WEBINAR: State & Local Fiscal Recovery Funds: Promising Practices -- Equity and Community Engagement

Hi, welcome. I'm Namrata Mazumdar, the lead for policy outreach for the state and local fiscal recovery funds. Thank you for joining us today for the first in a two-part series on how recipients can use their state and local fiscal recovery funds, or SLFRF for short, investments to create a more equitable recovery for their community. To start, I want to let you know that we are recording today's session. We will post the recording and the slides on Treasury's website in the coming days. This session is designed to help recipients effectively implement and report on SLFRF. Therefore, it is closed to the press and an off-the-record session. Finally, I want to note that we will have time for Q&A at the end of today's webinar. We will only be able to take questions related to the subject of today's webinar. We will not be answering specific questions about eligible uses of state and local fiscal recovery funds. Before we begin, I would like to introduce my colleague Janice Baldler, who is the Treasury Department's first counselor to the Secretary for Racial Equity. She will share a bit about the Treasury Department's department-wide approach to equity. Now, Janice, I would like to turn it over to you. Great. Thanks, Namrata. Thank you so much for joining us for this really important conversation. As Namrata said, I'm Janice Baldler. I'm the counselor for racial equity. I'm just going to take a moment to give you a sense of what that actually means. My role here at the department is to think laterally across the building about all the tools and resources that Treasury has to advance racial equity and specifically to think about long-standing, persistent racial wealth and economic disparities that are rooted in our history of structural racism and to really acknowledge the role that the federal government and federal agencies have played historically in having created that gap. That means that we have a special responsibility to be part of the solution, and this administration has made that a day-one priority. How can we use all the tools and resources of the federal government to take preparative action and help create the kind of economy that works for all? It's simply, I think all of us experience this in the work that we do. We cannot build the kind of durable, sustainable economy that we're looking for if we're sidelining major components of our families, communities, and businesses. Just briefly, you can think about our racial equity agenda as having three kind of operational tentacles. The first is thinking about our programs and policies, and in particular, the work that you are doing falls heavily into that first bucket. How are we implementing with an eye towards addressing long-standing racial wealth disparities? That's really the crux of today's conversation. I think there's so much exciting work that's happening out there when it comes to SLFRF, and I'm excited to hear a little bit more of what you guys have been working on and thinking about how we can lift that up and scale through replication and broader adoption of those best practices. A second tentacle is how we ensure that Treasury is really lining up with our own values, that we're meeting our own aspirations in terms of the way we work as a Treasury Department, that we have a workforce that reflects the diversity of our country. We recently created the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. Treasury has not had an office like that. That office will be led by permanent career staff that will build a durable function that's here beyond a single administration and be the keepers of this work over the long term. Importantly, that office is not limited just to the traditional internal operational pieces. It also includes policy shops that will include career staff for whom racial equity is their domain expertise. The same way any other policy shop here has permanent career staff dedicated to tax policy, economic policy, financial and capital markets, we're recognizing that we need this domain expertise in our career staff and we're aspiring for that. And then finally, a third tentacle of how we operationalize our equity agenda is really about communication and transparency. Events like today are really important from this perspective. We need community intelligence coming in and helping us understand where we can do more and how we can help you all achieve your equity goals, your racial equity goals. So that policy programs, internal operations, and the feedback that we get from communities are all part of how we advance this agenda. And again, our ultimate goal is really to think about how we are investing in communities of color as a way for further economic growth that creates that broadly shared prosperity. When we do that, we know that we are not only driving resources and elevating communities that have long been left behind, but we are creating economic opportunity for a broader set of Americans that benefits us all. So I know that's a really high overview. I'm happy to provide any additional detail about that at a later time, but I'm eager to get you over to the content of today's discussion and this opportunity to learn from one another as peers. So thank you very much, Namrata. I will hand it back over to you. Great. Thank you so much, Janice, for that great overview of how Treasury is focusing its efforts on advancing equity and why that is an economic imperative for the country. Now I will go over today's agenda. We will begin with an overview of how State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund's final rule was designed to facilitate equitable outcomes. Next, we will provide background on the Equity and Outcomes Resource Guide. Then we will have a peer discussion with Leo Flohr, Director of the Department of Community and Human Services in King County, Washington, and Andy Segovia, the City Attorney of San Antonio, Texas. Then Sarah Beth Gell, the Executive Director of the Southern Economic Advancement Project, otherwise known as SEAP, will share some insights from the national perspective, as well as best practices for how recipients can use their SLFRF allocations to invest in equitable recoveries for all members of their community. Then my colleague, Jen North, will share a few examples from within the guide. Finally, we will have a Q&A