As foundations redirect resources to address today’s converging health, economic, race, and climate crises, they should consider investing in one area that is largely overlooked but likely to gain momentum in Washington, D.C.: our public infrastructure.
America’s deteriorating, and in some cases absent, infrastructure — including broadband, water systems, and transportation — prevents children from doing schoolwork, plunges families already on the margins further into poverty, hinders travel to jobs, interferes with the ability to get health care, and pollutes the air and water. If it wasn’t previously apparent, Covid-19 has exposed the racial fault lines in who does and doesn’t have access to adequate infrastructure — and the life-and-death consequences of these inequities.
Our public infrastructure perpetuates and enshrines racial inequities in concrete and steel, dating back to Reconstruction and Jim Crow and exacerbated by 20th-century policies such as redlining. Infrastructure segregation closely tracks historic residential segregation. Low-income communities and communities of color receive less public and private infrastructure investment in areas such as street repair, recreation, and running water. They are the default locations for highways, power plants, wastewater treatment plants, and other polluting facilities.
Improving infrastructure, particularly for those in marginalized communities, will increase economic opportunity and shrink health inequities. And job-creating infrastructure investment offers a promising avenue to recovery from our economic crisis. Right now, our failing infrastructure results in billions of dollars in lost economic activity and imposes $3,400 in indirect costs on the average family, whether in car repairs from poorly maintained roads, job searches thwarted by poor internet connections, or higher charges for goods and services passed on by businesses for inefficiencies resulting from unreliable infrastructure.
Philanthropy can play a critical role in supporting and promoting equitable infrastructure, including bringing together diverse interests, bolstering racial-justice organizations, and investing in innovative strategies that government or businesses may not be ready to adopt.
Recent research (conducted by one of our organizations, Onside Partners, and supported through grants by the other, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) uncovered multiple ways philanthropies can step into the infrastructure arena. Here are a few:
Support efforts to ensure government agencies target funding where needs are greatest. This could involve replicating models such as the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board’s Racial Equity Action Plan, which uses a set of key metrics to make racial equity a priority in the funding of local and regional parks and trails, including park staffing, procurement, and upgrades. The goal is to address the legacy of structural racism that gave rise to infrastructure disparities in the Minneapolis area. The plan was created with guidance from the Government Alliance on Race and Equity, a national foundation-funded network that works with local and regional jurisdictions to develop racial-equity projects.
Support efforts that help people of color pursue infrastructure careers and win business contracts. Trade unions and large firms, which are disproportionately led by white men, dominate the infrastructure economy due to a long history of discrimination and exclusion. Onerous contracting processes, tough insurance requirements, and good-old-boy networks put up obstacles to entrepreneurs of color.
Philanthropies can shore up economic and work-force development programs such as those pioneered in Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif., in partnership with the nonprofit Emerald Cities Collaborative. One such program helps economically disadvantaged high-schoolers get jobs in the infrastructure field by covering the costs of enrollment in community-college courses, providing paid internships, and even paying for work gear. Another Emerald Cities program prepares Black and brown contractors for the opportunity to participate in the types of energy-efficiency retrofit projects that generate billions of dollars in contracting opportunities in California.
Support efforts that bring community members into conversations about redevelopment. Philanthropy can take inspiration from the New Orleans equitable recovery efforts after the city was battered by devastating hurricanes and the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The Greater New Orleans Funders Network — a coalition of local, regional, and national philanthropists — recognized that Black communities were systematically excluded from redevelopment conversations and decisions. To correct historic injustices and incorporate equity into recovery planning and implementation, the Greater New Orleans Funders Network brought together leaders in a cross-section of fields and industries with community members in hard-hit areas. They worked together to determine how to spend recovery dollars; how to incorporate racial equity into development strategies; and how to create opportunities for Black workers and businesses to get jobs and win contracts on local climate and water projects.
Philanthropy has the opportunity to shift dynamics at the intersection of the public, private, and civic arenas to achieve three goals and create robust and equitable infrastructure for all.
First, philanthropy can help shape funding and financing so that infrastructure costs are allocated fairly and all communities have access to affordable capital. This includes using grants and investments to move public and private capital to communities where the need is greatest; promoting equity standards for bond issuers and credit underwriters; and advocating for progressive tax and fee structures.
Second, philanthropy can help government at all levels build the capacity, will, and policies to provide and ensure equitable infrastructure. This could involve funding coalitions to develop federal and state action plans for equitable infrastructure or convening regional and cross-industry partnerships that help improve effectiveness among thinly stretched government officials.
Finally, philanthropy can bolster strategies — such as funding community organizing, improving community participation, and promoting equity targets — to dismantle structural racism in infrastructure development and decision making and to balance power fairly between corporations and communities, the wealthy and low- and moderate-income people, and white people and people of color.
By supporting these goals while prioritizing the people and places forced to navigate the worst of our nation’s public infrastructure, philanthropy can play a vital role in righting the wrongs of racial injustice and laying the foundation for more resilient and healthy communities.