How can smaller cities recover after their industry disappears? Boston Fed researchers found answers to that question, and they became the basis of one of the Bank’s hallmark community development programs, Working Places. The initiative has since reached 30 communities in five states. On its 10^th anniversary, program director Colleen Dawicki discusses successes and lessons learned.

The core of the initiative is building networks between people who might not normally interact – for instance, the business sector and social services. Then, they collaborate to address chronic local issues.

This collaboration is not easy. But Dawicki notes it’s worked in several places. And she looks ahead as the initiative evolves to include more communities.

JAY LINDSAY:

Hi, I'm Jay Lindsay. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Six Hundred Atlantic. Today, the topic is the Boston Fed's signature community development initiative, Working Places. Now, for some, this initiative is best known by other names, The Working Cities Challenge or The Working Communities Challenge. But these are both under the Working Places umbrella, and they both have the same basic approach. They focus on building networks between people who might not normally interact in the community, say the business sector and the social services sector. Then, these people collaborate to address chronic issues in the community.

Now, it's been 10 years since the Boston Fed started Working Places, and we want to mark this anniversary because the initiative has reached 30 communities in five states in that time. We're talking about places like Springfield, East Hartford, and Lawrence. Up in northern New England, we're talking about the Passamaquoddy Tribe in Northern Maine and the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont. So, we've got Colleen Dawicki here to help us mark this milestone. Colleen is the director of Working Places, and she knows this initiative, and she knows these communities as well as anyone. Welcome, Colleen.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

Thanks for having me, Jay.          

JAY LINDSAY:

I want to talk first about the origins of Working Places. I'm hoping you can hit on the Springfield connection. I know that that is part of it, but there's broader research origins here that I'm hoping you can hit on here.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

New England has a number of smaller post-industrial cities, and Springfield, Massachusetts, is one of the more famous of them. Springfield had years of manufacturing decline that led to population loss and some significant challenges that really came to a head in the mid- to late-2000s. The Boston Fed was asked to come in and look at Springfield and ask the question about, “What would it take for a city like Springfield that suffered from those years of economic decline to actually achieve what we would call economic resurgence?” So, seeing some growth in population, seeing the economy get stronger. Some Boston Fed researchers took a look at other cities around the country and identified places like Springfield that had actually achieved that level of economic resurgence that we would hope to see in our New England industrial places.

When they asked for the common factors that were involved in that resurgence, they looked at traditional economic factors, and those were not the driving forces. The places that had achieved economic transformation or resurgence were really places that had leaders who worked together across sectors, mobilizing resources, mobilizing their networks, and really pursuing a shared vision for a better economy in those places. And those are factors we really call civic infrastructure. It's having that set of forces and factors in a place that can respond to crisis, can respond to opportunity, and can really drive the vision of a city to be more economically successful.

JAY LINDSAY:

So, the Fed goes about with this program trying to help build these networks. I guess a question off the top is, “Why does the Fed care about these types of places?” People think about the Fed, they might not necessarily think about this kind of community development work.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

That's right, and when we go into cities, people are surprised to see the Boston Fed there because many people know about part of our dual mandate, the mandate that relates to price stability and concerns interest rates. The other factor that's part of the Fed's dual mandate is maximum employment, and we really think of that as employment for everyone who wants to participate in the economy.

Almost every city we work with really focuses its efforts on workforce development, recognizing that there are a lot of people who have local barriers to participating in the economy. That might be transportation, child care, even just hours that meet their schedules, if their needs are related to parenting or whatever their skills may be. They're really focused on maximizing local opportunities and ways to help people enter the workforce.

JAY LINDSAY:

I think it might be useful here to give a few examples of the work Working Places teams have done in different cities and towns around New England. We've mentioned Springfield already. Can you talk to me a little bit about the efforts there?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

You bet. So, Springfield identified a challenge that's really aligned with why the Boston Fed does the Working Cities Challenge, and it's the fact that only about 57% of working age adults are participating in the labor force, compared to about 67% statewide. So, when this team in Springfield looked at what to do about that, they really honed in on a few factors related to employer engagement, community engagement, and also engagement with some policy levers.

One policy they identified is related to something called the benefits cliff, which happens when people who are receiving forms of public assistance lose those benefits when they get higher wages. And that disincentivizes participating in work or taking an increase in pay or a new job responsibility. So, the Springfield team really effectively advocated at the state level and was able to secure some state resources to pilot some approaches to reducing the impact of the benefits cliff and making sure that more people can work without being disincentivized from taking on a new job.

