How We’re Building an Inclusive Economy for Chicago
We have identified three main pillars for our work: empowering people through financial stability, creating pathways to quality jobs, and tackling exclusion head-on.
Earlier this year, the Inclusive Economy Lab was fortunate to receive generous philanthropic support from the Margot L. Pritzker Fund. We are humbled by this recognition of what we have built over the last six years. From a team of two (though not in a garage), we have grown into a family of about 30 full-time members, all bought into the same goal: producing community-informed, partner-driven research to generate large-scale, positive social change in Chicago.
We are eager to leverage this transformative gift to accelerate our work to expand economic opportunities for communities harmed by discrimination, disinvestment, and segregation.
As we look into the next five years, we have identified three main pillars for our work:
Empowering people by providing foundational stability
Financial instability is a fact of life for too many Chicagoans, with low wages and a shortage of affordable housing leaving many with little room in their budgets to absorb any unexpected financial shock. To achieve a prosperous and inclusive future, every Chicagoan must have the foundational stability necessary to make meaningful investments in themselves, their families, and their communities. Achieving this vision will require improving and expanding existing safety net programs to support individual agency and choice. It will also require more sophisticated methods of promoting housing stability that are targeted and responsive to households’ unique needs.
Over the next five years, we will explore the benefits of a wide range of strategies to promote financial stability, including cash assistance in the form of a guaranteed income or as a direct alternative to staff-intensive social service programs. We will also evaluate a range of methods for targeting and tailoring supports to Chicagoans experiencing housing instability — from those worried about an upcoming rent payment to those in emergency shelters.
Creating pathways to quality jobs
Changes such as automation, the rise of the gig economy and the consolidation of employment within many industries have weakened workers’ bargaining power. We believe that everyone in Chicago should have a pathway to a quality job — one that provides safe conditions, flexibility to address personal obligations, and a wage that empowers workers. While a college education continues to provide the clearest path to such jobs, the rising cost of higher education has dampened its appeal for many that are looking for alternative pathways to quality jobs.
Over the next five years, we will seek to engage with policymakers, non-profit leaders as well as private-sector employers eager to experiment with alternative models for workforce development and employer-labor relations that can help workers to thrive in an evolving labor market. We will also continue to build on strengthening a data system that allows us to better understand pathways from education to employment.
Tackling exclusion head-on
Discrimination and exclusionary policies have created and perpetuated significant disparities in economic opportunity for Chicago’s Black and Latinx communities, and COVID-19 has exacerbated these inequities; women and people of color have both been more likely to lose their jobs and more likely to bear health risks as frontline workers. Historically, public discourse around racial disparities has focused exclusively on explicit discrimination and failed to recognize how race-neutral policies can perpetuate or exacerbate historic inequities. While our work has implicitly always sought to address racial disparities, being more intentional about this goal will ensure that our work has maximum benefit for communities harmed by discrimination, disinvestment, and segregation.
Over the next five years, we will build new partnerships with organizations engaging in place-based economic and community development. We will explore new projects aimed at addressing residential segregation and reducing bias across markets and organizations. And we will double down on identifying situations where seemingly race-neutral policies inadvertently reinforce historic inequities, and work on identifying ways to minimize such disparate impacts.
Addressing exclusion in society also requires accelerating progress toward our own inclusivity goals as a Lab. We firmly believe that we will not achieve our mission of expanding economic opportunity for all Chicagoans if our organization does not reflect the rich diversity of this city. Over the next five years, we will build new recruitment pipelines to expand the diversity of lived experience and racial identities in our leadership and ensure fairness and inclusion for all staff.
Together, these three pillars are inextricable components of a truly inclusive economy. By providing foundational stability, we can foster an economy where all families are financially secure enough to invest in their future and that of their children. By creating pathways to quality jobs, we can help ensure that these investments are productive and enable upward mobility. And, crucially, by tackling exclusion head-on, we can create an economy where no one is excluded from participating or denied a chance to succeed.
