Inclusive Economic Development: With Issues of Race, Changing Lives Needs More Doing Than Talking
The social justice and equality movement of 2020 represents a once in a 50-60-year opportunity to make meaningful change in a most persistent U.S. problem. Enormous amounts of goodwill exist across demographics for a reckoning that improves systemic conditions laid down by centuries of now-indefensible cultural assumptions.
We know that all men and women are created equal and that social conditions, not race, determine the degree of human potential each citizen eventually contributes to their communities and this great nation. The lost human and economic potential is recognized by a majority of Americans as just plain wrong.
What’s more, the pandemic of 2020 will require major efforts to rebuild our economy, providing a confluence of opportunity. Intentionally inclusive economic development initiatives provide a set of strategies by which progress is possible in both areas. However, the question remains, will we grasp this moment’s potential, or will it evaporate into a fog of good intentions and wasted words?
If we apply a change framework to how this moment opened, video of George Floyd’s death activated forces and beliefs which advanced reforms in a way that they reached a disequilibrium point with those forces resisting change. A window of time exists “unfrozen” during which new learning and behavior change can be introduced to move toward a new equilibrium point. Before our society refreezes around a new point of equilibrium between activating and resisting forces, will we replace old ideas and behavior with increasingly constructive patterns and systems?
Inclusive economic development represents a concept about including disadvantaged populations in programs designed to expand jobs, new companies, and growing prosperity. It is a framework that can be very useful as communities, organizations, and businesses respond to these twin challenges. However, progress will take getting things done. Current passions must be channeled into actions that transform lives, that actually make our cities and towns safer, more prosperous places so goodwill becomes tangible progress, for everyone! It will require more action than talk, more substance than rhetoric, more perceived emphasis on what is “good for all” than just on the benefits for targeted segments.
To be successful, inclusive economic development initiatives must answer questions of who, how, and why with every bit as much intensity as what we do. The second half of my career has centered on expanding economic and educational opportunities for all, including disadvantaged populations. Two important initiatives inform my message here. I was part of the leadership for a community dialogue on race in Terre Haute, Indiana led by its educational institutions and later a more comprehensive effort to include racial minorities in greater Danville, Virginia’s efforts at economic transformation. Both initiatives attempted and accomplished change in this general endeavor during times less ripe for the potential progress of the current moment. The former emphasized a community dialogue; the latter emphasized shared effort and work to accomplish a common agenda for economic transformation.
What? - If we consider important topics for answering the “what to do” questions of inclusive economic development, some or all of the following should be included:
· Economic Development, including entrepreneurship, business growth, and access to capital,
· Human Capital, including education, talent development, employment, wages, and institutional board representation
· Transit and Access, including transit, transportation, and housing.
Solid programs and program models to address these topics and others exist and should be tailored to place. However, a narrow focus on answering the “what” question will yield only modest results if not combined with perspectives and solutions that consider the issues related to who, how, and why.
Who? - Addressing the “who question” begins to open windows into what it means to be inclusive, or not. Successful inclusion strategies are about forming new, trusted relationships. To move the needle, your inclusive economic development program must expand the breadth and strength of who is known to whom and who is trusted by whom. Strategies about “what is done” must include “who” is working together on the larger agenda (see the recent Brookings report about inclusion in Charlotte, NC for dramatic illustrations of how important social networks are to the root of the problem - https://brook.gs/3o8ZBvs). In Danville, African American leaders organized, and their leaders joined other prominent community leaders’ advocacy for state support to operate a new regional institution dedicated to economic transformation. Over months and months of shared effort, social capital between the majority and minority leaders developed through this shared effort. Later many of the minority leaders received appointments to prestigious boards, roles that expanded the strength and breadth of those leaders’ social networks in ways both meaningful and long-term.
As the popular Broadway musical Hamilton illuminated so well, “who is in the room” matters! “Who” works together to achieve inclusive economic development goals represents the secret sauce of an initiative’s success. Bonds of trust build between people who work together. Diversifying non-profit and institutional boards is a great place to start. However, early wins are possible by including leaders from diverse social networks in projects and work of all kinds. Get diverse social organizations or churches working together on projects. These experiences expand and strengthen ties that bind. Stronger relationships result from the shared effort. Trusting relationships are the coin of the realm in an inclusive economy and success will be ephemeral without an intentional effort to expand them.