session with all of today's presenters. On that note, as you have questions throughout the presentation, please use the Q&A function so we can address them during the Q&A at the end. I also want to note that if you would like an introduction to the themes of our webinar series, then you can find several recorded webinars on Treasury's website where we hosted introductory webinars last year about equity, community engagement, evaluation, and metrics. We will drop some links to those in the chat. The State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund, authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act, delivers $350 billion to state, territorial, local, and tribal governments across the country to support their response to and recovery from the COVID-19 public health emergency. Recognizing that historically underserved communities, including low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, experience disproportionate impacts of the pandemic, when implementing the SLFRF program, Treasury sought to encourage recipients to address health and economic disparities and ensure that the recovery from the pandemic is truly an equitable economic recovery. Next, we will look at the implementation approach for the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. As we've discussed, equity is a key principle for an effective economic recovery that leads to long-term prosperity for our country. There are four key ways that Treasury's implementation approach advances an equitable recovery. First, Treasury has structured the program's eligible uses to encourage recipients to address underlying health and economic disparities by including a broad menu of automatically eligible uses of funds. The final rule has listed an expanded set of automatically eligible uses of funds when provided to disproportionately impacted communities, including funds for community health workers, housing vouchers, and high-poverty school districts. This approach made it easier for recipients to address the underlying disparities that contribute to the more severe impacts of the pandemic in underserved communities. Second, Treasury has expanded eligible populations so recipients can serve families and communities hardest hit by the pandemic, therefore automatically eligible for the broadest range of services. Third, Treasury has designed reporting guidance to support equity by encouraging recipients to engage their communities in the design of their SLFRF programs. Through the recovery plan performance reports, recipients are also encouraged to clearly demonstrate how the SLFRF programs promote equitable outcomes as applicable. Finally, Treasury held tribal consultations to ensure that the final rule and reporting approach were tailored to the unique needs of tribal governments. As a result of these efforts, in its first year, the program has delivered much-needed resources to communities across the country and helped revitalize the economy and ensure that funds reach the most historically underserved communities. If you would be interested in learning about how Treasury has designed SLFRF to focus on an equitable economic recovery, then it's worth reading the recent White House report on advancing equity through the American Rescue Plan, and we will drop a link to that in the chat so you can see it. Before we turn to the guide, let's briefly discuss four categories highlighted within the guide. First, for the purposes of this guide, the definition of equity is based on the President's Executive Order 1398 on advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government. The Executive Order defines equity as consistent and systematic, fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders, and other persons of color, members of religious minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer persons, persons with disabilities, persons who live in rural areas, and persons who are otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality. We begin the process here because we encourage recipients to view equity as a lens through which governments begin their engagement and recovery activities. Second, community engagement is a deliberate and sustained effort to devise thoughtful strategies to invest in communities. Third, making evidence-based investments means using new and existing research to strengthen decision-making. It provides an opportunity to test new strategies or test strategies in new conditions and conduct rigorous program evaluations to build evidence on what works, for whom, and how. Governments can use this opportunity to build a culture of evidence-based policy making, learning, and improvement that can far outlast state local fiscal recovery funds. Finally, performance management is focused on how governments create goals, track progress, analyze performance, and improve processes. By monitoring results, governments can achieve better outcomes for their residents. For all of these topics, I want to emphasize what was noted at the top about previous Treasury webinars on these topics. You can find the introductory webinars from last summer about equity, community engagement, evaluation, and metrics on the website. Throughout the resource guide and this webinar series, you will learn about these four important areas and hear about these activities in actions with presentations from your peer government. To ensure that governments are prioritizing these important areas when investing in state local fiscal recovery funds, Treasury has required information as part of its reporting process. Specifically, Tier 1 recipients, which includes states, territories, as well as localities with more than 250,000 residents, must include information in the recovery plan performance reports about their approach to equity and community engagement. And for projects in expenditure categories, they must include in their recovery plan whether the project is evidence-based or being evaluated. Finally, each project in their recovery plans must have specific performance metrics to measure the result of the state and local fiscal recovery funds. The next recovery plans are due at the end of July this year. Beyond this reporting, in the recovery plan performance reports that Tier 1 recipients must complete, all state and local fiscal recovery fund recipients must include in their project and expenditure reports whether certain types of projects are targeted