How We Work
A Compassionate Approach, Backed by Research
Our focus keeps us trained on issues that will substantially impact local finances. Public budgets and finance run throughout vital community issues, however, and so we align our efforts with advocates, activists and practitioners and advocates on the ground.
Our Process
Phase 1:
Discovery &
Design
The first phase of our work is always to learn if and how we can be helpful. We conduct interviews with community partners, local organizers and municipal officials to learn about what is needed and if we’d be welcome. We then develop a research framework that identifies key aspirations and social risks voiced by the community we’re working with.
Phase 2:
Fiscal Justice
Analysis
This phase focuses on gathering public finance data, policy research, and reports to create a detailed financial health profile of the community. We don’t simply focus on describing disparities in the outcomes that result from long-standing structural racism; instead, we identify where financial priorities of our institutions are currently reproducing those harms. This phase points to the long-term community benefits if racial equity is invested in directly with municipal finance.
We highlight challenges and possibilities across key areas:
Policing – Fines and Fees – Incarceration – Economic Development & Abatements – Social Services – Healthcare – Infrastructure for all – Education – Housing – Access to Capital
The results of our work in this phase inform local advocates for better housing, health, education and economic opportunity. We share our work directly with community groups, starting with those who informed our efforts. We connect with nonprofits, philanthropic organizations , and local government offices as well, seeking to share what we’ve learned and grow meaningful knowledge-building relationships.
Phase 3:
Projections & Recommendations
This phase of our work distills the first two phases of community-voiced risks and aspirations, informed by our Phase 2 fiscal analysis. This creates a clear image of where public budgets and tools of finance can have the greatest impact. We identify and detail opportunities to address inequities directly in projects and programs. These are projects (in the key areas named above) that foster intergenerational prosperity as well as financial health for local governments.
These projects may currently exist or may not yet – in either case they come from community desires and aspirations. And they resonate with possibility among stakeholders like city and county managers, philanthropic foundations and other vested local partners like community development finance institutions.
The results of our work in this phase should be projects on the ground getting financed. That is our unique niche, taking all this community knowledge and financial research and bringing it to bear in the funding of fiscal justice projects.