Equitable Economic Development

Historically, economic development projects have not benefited all populations, and have particularly shortchanged some, including people of color, immigrants and low-income communities.  Many development decisions have resulted in projects that exclude these same communities from shared benefits generated in the economy.  Today, cities and states are developing new and creative strategies to jumpstart their economies and re-imagine their futures. They are collaborating in innovative ways to produce beneficial outcomes for these historically shortchanged communities.  The Strong Local Economies Program aims to influence economic development planning and practice so that equity, transparency, sustainability, and community engagement become driving forces on any project.

What we fund:

We seek funding opportunities that:

• Integrate equity and sustainability into economic development practices by transforming the training of professionals, developers, and planners.  Examples may include curriculum redesign, shifts in ongoing professional development opportunities, and research that demonstrates the impact of these changes.
• Establish and replicate successful local and regional policies that promote equitable economic development outcomes. These policies may include community benefits agreements, local hire policies, sustainable land-use planning practices, and transit equity measures.  We seek best practices and implementation models, as well as ways to share knowledge and promote collaboration through networking and partnerships.
• Encourage equitable and sustainable outcomes for large publicly subsidized development projects. These opportunities will be very limited.  Applicants should convey a thorough overall picture of a specific development project, its economic impact, and potential to create positive community benefits, as well as the full array of organizations collaborating to influence the project’s outcomes.  We seek to support activities such as: coalition development, community organizing and policy advocacy that leads to accountability measures, community benefits agreements, and first source hiring agreements.
• Use strategic communications to highlight cases where economic development resulted in equitable outcomes and benefits for our priority communities.  We also seek ways to communicate cases of missed opportunities, where residents and local businesses could have benefited if equity considerations were driving decision-making.

We give preference to the following types of efforts:

• Community organizing campaigns that advocate for specific community benefits related to large, publicly subsidized economic development projects;
• Organizations that seek to create and implement community benefits agreements, local hire, and local sourcing policies;
• New curriculum and leadership trainings for economic development professionals that emphasize equity and sustainability in economic planning decisions, practice, and policy;
• Research and communications projects that highlight best practices in equitable economic development.  Alternatively, we seek critiques of publicly subsidized projects that failed to produce equitable outcomes;
• Regional economic development planning that activates local economies and creates new opportunities for historically shortchanged communities;
• Organizations addressing policy issues and contracting opportunities within a next generation infrastructure framework (as described by our Sustainable Environments Program).

How to apply:

If you are interested in applying for a Surdna Foundation grant, please submit a letter of inquiry by clicking here. Please note: We can only support organizations that meet our guidelines listed under "What we fund."

Two new guides are available from the Center for Transit-Oriented Development:

TOD 203: Transit Corridors and TOD

"This guidebook illustrates how planning at the corridor scale can help transit investments capture the benefits of TOD," said Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development. "Corridor planning can engage stakeholders, lead to more cost effective planning processes, and identify where along a new or existing transit line that the real estate market will be most active.”

Filled with real-world transit-oriented development lessons, the guidebook explains how corridor planning can facilitate not only successful transportation outcomes but also successful transit-oriented development.

Performance-Based Transit-Oriented Development Typology Guidebook

A hands-on tool for identifying the different conditions that exist around transit stations and determining how that influences performance on a range of metrics.

"The compositions of our communities and the quality of transit have a great influence on how people choose to get around and the choices they have in their daily lives," said Sam Zimbabwe, director of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD). "The Performance-Based TOD Typology is a user-friendly tool that gives interested people around the country the ability to evaluate the performance of the transit zones in their neighborhoods and towns."

Whether working locally or regionally, the guidebook provides easy to understand information to help guide efforts to create high-quality TOD that reduces vehicle miles traveled (VMT), a significant generator of our national greenhouse gas emissions, as well as creating a host of community benefits. The guidebook builds off of the TOD Database, a web tool released in October that provides economic and demographic information for every existing and proposed fixed-guideway transit station in the United States. (See URLs for the report below.)

FIRST OF ITS KIND NATIONAL DATABASE WILL FACILITATE TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT

The Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD) launched a first-of-its-kind web database to provide access to comprehensive information about more than 4,000 transit zones across the United States. The web tool will help developers, investors, and city officials make planning decisions that take advantage of development opportunities around transit nodes.

The TOD Database, available at http://toddata.cnt.org, provides information on density, demographics, occupation and transportation habits of households near 4,160 existing and proposed fixed-guideway transit stations, including commuter rail, streetcars, light rail, bus rapid transit and ferries.  Spanning Honolulu to Portland, Maine, the database synthesizes 40,000 data fields at half mile and quarter mile buffers around fixed rail stations to create a user-friendly web site that allows people to view maps of various transit regions and choose data reports for stations of interest. Users can also query data by geography or demographics. The TOD Database is a product of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development, a partnership among the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Reconnecting America and Strategic Economics.

To read a full article about the database, click here.

The Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) recently released two reports on the role of urban universities as anchor institutions in cities. They contain national survey data and case studies of how universities partner with cities to achieve a host of economic, social and community objectives.

The reports are:

• Urban Universities: Anchors Generating Prosperity for America's Cities, is USU's first white paper.  This policy document demonstrates the value and role of urban universities as "anchors" for cities.  It contains national data, aggregate survey data, and case study examples that showcase the importance of our partnerships to cities, and provides recommendations for federal policies that build upon our success. To read the paper, click here.

• And, the second document, Urban Universities as Anchor Institutions: A Report of National Data and Survey Findings, provides a more in-depth look at the data from a USU survey conducted in the Summer, 2009. To read the paper, click here.