to disproportionately impacted communities. This helps delineate the equity impact of your state and local fiscal recovery funds. And we'll drop links to reporting guidance in the chat for your reference. Next slide, please. There we are. All right. In order to assist recipient governments to use their funds effectively to advance an equitable recovery, Treasury has created State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds Equity and Outcomes Resource Guide, which we'll discuss in this two-part webinar series. The guide highlights examples of how recipients have been applying equity principles, engaging their communities, incorporating evidence-based interventions, and monitoring outcomes using performance management strategies. These practices, along with the transparency and accountability, are at the core of an equitable recovery. The goal is to provide recipients with examples from their peers on ways to develop and implement SLFRF investments. In the guide, Treasury highlights examples of approaches and tools recipients are using in the areas of equity community engagement, evidence-based investments, and performance management. The examples can be used throughout the life cycle of the state and local fiscal recovery funded programs and beyond, from policy and project selection through implementation. These strategies include goal setting, setting goals for their jurisdictions equity work, both in their SLFRF funded programs and throughout government operations through executive and or legislative action and strategic planning. Equity frameworks, using frameworks or rubrics to consider equity throughout the project development or selection process, assessing proposed projects on equity in project design and outcomes, identifying high-need populations, mapping social vulnerability indexes, and other data against proposed project locations to ensure services are targeted to the communities with the greatest need. Engaging underserved communities, which is offering different types of engagement opportunities, ensure that voices from underserved communities can participate in the process. Convening leaders, which means convening task forces made up of diverse group of community leaders to analyze data gathered through engagement processes and recommend focused areas and projects. Using evidence, which is incorporating consideration of evidence-based practices into the budget process. And tracking outcomes, which is collecting performance data for all projects, for each project to track progress towards advancing equitable outcomes. Next slide, please. Now I would like to turn it over to my colleague, Laura McDaniel, a policy outreach advisor on the state and local fiscal recovery funds team, who will lead our discussion with today's speakers. Thank you, Namrata. As you will see on the next slide, we'll have speakers from your peer governments in San Antonio, Texas and King County, Washington with us today. I'll introduce you to our speakers today. First, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Leo Flor, director of the Department of Community and Human Services in King County, who will discuss their approach to SLFRF investments. Then Andy Segovia, the city attorney for San Antonio, Texas, will tell us about their race equity and diversity strategies with a focus on the city's budget equity budget tool. I'll turn it over to you, Leo. All right. Thanks, Laura. I saw some chat about slides, so if you're looking for them, no slides. My name is Leo Flor, and I have the privilege of directing our human services department in King County, Washington. For folks who don't know their counties super well, we're in the upper left-hand corner of the continental United States. King County, if it were a state, would have more people in it than 15 of the United States at 2.3 million people. And area-wise, we're the 13th largest county in the United States. And I mentioned those because what it really meant is that we had a responsibility to be able to provide services to a diverse population, both racially and ethnically, but also in terms of a lot of urban centers, a lot of rural centers, a lot of suburbs inside of King County. So I want to make three points today and just offer that we learned as we administered programs using SLFRF, which is my favorite federal government acronym now. So one, the presumption of inequity, and we'll get into that in a minute. Two, the asset that is community. And then three, the way that our systems operate in some specific examples. So first, the presumption of inequity. We started with a clear understanding that we have inequity within our communities and that the most severe inequity in King County, Washington, although I would offer that I believe this is the case nationally, is along racial ethnic lines. And that is not a philosophical or value statement. That's a data-based statement. The data are very clear across every domain that we measure in human services, whether it's homelessness, behavioral health, poverty, lifespan, that there are certain races and ethnicities that are consistently burdened more and therefore enjoy consistently less wealth, less access to resources and shorter lifespans. In our communities, the very clear pattern in particular is that, and the data show this, is that Black or African American members of our community and then Native or Indigenous members of our community very clearly show up as being persons who have reduced lifespans, who have reduced wealth, who are incarcerated more often, who are homeless more often. And so we started with a presumption that anything that we did that did not automatically attempt to correct for that would perpetuate it. And that's what I mean by the presumption of inequity. So one way to look at that is I think it actually offers a little bit of hope because we can actually see very clearly why those disparities exist in the data. And it's because we have a history of policies that have created those disparities. I think any honest look at the history of our nation, and certainly King County, Washington, would show that it is policies that for centuries specifically targeted Black or African American members of our nation and then the Indigenous persons or the Native persons of the United States. Very clearly, we with governmental policies at all levels and social policies for centuries dispossessed and worse those two populations. And