Marcel Lecours

Looking for Progress: How Cedar Rapids is Connecting Growth and Opportunity

As part of our ongoing work exploring the lessons and recommendations offered in Looking for Progress in America's Smaller Legacy Cities: A Report for Place-based Funders, we asked some of the participants in the study: How has revitalization proceeded in your community, and how might your foundation and local partners ensure that economic growth and economic opportunity develop in a coordinated fashion?  Dr. Les Garner, Jr., president and CEO of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation, shares his thoughts:

The Looking for Progress report highlights the observation that revitalization in smaller legacy cities seems to move along two distinct paths: an “arc of growth,” traditionally seen as the purview of business, economic development commissions, and chambers of commerce, with the support of government; and an “arc of opportunity,” often seen as the responsibility of workforce development and K-12 educational systems, with the support of social service organizations.

In Cedar Rapids, we have recognized that revitalization must proceed in a way that ensures both economic growth and opportunity growth. Creative Corridor Rising, our current regional planning effort, is designed, in part, to bring the two arcs together.

The regional planning process has always included stakeholders invested in both the economic growth arc and the opportunity growth arc.  Leadership of the process includes the business and economic development communities, higher education, our council of governments and the charitable sector as represented by the United Way of East Central Iowa and the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation.  Public education and area nonprofits have been at the table from the beginning.

The plan will address regional workforce development and issues of community development as well as regional economic development. The regional approach is critical in planning for the economic growth arc.  As we consider those sectors that are most likely to experience rapid economic growth, we are searching for ways to merge intellectual capital from the University of Iowa with the manufacturing and production abilities of Cedar Rapids.

The arc of opportunity will certainly, but not exclusively, be addressed in the workforce development and community development sections of the plan. Issues under current discussion include removing barriers to workforce participation, enhancing affordable housing, and improving transportation.  Issues related to early childhood and education achievement are being addressed, as are issues related to diversity and economic, social and cultural inclusion.

As a place-based funder, the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation recognizes the important role that local nonprofits play in supporting both arcs. Many nonprofit organizations have adopted innovative approaches to addressing important components of the growth and opportunity arcs, including job training, family stability, affordable housing, health care, micro lending and the development of core neighborhoods. Along with other funders, we need to serve as a convener for conversations designed to pinpoint critical missing program elements and find the best way to use our limited resources and leverage private philanthropy to achieve a prosperous and equitable community.

A good example of the opportunities we will seek as the planning process proceeds is the work currently underway in the Wellington Heights neighborhood of Cedar Rapids.  Wellington Heights is a core neighborhood that was, several years ago, considered to be at the “tipping point” of instability. Four Oaks, a family services agency, decided to focus energy on the neighborhood through its Total Child initiative. Total Child made the commitment to work with children from youth to adulthood and to support families through a variety of interventions, including making major investments in stabilizing housing in the neighborhood, an effort supported by other agencies including Habitat for Humanity.  Jane Boyd Community House, an affiliate of Four Oaks, initiated the Paths Program to provide job training, coaching and advocacy for parents who faced barriers to entry into the workforce.  It has subsequently partnered with corporate partner Go Daddy to establish a neighborhood-based entrepreneurial development program. The entrepreneurs who complete this program will find opportunities for financing through MICRO, the City’s micro lending program targeted to core neighborhoods.  The Community Foundation convened the partners to establish MICRO, which is funded in part through private contributions. It has also funded Total Child and the Paths program. It will continue to seek such opportunities to help its nonprofit partners provide more comprehensive support for economic inclusion.

About the author: Dr. Les Garner, Jr., is president and & CEO of the Greater Cedar Rapids Community Foundation.

Looking for Progress in America's Smaller Legacy Cities: A Report for Place-based Funders
As part of The Funders’ Network-Federal Reserve Philanthropy Initiative, the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and New York recently released, in partnership with The Funders’ Network, a whitepaper presenting findings from a four-city study tour of older, legacy cities. This blog is the second in an occasional series stemming from that report. The full report can be downloaded here.

Main photo credit: Iowa's Creative Corridor.

by Marcel Lecours

Looking for Progress in America's Smaller Legacy Cities: Takeaways & Tools for Place-based Funders

Place-based funders can play an important role in connecting economic growth to opportunity.

What began as an inquiry into four small legacy cities – Chattanooga, Tenn.; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Rochester, N.Y.; and Grand Rapids, Mich. – that appeared to have experienced some measure of revitalization in the post Great Recession environment, evolved into an understanding that the places are moving along two distinct paths: an “arc of growth” and an “arc of opportunity.”  In the context of these small legacy cities, growth and opportunity unfold simultaneously along these two long-term and distinct “arcs” leading to the conclusion that broad community prosperity lies in (1) recognizing that growth alone does not naturally lead to opportunity and (2) advancing deliberate policies, investments, and programs that connect growth to opportunity.

