A Social Infrastructure Act - Shifting Focus and Funding
Imagine an America where families and communities are flourishing, alive with goodwill and possibilities.
Vision
In such an America backyard barbecues and front porch gatherings reverberate with the sounds of neighbors, punctuated by the silly laughter of children chasing fireflies. The nation is economically vibrant, valuing the humanity of all creeds and tribes.
Preposterous or possible?
This vision requires a new Infrastructure Act - a social infrastructure act of boldness that supports lasting well-being – across generations. To achieve this goal, beginning with those long othered, such investments must:
Heal - Mend the fractures in our collective soul, stitching together healing, connectedness, and other life-giving intangibles.
Empower - Weave trampolines of well-being from the fabric of family and community.
Network - Build a multidimentional mosaic of shared cross-sector outcomes.
The way forward is different than currently configured. Presently, a disproportionate share of social “investments” are deployed to address crises - primarily with professionalized care mapped to near-term metrics. But members of devalued communities continue to cycle among multiple programs, compounding social, ecological, and economic fragility.
The time for better integrated solutions is now. Our region, state and nation possess no shortage of data and purpose-driven organizations working to solve discrete pieces of the puzzle. Collectively, governments, foundations, and non-profits have the potential to create a model that produces impact at scale – on the axis of time.
Let's sound a clarion call for collaboration, to weave a tapestry of shared outcomes before the threads of opportunity fray too thin.
The Challenge
First, members of economically ascendent “superstar” regions have, perhaps unknowingly, collectively accepted a stagnant stasis between economic performance and some negative social byproducts. Secondly, tapping the profits of performance, the social sector, designed to dampen those externalities have scaled but changed their underlying assumptions little during the past century. As a result, frameworks deployed to solve housing, mental health, educational, income inequalities, and other crises are growing more costly but are unfortunately not resulting in stronger communities. That’s because models primarily focused upon crisis solutions struggle to leverage humanity’s core superpower –connectedness.
Two areas where the impact is particularly evident are education and workforce. Without significant improvement in educational outcomes across economic strata, future demand for creative, analytical, high-skilled workers will go unfilled by today’s students - generating more income inequality and homelessness.
In response to the workforce challenge, the Washington Roundtable set a goal to increase the percentage of Washington high school graduates obtaining post-secondary certifications by age 26. They aim to raise this from 31% in 2016 to 70% by 2030. The human suffering contained between these percentages cannot be measured, but the shift is projected to save the state $3.5 Billion in social service spending.
Peeling back the layers that contribute to homelessness, another urgent social symptom, the combined work of authors Gregg Colburn, Jerusalem Demsas, Matthew Desmond, and Dr. Vivek Murthy examine compounding conditions that reveal a core driver: a housing shortage (Colburn), academic and income stratification (Demas), an exploited reservoir of social fragility (Desmond), the othering of people viewed as less deserving of dignity – all are amplified by disconnectedness (Murthy).
Not only are we increasingly disconnected, but so too are our solutions.
Root Causes
Invariably, people long feared, othered, and exploited represent the canaries in the mines of the nation’s disconnected and dysfunctional systems. for example:
American healthcare devours 18% of GDP while delivering disappointing outcomes for many and the most dour for Indigenous and Black communities.
The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women represents a maze of injustices and a spectrum of violence experienced by Native women for centuries. Indigenous neighbors are also represented at 8x among those living unsheltered relative to their representation in the general population.
Much like the game of Chutes and Ladders during the past 150 years, descendants of the Middle Passage have faced cycles of hopefulness followed by novel forms of marginalization:
UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute 2023 report highlights that, in nine of fifteen wellbeing measures such as infant mortality, wealth and employment, the situation for Blacks today is worse than it was a half century ago when President Johnson signed Civil Rights legislation.
In America’s most progressive cities, like mine (Seattle), journalists have repeatedly chronicled plummeting Black homeownership, wealth and community connectedness.
Such measures do not begin to account for the shared costs: the intangible frayed threads of social connectedness, opportunity costs, or of the very tangible growing repair costs.
Solutions
In A Road Less Traveled, Scott Peck writes, “A healthy organism is not one free of disease but one able to heal itself.” Like organisms, strong communities nurture healthy families, civic engagement, local economies, and mutuality.
To achieve lasting outcomes, funders must incentivize models that:
Heal – disrupts the transfer of trauma to the next generation.
Empower – shifts power from institutions to community and family to execute on visions for their grandchildren.
Network – defines long-term collective well-being, socializes narratives, standardizes data, convenes, shares progress, and links individuals needing urgent interventions in one sector to resources provided by another.
This approach is not altogether new, but more is needed. Many funders and social service enterprises currently recognize the effectiveness of targeted universalism and collective impact to tackle complex issues. For instance, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has demonstrated the benefits of two-generation and community-based investments. Fortunately, others have demonstrated elements of a more complete model:
Healing - Indigenous peoples have long known that multigenerational trauma requires multi-generational healing. People need time, space and community to heal, envision, plan and build. Indigenous communities for example, engage in healing that includes acknowledging (storytelling), understanding, releasing and transforming historical trauma. One such Alaska Native tribal community organization that treats substance abuse and domestic violence, among other problems, engages families and communities rather than individuals, and programs such as cancer treatment encourage traditional diets and traditional ways of gathering and preparing food, including their spiritual and social dimensions.
Empowerment - Parents’ dreams for their grandchildren can be buttressed by what science confirms. The University of Washington’s ILABS and Cultivate Learning have published a trove of research demonstrating the importance of healthy early learning environments that integrate social-emotional and cognitive development. Early literacy, even communication at 10 months, for which family is primarily responsible, is predictive of many other lifetime outcomes. Locally, Open Arms Perinatal Services provides community-based support during pregnancy, birth, and early parenting to nurture strong foundations and catalyze multi-generational outcomes.
Networks – In addition to housing, FAME-Equity Alliance of Washington increases residents’ access to financial stability and wealth creation, education, and workforce skills. Furthermore, FAME-EAW enables these outcomes together with complementary partners through Seattle’s Black Community Impact Alliance, convened by FAME-EAW’s founder Evelyn Allen.
Next Steps (not linear)
Identify communities experiencing intractable cycles of multi-generational trauma.
Build a guiding coalition(s) and narrative.
Draft measures of collective longer-term community, economic, ecological, and civic wellbeing.
Map the system.
Shift funding incentives so that crisis solutions are coupled with longer-term outcomes served by family and community.
Conclusion
Solutions are often found in new configurations rather than in new tools.
Even as outcomes will not be attributed to any single program or social sector, funders can incentivize collective outcomes. They can track short-, mid-, and long-term metrics across social, civic, economic and ecological ends. Mid-point measures, for example, encompass healthy parent-child bonding, strong social and civic connections, and high rates of Pacific Islander, Black and Indigenous children beginning kindergarten with their curiosity and creativity ablaze.
Strengthened communities centered in mutual care will produce virtuous cycles.