I believe that's why those show up in the data today as communities that are disproportionately impacted. So the hope here is that the same policies that create those disparities can also correct those disparities. And I think that's what we mean, again, when we say there's a presumption of inequity, but that we can flip that presumption by the way that we invest what is a historic amount of resources. And we saw very clearly and I'd offer to all of you as peers that if there is not active accounting for that inequitable presumption, that you might be or that we might be perpetuating the inequity inadvertently. One example of the data is what I mentioned, there's a persistent trend in our data that, you know, all domains and for a long time that specifically Black, African American or Native communities experienced inequity. But monitoring the data in real time also became something possible with slip ref funds and something that I think is really important. And so in a really specific way, we found that Pacific Islander communities were receiving lower rates of vaccinations and were dying at higher rates and getting ill at higher rates in our community from COVID-19. And we are able to work with community-based organizations that were specifically sort of by and from the Pacific Islander community. And I think they did heroic work. And when we look at our data now, we actually see that some of the highest rates of vaccination are amongst the Pacific Islander community. Some of the lowest rates of serious illness and death are because of the Pacific Islander community. And I attribute that to those community-based organizations that did that work and that we were privileged to support. So that brings me to my second point, the asset that is community. When we take a look at how we implemented funds in King County, I see another really clear pattern. We began to see community as both advisors but also implementers. And what that allowed us to do is to not only have input from communities that were affected or that are affected, but what it also allowed us to do is to equip those communities to use their existing relationships and credibility with the people that we are trying to correct the inequity for and to be able to effectively and durably, I think, create systems that provided services to those communities. So I mentioned the example of Pacific Islanders and the experience of COVID illness. We also created a pandemic and racism advisory group, partially supported by sliver of funds. And that allowed us to have a constant relationship with organizations that we were funding and not funding who represented the diversity racially and ethnically, but also with the disability community inside of King County, Washington, and establish this real-time advisor relationship. And then they would help us measure whether or not the community-based organizations that were implementing the program were being successful. The last part I want to just touch on, and this is some of the more specific, hopefully, lessons learned that can be to other people, is some of the systems that we use. So first, access matters, and you can fund community-based organizations, but it's big things and little things. And I'll note there was a comment in the chat about whether or not this webinar had closed captioning involved, for example. I've made this mistake myself, and I've had to learn about it, but it's those small things, like as we're implementing digital solutions using sliver of funds, how can we make sure that they're available to everybody, but especially the people who need it most? And so things like closed captioning, things like translation and interpretation in real time. But another lesson that we learned is that translation and interpretation are essential. It's not a bonus to do it. If you want to reach the Spanish-speaking community, you've got to have materials available in Spanish. But further, what we actually, I think, found even more is that the existence of translated materials is necessary, but it is not enough. It's got to be paired with outreach, and that outreach has to be done by organizations within the communities that you seek to reach. So that was one of, I think, our big lessons, is that we've got to create this programming in a way that's accessible to the communities that we seek to help. Otherwise, it's sort of predictable that we won't actually get to the results that we're after. Another issue is sliver of money, and there are a federal money in general is more difficult to expend than local money is, because it has a lot of requirements. And I think those requirements are there for good purposes, and it's not for me to question that. But I think a question when we talk about complex funding and community-based organizations is who ought to bear the complexity. And so at King County, I think we got better and better over time and continue to get better about realizing that there is some complexity that we should bear on behalf of the community instead of passing through the complexity the same way we're passing through the funding. So things like data measurement, things like invoicing systems, things like access to insurance, those are complexities that we might be able to bear or provide assistance on. And one example is the way that the federal funding, at least in Washington, works is it's on a reimbursement basis. And we were seeking, because we wanted to reach a community that were disconnected to work with community-based organizations that were relatively small. And a relatively small organization has a very difficult time floating $100,000 or a million dollars in waiting for reimbursement. So what we were able to do is to create a capital fund that was accessible to contracted small community-based agencies and essentially float on their behalf through this fund the payments so that they were able to continue to do business to hire staff to grow the way that we were asking them to grow to be effective and do it in a way that was financially sustainable because we were able to maintain a centralized pool of funding that they could access instead of having to raise that capital on their own, duplicated across the community. And so I think the last thing that I'll end with, and I saw another question about this in the chat, is we had a very deliberate conversation about how can you set up systems that have historically