of color, significantly underrepresented in the field at present.
Meanwhile, the Alliance for Building Better Medicine in the Richmond/Petersburg region is growing the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector, seeking to onshore the production of orphan drugs and generic medications. The sector's growth will benefit both the rural and urban communities in the region, including in communities where the poverty rate is 76% higher than the national average. They will do this through building bridge programs targeting Black youth and young adults and creating pathways for upwardly mobile jobs through partnerships with school districts, community colleges, local outreach partners and research universities.
In Ohio, an enhanced broadband strategy is bringing high speed internet access to unserved and underserved areas of the state by convening key stakeholders to build a broadband workforce, led by a central coordinator from the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation. Blending state and federal funding, these investments in broadband and 5G are expected to create tens of thousands of jobs in Ohio over the next decade.
These groups, among many others, are part of a movement that is afoot to create hope in communities where distress has been the primary commodity. Each of them is taking a unique and varied place-based approach – and doing so with a goal, implicitly or explicitly, to build a solidarity dividend, to grow the pie and to share it more broadly, enabling the benefits to multiply in breadth and depth.
These stories, and many more, are just the beginning of what is shaping up to be an epic, inspiring narrative about economic prosperity, with the bulk of its chapters yet to be written.
But the final version can only come to fruition if even more partners – including philanthropists, state leaders, businesses and educational institutions – come together to invest more deeply in making the impossible possible. Consider that this past year, 508 coalitions applied for the Good Jobs Challenge, 529 applied for the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, and 679 submitted concepts for NSF Engines.
Next year, we anticipate that even more coalitions will come together to pursue their visions, leveraging additional federal dollars from the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, to name a few. Regional coalitions cannot do the work alone. Only a fraction of the coalitions that have applied or are applying for federal grants will receive large funding, and even those that receive federal support have additional funding needs if they are to realize their goals of implementing programs that will achieve equitable systemic change.
In the coming year, one way that America Achieves will continue to seek to bridge that divide is through the Catalyze Registry that the White House announced in early November. It is intended to connect funders to promising coalitions with equity at their core, with the hope that an infusion of capital might enable them to construct a talent pipeline that could serve workers and businesses in in-demand sectors alike.
America Achieves will have exciting updates about the Catalyze Registry in the New Year, along with more specifics about our work and ways we hope you will actively engage. But for now, we wanted to say thank you for being part of this hope-building movement. Wishing you a safe, healthy, and hopeful holiday season.
Former Chief Strategy & Communities Officer of America Achieves.