Looking for Progress in America's Smaller Legacy Cities: A Report for Place-based Funders looks at four cities and how place-based funders are helping in post-recession economic recovery. (Download the full publication here.)

Five Takeaways

Given the common narratives emerging from the study tour and the dual arcs framework for evaluating place-based revitalization, participants in the tour put forward a short, non-exhaustive, list of conclusions for funders:

1. Patient capital builds local capacity:  The time horizons of community revitalization require capital that seeks both social impact and financial return over a longer-term. Place based funders are uniquely positioned to address the long time horizon that this work dictates, and the resources they control may be critical aspects in its acceleration or deceleration.

2. State policy often limits the flexibility and authority of local leaders to connect the arcs of growth and opportunity:  Funders can take an active role in identifying those policy bottlenecks or opportunities that facilitate more positive local action toward connecting growth to opportunity. Place-based funders can be catalytic change agents for both policy and practice without engaging in lobbying.

3. Jurisdictional authorities dictate policy to connect the growth and opportunity arcs: The levers of power and resource allocations accorded to any number of public or pseudo-public authorities have a significant, often negative impact on the efficacy of efforts to connect the dual arcs. Funders can take an active role in helping to identify and break down or circumnavigate local jurisdictional boundaries that prevent positive action and facilitate alignment toward common goals.

4. Effective marketing and communication advances positive momentum: Maintaining a steady cadence on the long-term mission of community revitalization often falls to place-based leaders. In most cases, the community foundation or another place-rooted funder had a role in funding or otherwise supporting the narrative of a community’s recovery, articulating a common, inclusive vision of what is possible.

5. Accountability is the lynch pin for connecting the arcs: Cities around the country (including the four visited) have revitalized in various ways over the last several decades. But benefits of that growth have left many behind. Place-based funders should be strategic in holding local stakeholders accountable for connecting the growth and opportunity arcs.

Helpful Tools

Despite the challenges of connecting the arcs, multiple tools or approaches in which the local place-based foundation played a lead role as a funder, convener or ‘steward’ of the effort that may be valuable to other communities were noted.  These tools were observed within a local context, and were often part of a broadly articulated plan or vision.  While tools are helpful, the environment in which they are most likely to succeed is also important.

• Addressing concentrated poverty by place: Interventions in this category were geographically targeted, but multi-faceted and cross-generational.  Stressed communities that were located near resources – perhaps transportation or a good school – were seen as good places to start.

• Addressing concentrated poverty through policy: Interventions in this category were explicit in channeling more gains from growth to opportunity, through local policy either by removing barriers or being prescriptive in the intentional distribution of benefits.

• Revitalizing downtown with greater attention to preserving and increasing affordable housing: While investments in making communities more attractive by building downtown entertainment or “innovation” districts and increasing desirable amenities has increased property values and living costs, cities are facing the need for more affordable, family friendly housing options near emerging employment opportunities.

• Business recruitment led by business retention:  Community economic growth strategies focused on strengthening existing businesses by recruiting businesses in their supply chain, placing retention and success of existing business as a higher priority than traditional recruitment alone. Coordinated workforce development was often key to this strategy.

• Develop leaders: Concern exists about where the next two generations of leaders will come from and how they will support broad-based collaborative efforts.  Strong leaders in business, government and non-profits, are critical to building a regional approach to both arcs.

• Data collection: Data has played an important role in many of the cities visited.  Data should be publicly available and granular enough to support neighborhood level understanding as well as robust enough to present an aggregated, comprehensive city – or MSA-wide -- profile.

Local dynamics dictate the timing, sequence, and particularities of the interplay between growth and opportunity strategies. Revitalization efforts that recognize the dual arcs and plan for their meaningful integration are more likely to yield robust and lasting long-term results.  Because place-based funders are so integrally linked to the history and prospects of the communities they serve, they have unique roles and responsibilities not only as funders, but as local institutions and innovators to make these linkages across place and time.

About the Authors

Alicia Kitsuse is Director of TFN's Older Industrial Cities Program.

Jeremiah P. Boyle is Managing Director of Community and Economic Development for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Looking for Progress in America's Smaller Legacy Cities: A Report for Place-based Funders

The Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and New York recently released, in partnership with The Funders’ Network, a whitepaper presenting findings from a four-city study tour of older, legacy cities.This blog is the first in an occasional series stemming from that report.  Future installments will reflect the views of some of the place-based funders that collaborated with Federal Reserve staff in the study tour visits and the subsequent report.  This initial blog features, as background, the executive summary of the report.  The full report can be downloaded here.

by Marcel Lecours