perpetuated inequity to undo inequity and how can you do that in a way that's compliant with a lot of structures in our community and in our government that prevent us, rightfully, from recognizing a person's race as the sole dispositive factor for whether they should be eligible for something or not. And what we really came up with was a framework around recognizing that there is a difference between preferring a person based on their race and implementing policies that are designed to undo racism. And so it's a methodology we've employed in a number of places now, but to identify a preferred recipient as a person who disproportionately experiences the effects of healthcare access and structural racism is a fact who those people are who disproportionately experiences those conditions in our community right now. But it's actually not a fixed attribute of a particular race. It's a fixed attribute of our system right now, and we can change that system. So it's a technique that we employed here so that we could honor the requirements of our legal system and not be shy about the fact that we recognize racism exists. And it was our job in the way we implemented these funds to undo its effects. Otherwise, we would be perpetuating that system. That's what I got for right now. Well, Leo, thank you so much for that insightful overview of the approach that you take in King County to advance equity and community engagement. Folks, I want to remind you, if you have some questions for our speakers, please submit them for the Q&A at the end of the presentation. Now is my pleasure to welcome the city attorney from San Antonio, Andy Segovia. So if we go to the next slide, Andy could begin to tell us about what you all have been doing in San Antonio. Thank you, Laura. Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome from San Antonio, Texas, where we're entering our 15th day of 100-degree weather. But that's probably a topic for another webinar. You may be wondering why the city attorney of San Antonio is talking to you about equity. The reason for that is the city recently formed the Department of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. And it was actually the city attorney who was prompting the city manager to take our office of equity and expanded scope to all the different things that touch on equity and touch on delivery of city services. So the DEI office reports to me, we're looking for a director right now. And so I'll ask all of you to take a look at that. I think we have the opening out right now. But we are focused very much on equity. Next slide, please. The good news as we looked at our SLFRF funds was that we had a lot to build on already in terms of using an equity approach in how we were going to spend those funds. Our city council for a number of years now has been very focused on equity and equity principles. And we've had our equity office in place for over 10 years. We've been using what we call an equity budget tool to assess as we create the budget that each department's impact on furthering equity principles. And what I mean by that is if we took a department by department approach, and ask them how they are changing the deliverables of city services, so that those communities that have been underserved are better served by the city now. As somebody mentioned, we're trying to reverse what has been historically and structurally, a system where underserved communities have not been receiving the city services they have, or they deserve. And so the city council took a very strong approach to that. So it was an easy transition, then from going from a budget equity tool and looking at it from a budgetary standpoint, to look at that as how we were going to spend our SLRF funds, so that our recovery truly was a recovery that benefited all communities. And so the one of the key takeaways I hope for all the fellow government entities out there and other organizations is use your leverage as best you can, your current equity approach, your current equity principles and processes, and apply those as best you can to the spending of SLRF funds. Next slide, please. So using that approach, we focused on what communities were impacted most by the pandemic. And using again, the equity principles we had already been using for our budget, we found that as most of you might expect that health accessibility was a big one. And using that equity lens, we found in looking at vaccination rates, somebody else mentioned, I think Leo mentioned those, looking at vaccination rates and seeing where we were having low vaccination rates, and taking an approach to spend funds to make sure that we reached out to those communities where we were seeing lower rates. And as might be expected, those overlap very clearly with areas we already knew were economically disadvantaged. And so it caused us, for example, to use what we were using as a hub system for vaccinations and become more of a direct outreach. So rather than having everybody come to the Alamo Dome, which is centrally located here in the city, we had centers across the city. And to this day, right now we're using SLFRF funds for pop up clinics for in areas where you would expect communities to gather, for example, senior centers, libraries, retail outlets, but we focused on being more of an outreach network so that we are actually addressing those communities that needed the most. The other thing we found, again, using the equity principles that we have been using for years now, is that the pandemic had a significant impact on housing availability. We were already facing the challenge as a community, being one of the fastest growing cities in the country, in terms of affordable housing opportunities. Obviously, the pandemic exacerbated that challenge. So we used our funds, many of our funds, a good portion of them, to address housing inequities. And we created a emergency fund to help people pay their rent. And that was one where we could easily measure the outcomes in that we knew that unless we help those people, they may find themselves out on the streets. And so it was one that we could put in pretty readily. We worked with our rental community in terms of putting it in place, and it's one that had a significant impact for the community. We had small business programs, recognizing that small businesses employ a good part of the community. And obviously, if they fail, the people wouldn't have jobs. And