JAY LINDSAY:

That’s a good example. How about Newport, Rhode Island? It's an interesting place, because it has a reputation as a playground for the wealthy, but that's really not the full story. Can you talk to us a little about the work the Working Places team is doing there?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

In Newport, they really focused on the north end of the city, which has a significant amount of public housing. And because there are many people receiving housing subsidies, they too were running into issues with those benefit cliffs. So, one thing the Newport team did was really recognize that resident voice is key to any lasting change that will benefit the neighborhood and the whole city.

So not only did they get residents to share their voices at the State House to advocate for changes around public benefits, but they also encouraged residents to join local organizations, boards of directors. And there's even one resident leader who's running for city council right now.

JAY LINDSAY:

Wow. Okay, great. Finally, let's go up north to one of the more rural areas. Talk to me a little bit about the work with the Passamaquoddy tribe, the work that they're doing.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

The Passamaquoddy Tribe has seen a lot of barriers to work because of child care access. There just aren't enough child care slots that are affordable, or are of high quality, or even just plain exist in the Washington County region. So, they brought a team together to look at how to expand child care access and was successful in securing a grant to build a new tribal child care facility that will serve more kids in the community. And they're now building out their efforts to think about what it takes to staff up those facilities and expand access to care regionally.

JAY LINDSAY:

Well, those are great examples. Thanks a lot. In the intro, I talked about the central principle of Working Places. It focuses on building partnerships between different sectors, but this is more about just getting people to work together, this ideal of collaboration, which can be kind of fuzzy. Tell me about the collaboration you're focusing on, that we're focusing on, with Working Places.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

First, we're asking people in these places to identify what we call a compelling cause. What is the challenge in your community or the opportunity that relates to building a more inclusive economy that you think is so important and also, none of you can achieve by yourself? So, it's really compelling enough to bring together a collaboration and to recognize that working in the same way isn't going to get a better result. You've got to do things differently. You've got to bring new actors to the table.

One of the most important factors too in these collaborations is pulling in residents and community members whose lives can be improved by this work, who understand what the challenges are from their lived experience and what solutions are going to impact their lives, so that the work that leaders focus on is the right kind of work for the right people.

JAY LINDSAY:

The ideal of collaboration compared to, I guess, the on-the-ground reality of getting this kind of collaboration, that can be very different. Can you talk to me a little bit about these challenges that you might've faced in the program building that local collaboration? What needs to happen for it to work?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

Collaboration is so hard, which is why it's important to pick a cause that you all care about enough to persist. And over time, the other important piece is to make sure that everyone at the table first understands, what's my role here? What am I responsible for doing? What am I giving to the group and what am I getting in return as well? Because if you're setting aside your own time to work on something that might be new and different and outside of your day-to-day job, you are giving up something.

You need to know that it's aligned with your day job or aligned with your own passions and missions as a person. We really tell everyone, make sure that everybody at the table knows, “What am I here for? What's my give, what's my get?”

The other piece is that what we're asking communities to do is really change the way they do business, and when you change the way you do business, you have to give something up. We call these adaptive challenges, and we've been working with our teams to really understand that when you're undertaking adaptive challenges, you have to help people understand what am I giving up and how will my efforts overcome the loss that I'm perceiving? How will it be worth it, and how do I know that even though change is painful, it's going to make my community better, and I'll be better off for it? So, it's a really important leadership skill, and it's not something that's taught in college or grad school, and we really work with our teams to understand that the challenges they're solving are fundamentally adaptive.

JAY LINDSAY:

I imagine it's been difficult at times to find the right people. Because what you're asking them to do, it's not a common thing necessarily to be a good leader. How have you gone about finding the right people?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

This is ongoing work for teams. It's a long-term process of first going with the willing, so who raises their hand and says, "Yes, this work is important enough for me to show up, to recognize that it's going to be painful, it's going to be challenging. I may have to give things up." There are in every community these committed leaders who care about this work. Over time, those leaders are bringing in new people and the most effective teams are the ones that can adapt and to say, "Hey, you know what? We need different kinds of leaders for this work that we're taking on," or "We don't need every leader at every meeting. We can be creative about how we mobilize our community and make the best use of our talents."

