Building Economic Recovery Through Civic Infrastructure
Infrastructure holds communities together: roads, bridges, an electricity grid. But what about the connections that we can’t see? Relationships, collaboration, goal setting and data sharing are part of a community’s infrastructure, too. These pieces are called civic infrastructure.
Civic infrastructure joins leaders from across a community — from education, business, health care, housing, philanthropy and more — to work collaboratively, using data, to improve outcomes for children and families. With a strong civic infrastructure in place, communities can change systems by shifting practices, policies, resources and power structures.
Civic infrastructure enables a community to adapt and flourish, even in crisis. What does this look like?
The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, along with the public awakening to racial injustice, have tested communities as never before. But across the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network, we’ve seen that communities with established civic infrastructures have been better prepared to tackle these challenges. Let’s take a look at four Wisconsin communities with the civic infrastructure needed to respond, recover and thrive.
The difference made by civic infrastructure
Cradle to Career Network members in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Racine and Green Bay make up the StriveTogether Wisconsin Partnership. Since 2018, the Wisconsin Partnership has focused on securing access to high-quality, affordable childhood education. The partnership has shaped public policy by providing crucial data and training parents and child care workers as advocates. When the pandemic hit, 25% of Wisconsin’s child care centers were suddenly at risk of closing. That’s where civic infrastructure made a key difference.
All four of these communities have used civic infrastructure to address immediate, pandemic-related needs in ways that have also informed and enhanced their long-term work. And they have kept equity front and center.
“The economy can’t grow without child care. And now we have businesses and university partners talking about child care in ways they hadn’t before.”
— Dave Celata, deputy director of Milwaukee Succeeds
Milwaukee | Collaborating across the community toward a shared vision
Milwaukee lost one-third of its child care providers almost overnight when the pandemic hit. Thanks to the civic infrastructure in place, partners collaborated to reopen centers safely, secure protective equipment, open new centers and add capacity for students learning remotely.
This response was coordinated by Cradle to Career Network member Milwaukee Succeeds, which brings together hundreds of community partners. These relationships allowed the organization to quickly move to action during the crisis.
“We knew the lay of the land,” said Dave Celata, deputy director of Milwaukee Succeeds. “We had the data capacity and the capacity for collective impact work, and we knew how to build a community agenda.”
Milwaukee Succeeds and its partners used emergency response funds and a federal grant to make small grants to 140 child care providers to stabilize the sector. They distributed face masks and other protective equipment, hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies, hundreds of thermometers, and thousands of diapers.
The Milwaukee Succeeds early childhood team includes members of the city health department and the state department for children and families, which meant that the team could coordinate on guidelines for safely reopening child care centers. And the team joined forces with a foster care and mental health organization to host workshops on how to support the mental well-being of strained child care staff, the children and their families.
Meanwhile, the hunger team, meeting a particularly urgent need, set up a distribution model and supply chain in just two weeks. The response team distributed thousands of meals each week. After the pandemic, the partnership will dedicate its efforts to helping providers recover and continue to improve all these essential services.
This incredible crisis response will continue making a difference in the community after the pandemic is over, with a renewed focus on a critical shared goal. “The economy can’t grow without child care. And now we have businesses and university partners talking about child care in ways they hadn’t before,” Celata said.
Green Bay | Tapping into data to meet the community’s needs
In Green Bay, Achieve Brown County and their partners gathered and analyzed data to create an easily accessible map of child-related services, needs and opportunities for collaboration.
Before the pandemic, the Cradle to Career Network member had been developing an innovative platform that combines student data with data from major health providers. The project was designed to learn how health and mobility affect children’s education in the region. Community partners signed on to an innovative data-sharing agreement that shared data between eight public school systems and three health systems.
When the pandemic hit, Achieve Brown used this powerful data and networking capacity to map the community’s needs and opportunities. They created a COVID-19 Resource and Response map, a user-friendly, Google-based visual of Brown County. There, partners submitted information about how they were responding, what resources they had and what resources they needed.
All members of the community could go to the map and easily see what was happening where, creating opportunities for alignment and collective action. This understanding of emerging needs led to the creation of a child care team and a digital access team to tackle challenges in those areas.
The map strengthened the existing civic infrastructure in the community. “It was born out of the whole idea of collective impact, and it amplified the efforts of multiple entities throughout the community,” said Spencer Bonnie, executive director of Achieve Brown County.
With new data comes new insights and more potential ways to collaborate on solutions. And this data, said Bonnie, will inform the actions they take to have the “greatest impact on outcomes for the greatest number of young people.”
Racine | Changing policies to connect students to resources
In Racine, where 30% of students in city schools lacked the technology needed for online learning, partners helped change state internet policies, open up Wi-Fi access and put laptops and tablets in the hands of all students.
Higher Expectations for Racine County has developed a strong civic infrastructure in the community. According to Executive Director Jeff Neubauer, this connectivity shows up in “the ongoing, engaged leadership of many community leaders who meet regularly to tackle major opportunities in our community.” The Cradle to Career Network member’s leadership table includes CEOs, college leaders, the mayor, the police chief and more.
When the pandemic disrupted learning, these leaders partnered with Higher Expectations in two major strategies to increase internet access for students. First, the team researched and enhance Wi-Fi hotspots. Partners opened up free public Wi-Fi or expanded the reach of Wi-Fi hotspots at their buildings.
The other strategy aimed to change longstanding state laws that prevented school districts from directly providing internet to students. The school district and the state department of public instruction negotiated with internet service providers to create new rules to allow the district to pay for broadband.
With the combination of these two strategies, essentially all Racine students had access to the internet and appropriate devices for remote learning. Higher Expectations continues to foster the civic infrastructure that enabled and motivated partners to move to action.
Kenosha | Building trust to move to action
The work of Cradle to Career Network member Building Our Future and its partners has never been more important than in the past year, when Kenosha was suddenly faced with both a pandemic and a civil rights struggle in its own backyard. Existing civic infrastructure allowed Building Our Future and its partners to rise to these extraordinary challenges.
On August 23, 2020, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot in the back seven times and paralyzed from the waist down by a police officer. Coming on the heels of police shootings elsewhere — and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic — the shooting provoked protests and further violence when a heavily armed white teenager killed two protestors.
Building Our Future partners were already committed to eliminating systemic disparities. But while they continued their work in education, they were now facing a civic emergency. They embarked on an effort to help the community unify and heal.
This effort took the form of a series of candid conversations between community members, public officials and Building Our Future partners. The conversations were designed to foster dialogue toward healing, prioritize community needs and identify next steps.
Building Our Future was primed to take on this work because it had assembled a strong, trusted network as part of the community’s civic infrastructure. “Over the last three years we have been talking about equity and putting it at the foundation of our work because racism is everyone’s problem,” said Tatjana Bicanin, executive director of Building Our Future. “We were seen as a trusted force, a neutral facilitator, [a partner] who wasn’t here to point fingers.”
Through these difficult yet productive conversations, the community’s healing process began. “What happened in those 90 minutes that changed the way most of us were feeling?” one facilitator reflected. “I would say we were living out our community conversation’s vision: To be a model community that builds partnerships through awareness, trust and relationships to support the success of children and families.”
Exploring what’s next in civic infrastructure
For more on the work in these four communities, access the full case studies here.
In the coming months, we’ll be exploring civic infrastructure in depth. Follow us on Medium to dig into shifting policies and power structures, effective funding for civic infrastructure, going beyond collaboration to create lasting change, and more, with stories from communities across the country.