so a good part of our program entailed making sure those small businesses have programs that help them recover from the pandemic and help keep people employed, and also provided essential services to communities that have been underserved. For example, it's not easy to sometimes get to a major grocery store. So we focused on those that provided, for example, local areas, food, medicine, things that are essential for the community to survive. So that that was one of our focuses. I included arts funding because in we'll touch on it on the next slide, but I included arts funding because that came from our public outreach. And you might not think that that was a part of our SLFRF program. But we found that from our public outreach that given our cultural history, the overall community was an important aspect that we had to deal with. So we included arts funding as well. So public outreach was a very, very much a key part of our program. We recognize that the communities we were trying to serve, we were trying to address through our equity principles required a multi prong approach to public outreach. So we had meetings throughout the city. We worked very closely with our city council members who them and their staffs knew, frankly, better than city staff. Where was the best place to meet? What was the best times to meet? So we worked with them very closely. We had a total of eight town hall meetings. And in addition to that, we showed up, for example, at a booth at major events throughout the city, to again, try to get as much public input as we could. So meetings were held throughout the city. We worked with our council members. There was a focus on social media and surveys. We had a survey up on our website through the entire process. We had several social media programs where we alerted people both at the town halls and the surveys of upcoming meetings in which the council was going to discuss and prioritize funding. So that worked very well. A key takeaway from this one is we worked very closely with our communications department to make sure we targeted those areas that are particularly underserved. And for example, in one of our town hall meetings, we had actual direct calls of 10,000 direct calls to members of the community and we sent text over 50,000 people in terms of direct contact with them to alert them of upcoming meetings or work them of information related to funding. So we thought that was a very key part of our program was this directed communication at those people that frankly, we hardly hear from, but we need to hear from as we set priorities. So there was also a focus on the digital divide. We knew there was a significant members of the community who don't have access to the internet or don't have access to smartphones. So we had a program specifically geared toward them. We had a number of printed materials that we handed out, for example, at senior centers at libraries, at churches. Again, we worked with our council members to help us identify those, those places where we could reach to the most people in terms of handing out materials. So another key takeaway, work very closely. If you have a communications department, work very closely with them and come up with a strategy of to how best to communicate across the entire community, the funding, the priorities, and most importantly, what the needs are. Cause that's what we wanted to focus on is where, where the community needs are in place, our money, where it'd be most impactful for those underserved communities. Next slide, please. So how do I incorporate equity into the program? As I mentioned before, community outreach is important so that we know we are prioritizing those needs that the community has identified for us. We should have, or you should have some very short term things that in your program so that people can see how the recovery is aiding communities. So a couple of examples of that is again, our, our, our rental assistance program was an immediate need. So we put immediate money into that. And there was short term benefits of that and where people got to stay in their apartments, families weren't separated. So that's the key thing is something tangible, something short term, something that could be easily measured, educate both the community and the staff that are delivering these services on equity principles. The good news for us, obviously, is that since we've had an equity lens on just about everything we do for so many years, really it was just meant augmenting our training, reminding people of how they can use processes and programs that they are very familiar with and apply those to SLF RF funding, community outreach already talked about. And part of our equity tool that we've been using as a budget tool, again, to evaluate our budget and, and make adjustments to that as necessary is to make sure that we have measurable deliverables and outcomes. Sometimes that's more difficult for some departments and others are from for delivery of some services versus others. But we emphasize that we need to make sure that there's actual changes to outcomes for members of the community that have been underserved, and that we want to make a definite impact on those outcomes in a near term manner. So that was our focus on how to incorporate equity. Next slide, please. Quick example of that, and you might not think that street maintenance fit into our, our program, but it did. And here's the reasons why is that it's an essential city service. And as you might expect, it's it's those areas where we have communities that have been underserved that traditionally, from an infrastructure standpoint, have have worse infrastructure than other areas of the city. We have been on a very program pace to try to address those inequities in street maintenance. But we found the opportunity with SLF RF funds to kickstart that a bit or I'm sorry to augment that a bit in that we were able to look at, for example, accessibility to health services, accessibility to city programs, so that we can focus on those areas that not only improve the streets there, but improve accessibility to vital programs. So it's a it's an impact that the community saw it was very tangible. It was very measurable in that we have a grading system, a through F, in which we grade the streets in terms of their maintenance needs, as you might expect, an F street means it is severely deteriorated. And again, as you