How? – If access to, and an accumulation of, social capital represent measures for an inclusive economy, a corollary question becomes, “How are these cross network relationships formed?” As I mention above, shared work holds the key. From my experience in both competitive sports and community change, in the crucible of striving for a shared goal, hearts and minds are changed by the spirit and talents teammates and partners bring to the effort. Trust results and emotional connections tighten when working together. This dynamic contrasts with a more familiar pattern in my experience: simply talking about it. Issues of social justice too often stimulate a first impulse to hold a dialogue. While the desire to reconcile differences using language is nearly always well-intended, it becomes problematic because words betray intent and too often expose differences in life experience, cultural assumptions, and expectations about outcomes. People talk past one another. All the language cues can trigger a “you are not from my tribe” response. The result frustrates participants and activates forces resistant to the desired change, even when the need for change is shared at the outset.
Adult social connections are made predominantly in educational institutions and workplaces. Both settings involve core activities and patterns by which participants work together for common or similar goals. As trust develops through shared enterprise, perceptions of “them” soon become a sense of “us”. Broader and stronger social networks formed through shared work are the result of “working” relationships similar to those developed in school or from workplaces and they persist long after the early impetus for change has dissipated. Sports reveal this dynamic in easy to see ways. When striving for a shared goal, if one contributes to the team’s success, then cultural background comes to matter little as trust grows; with time and shared experience, a team feeling develops and the one-time stranger becomes recognized as a worthy individual and teammate.
In Danville, it was the community leaders from diverse social networks who worked together founding a new institution and programs to transform the economy that were appointed to critical board positions and included in strategic decision-making. Why? Because they were trusted and respected for their contributions to the shared effort. For inclusive economic development initiatives, the wise leaders’ task is to shape the manner in which project teams are composed so diverse constituencies have the chance to share work, build regard for one another, and expand the social capital that will be included in the region’s economy.
Why? – In the book Sapiens, author Yuval Levin identifies the human quality that permitted our ancestors to move from the middle of the food chain (arriving at the “kill” sometime after the hyenas had finished their eating to crush bone for marrow) to the top of the food chain. He calls it the “Communication Revolution.” Our ancestor’s unique ability to communicate verbally permitted them to organize into communities and tribes of more than 150 individuals, which is the largest community found among any other primate. Language permits trust and familiarity to grow across larger groups. Of essential consequence, it allowed for the coordination of effort while hunting (e.g., herding buffalo off cliffs or setting fires to flush out game into human traps). Shared work, facilitated by language meant our ancestors ate better, allowing survival in a prehistoric world. These deep roots come through in today’s use of words. Communicating meant communing together and shared food meant shared trust; the tribe was strengthened by numbers, shared language, and their shared work. Trust, tribe and economic success have been linked for nearly forever.
So shared work has deep history with our human sense of shared welfare, which means it is at the core of a strategy that will lead to lasting change. It also means the warrant for working together needs to be shared prosperity, improvements for the collective well-being. Shared work built around a rationale that improves conditions for all shapes a sense that we are all on the same team. The trap to be avoided is framing the outcome of improved social or economic justice as being a better world for me, rather for us. Unwittingly, the meaning can move perceptions from concurrence about an obvious inequity to representing the narrow interests of a less-trusted tribe in ways that result in participants shifting from collaborators to competitors. In Danville, the common goal was transforming the regional economy for all. Inclusion was justified more by the mandates of a diverse global economy than just the inequities visited on minorities by systemic structures and policies. These latter conditions were all true and recognized. However, the energy to act for change across all leadership groups came from the shared goal of economic transformation. It was a unifier and avoided instinctive reactions that someone else’s success will come at my expense.
Competitors rarely recognize the common humanity in one another. It is part of a battle mentality. In leading the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, through “good trouble” (John Lewis’s wonderful term) and non-violent protest, permitted mainstream America to see and understand the humanity of the oppressed and to make their own moral choices to recognize one another’s plight and humanity. To paraphrase a point about social change attributed to the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her work for gender equality, King made his case in a way that allowed those who initially were opposed to join him eventually. Progress resulted.
Progress is needed again. It is important to shift this reckoning for social justice into an agenda and a method of change that leads to tangible results for both the social justice reckoning and post-COVID economic rebuilding. What to do is the easier part of the puzzle. Success, however, will build by following a sound “what” agenda with application strategies that also answer the who, how, and why imperatives. Success rests in who we work with and how we work together…Shared work alters conditions. It bridges divides and connects previously isolated social networks. Shared work builds trust and increases social capital. Shared work changes beliefs and, ultimately, the spirits of involved individuals. New trusting relationships become the lubricant for change and the social capital upon which a community’s culture is reshaped. People choose to renew systems and follow new rules because something has changed in their heart. They want a better life for themselves and the people they care about. It is justice at its best.