might expect, the most the most F streets that we have are in those areas that traditionally been underserved by the city. So although we had a program in place to try to address that, we were able to accelerate that using our funding. And it was a clear example of how using equity principles does address the historical and structural inequities. But at the same time, it's very much tied to central services. And it's one where the entire city can see the benefits of having better streets, better access to everything, frankly. So that's just, you know, again, an example of something that you can readily point to, to say that we're using our funding to address inequities, and to improve the overall community. And that's all I have, Laura. But I'll come back for the obviously for the q&a. Yes, well, thank you very much, Andy, for sharing, you know, the strategies that you all use in San Antonio to create, you know, better outcomes for the underserved communities and connect them to essential services. Now, I'd like to transition our discussion to a discussion about the national perspective. So we go to the next slide. I'll introduce our speaker. Sarah Beth Gell is the Executive Director of the Southern Economic Advancement Project or SEAP. She is here to share some best practices she's seen from recipients in her work. Sarah, thanks for joining us today. I'll turn it over. I'll turn it over to you. Great, thanks so much, Laura. And thank you, everyone for being here today. As Laura said, I'm Sarah Beth Gell, Executive Director of the Southern Economic Advancement Project. And if we can pull up my slides. Thank you. Next slide. So at SEAP over the past year, we've worked with communities, both the local government side, as well as the advocacy side, to think about equity and engagement in the American Rescue Plan as an opportunity to move communities forward from the pandemic. Next slide. So a few weeks ago, Treasury and the White House released their first equity report for the American Rescue Plan with some really exciting findings from across AARP, including gains in employment and income and healthcare access. And I've put just a few of the many findings here. And so I think first and foremost, my remarks today are to note that the opportunity for equity gains continues. And that's through the state and local fiscal recovery funds. So now it falls into the hands of local governments to expand on these initial AARP equity findings, as communities decide how to spend the second tranche, and for some communities, the first tranche of funds. So the good news is that the window is still open for gains and equitable outcomes and practices across communities. Next slide. So I'm going to talk about promising practices that we're seeing across the nation, in terms of how communities are prioritizing equity in state and local fiscal recovery funds at every stage of the process, whether it's at the beginning, setting principles, or engaging communities, deciding on projects, or evaluating projects and making public what was done with the funds. Next slide. So phase one, equity frameworks. These frameworks set out the values and principles that will guide the decision-making process. The example I include here is Harris County, Texas, which laid out in April of last year an equity framework. It contains the equity goals that are displayed here, but also equity strategies and reflection questions to guide them in their decision-making on SLFRF funds. The framework lays out how equity will be incorporated into each phase of the process. And I want to highlight, in particular, the second goal that they have, which shows that they are using this opportunity to build the equity infrastructure across county government, so that this isn't just a one-off exercise, but really becomes part of the DNA of how the county works when thinking about spending funds. Next slide. Another example, New Orleans, Louisiana. The city council there passed a resolution that prioritizes equity. They passed this last October. The resolution cites the inequities that existed before COVID, how COVID can make that worse, and then prioritizes equity in addition to community input and accountability in the decision-making framework. They followed that up just a few weeks ago with an ordinance that builds on this framework and talks about how they're going to inform the public on a regular basis and how they're going to track different metrics to really meet these equity goals. So, these frameworks make equity a matter of policy, which is really important. And also, they can be layered as governments move forward with additional resolutions and ordinances, like New Orleans did, to really flesh out how these equitable principles will be put into practice. Next slide. So, phase two is equity and engagement. We often compare this to census outreach. So, you need an overall strategy for how you're going to get community input, but you also need to consider hard-to-reach populations. There needs to be engagement goals and strategies that are focused on specific populations that have barriers to participation and or have been most impacted by the pandemic, for example. So, just to lift up a few examples, Denver, Colorado began by looking back at past community input processes and planning efforts to see the needs and priorities that had already been identified and how they could build on those existing knowledge base of community needs. Then they constructed an engagement plan for the most at-risk areas in the community. They mapped out what zip codes were most at risk and had the greatest barriers to participation, particularly digital barriers. And then they held a series of teletown halls where they directly contacted individuals, placed them into the community process while they were in their homes through these teletown halls, and were able to interact with them through polls in the teletown hall system. In addition to that, they had county-wide, community-wide surveys that were in multiple languages and also had equity and community-wide focus groups. I put the example of the state of Colorado, which had kind of a similar system, where you have geographically-based focus groups, but then you also have sector-specific that are particularly impacted by the pandemic and equity focus groups, Black, African-American community, Latino community, other groups that have historically been left out of the process and or are most impacted by the pandemic. A few smaller examples. I put in there Lorain, Ohio, as well as Flint, Michigan, because a lot of people are turning to online surveys. So, I highlighted them just to show the importance of kind of old-school methods as well, mailing surveys to people. So, Lorain, Ohio mailed surveys through their water bills, and you can see that three-quarters of the responses came from that effort versus the online effort. Flint, Michigan used online surveys, but also had a Dropbox at City Hall, had an 800 number people could call, email address, and mailing address. And then finally, Harris County, Texas worked with a local non-profit to engage focus groups for communities of color, those earning less than $75,000, as well as a few other groups. Next slide. So, to increase equity and engagement, we recommend beginning with what level of participation is sought and establishing metrics for specific populations. We often think about outcome metrics for the projects themselves, but we need to think about metrics for the engagement process. How many people are we trying to reach? What is successful engagement in general and among particular populations? What are those metrics that we're going to hold ourselves accountable to? Identifying existing and potential partners. We've heard a little bit about this from the other speakers, but thinking about the business leaders and civic leaders and non-profit leaders that we typically hear from, and who's not at the table and needs to be. So, how do we expand that list of partners in this process? And then finally, the tools and processes, particularly in light of the barriers to participation, and how do we launch an engagement plan that really lays out a roadmap for the public on how and when they will be involved. Next slide. So, quickly on to phase three, equity assessments and implementation of projects. Holding up Durham, North Carolina here that had an ARP scorecard that scored on equity impacts, how much the community was involved in the design of the project, and how stakeholders would collaborate, and how it connected back to the original strategic goals they identified for ARP. Next slide. And this is not exactly a rubric, but again, Harris County, Texas laid out these reflection questions on how they were going to measure outcomes, how they were going to disaggregate data, whether voices of disproportionately impacted individuals were included in the process. And so, I highlight this one particularly for those communities, perhaps smaller governments that are not going to go through this scorecard process, but can have two or three questions that guide city leaders, elected officials, county staff, advisory committees, so that everyone's asking the same questions of the projects during the decision-making process. Next slide. Finally, reporting back, what happened for the funds, accountability for the funds. So, an example here of a dashboard from Los Angeles County that's working on not only this dashboard, but another that maps social vulnerabilities, and then will map how the projects fit onto those social vulnerabilities, so that they can really see geographically the impact of the funds, and look at it in an equitable way. Next slide. But it doesn't have to be a fancy mapping dashboard. So, I wanted to highlight a couple of other examples. College Park, Maryland has a very simple image over here on the right, six buckets of funds, two metrics, where residents can readily see what the goals are, and what a few metrics are for each of those areas in the ARP spending. Sun Prairie, Wisconsin similarly has a very simple dashboard, the pie chart on the bottom. Underneath the pie chart on their webpage, they have the goals that they identified early on for the state and local fiscal recovery funds, and then they tag each project to those goals, and put the resolutions that allow that spending to happen, so that people can track back to the decision-making process. And finally, Lakewood, Washington, I would just hold up a very simple webpage. They put contacts of who to contact front and center, so you know who at the city is responsible for this, and can give input directly, and then have some good visualizations of their community input process. Next slide. So, just a few takeaways in conclusion. Part of the research I do is on local government financial management following natural disasters. And so, you know, this pandemic is quite different in many respects from other disasters. There's no property destruction, it's nationwide, not a specific place, and the roles of state, federal, and local governments are somewhat different. But there's some similarities, such as the importance of federal recovery dollars, the importance of community outreach, communication, and collaboration in recovery, and the need to consider equity. So, often disasters, whether natural or economic, exacerbate inequities. And that's one way that this pandemic could be like others, is that it could take us 10 steps back in widening gaps in housing, health, education, and opportunity, if we allow it to. So, one of the really important things about these pandemic recovery dollars is their flexibility to meet community needs, that it's reaching down to every community, not just state level or large jurisdictions, and that these dollars are coming with this intention that communities think about equity and engagement. Two other takeaways is that this is not just for large jurisdictions. So, hopefully I've highlighted a couple of smaller places, because there's great innovations and strides being taken in smaller jurisdictions as well. They don't have the same reporting requirements, but we're really excited to see what smaller jurisdictions are taking on in terms of equity and engagement. And then finally, that equity should be woven into every stage of the process. It's not just about having an equity outcome metric at the very end of the process, but really looking at it at every stage of how we're deciding on these dollars moving forward. Thanks so much. All right. Well, Sarahbeth, you know, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing those specific examples of how governments can identify community needs, devise strategies to address them, and connect equity to their original strategic goals for SLFR. I want to pass it over to my colleague, Martha Muzumdar, to do the Q&A.