JAY LINDSAY:

I want to talk now a little bit about an evolution of Working Places in midstream that happened. Initially you focused on some of the cities we mentioned earlier. But then it moved into the northern part of New England. Can you talk to me a little about this evolution of Working Places up to that northern region?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

Most people hear Boston Fed, and they think we're focused here in Massachusetts, but our region covers all of the New England states. We wanted to think about how this effort could be inclusive and accessible to all the New England states that wanted to participate. We also recognized that what we're bringing is just, again, that opportunity to work differently, to take on those common practices in your city and shift them in ways that get better results for people. We think the same principles apply. We think you still need to collaborate across sectors. We think you still need to pursue a compelling cause. You need to adapt and be learning-oriented. In Northern New England, you might have to do that over a broader region, and you might have longer time horizons for change because of what you have to do to engage more people across more communities. But we think the same fundamentals apply.

JAY LINDSAY:

As you've been working with these different types of places, cities, smaller cities, towns, and regions, has there been something that you've found is kind of uniquely or commonly faced as a challenge in these places that you've had to overcome? Is there anything like that?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

There are a number of challenges. So, I think one really does relate to the collaboration and how do you build a team where you can then ask each other that you need each other to work differently. And you might need to ask someone to change a practice or policy that they've been using for years that isn't getting good results for community members. A key piece of that is building trust and recognizing that building trust takes time. Building trust requires a lot of vulnerability, and those aren't easy things that come to any of us. So, how do you develop those things, even though you're in a three-year grant and you might feel some pressure to perform? We really want to encourage communities to take that time and space, build those relationships, test some ideas together, and really recognize that sometimes a lack of success is a great opportunity for learning. And that’s the space and grace that we like to give to places.

JAY LINDSAY:

We're talking about how community based this program is. Can you talk to me about the Fed's role and how it's evolved over the years as these communities do this work?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

I think of us at the Boston Fed as conveners and mobilizers. First at the state level, we're convening leaders to say, "Hey, how do we make sure the Working Cities Challenge is right for your context in your place, and how do we mobilize resources to these places?" Then once we have communities participating, we're really mobilizing them to say, "What are your aspirations, and what have you not been able to do that you want to achieve in this three-year grant period? And how do we bring you the resources beyond grant dollars, whether that's technical assistance, whether that's coaching, whatever that may be?” In some ways, too, we're that coach, we're champions of the work on the ground. We bring as many resources to bear as we can, and we're really cheering along the communities as they adapt and test and do what's right for their places.

JAY LINDSAY:

It's sort of a related question: We know that these grants, these Working Places grants, initially they're three years long. But you intend for things to go past the three years, and you're tackling challenges that aren't going to take three years to solve. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you hope these programs extend past those three years and what we do here at the Fed to help that?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

We're seeing the Working Cities Challenge and Working Communities Challenge as really catalytic opportunity. Opportunities to bring new people together, try new ideas, and really build the muscles that it'll take to sustain this work over time. We're hoping that in those three-year periods, teams have identified what the most important work of their initiatives will be and what they can leave behind, because you can't do everything. You can test a lot of great ideas, but you need to refine your strategies. you need to see what is most connected to your community.

One of our grantees from Pittsfield called this a “learning grant” because she said that the Working Cities Challenge was the rare opportunity where teams were encouraged to try new things, to learn together, and to really bring that learning to the forefront of how they approach many other challenges in their city, and really appreciated that flexibility and that space to say that teams need to learn together in order to sustain their ability to collaborate.

JAY LINDSAY:

We know that the grants are, they're not funded by the Fed. I'm wondering what it is you think about the program that has drawn and continues to draw philanthropic interest to it?

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

For each round of the WCC, we're bringing together the public sector. They're investing state dollars in each of the states we're in. The private sector is investing. There are new local leaders getting engaged. And if you're a national funder, you're not going to be able to get to know conditions on the ground in Fitchburg or in Holyoke, but we at the Boston Fed can do that. We can help ensure that a national funder can have reach in far more places than they could connect to otherwise, because we have relationships on the ground, and we're stewarding the resources to ensure that they're landing successfully.

JAY LINDSAY:

I kind of want to end with a question about what's next. The program itself is evolving. It's going to be something new called Inclusive Economies, and I'm hoping you can talk to me a little bit about it and why this is a logical next step, why this fits.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

The Working Cities and Communities Challenge, as you mentioned, has reached over 30 places. There are far more where there are people who are working tirelessly to build more inclusive economies without as many resources as the WCC. How do we connect to those people and help everybody build their skills to build a more inclusive economy through learning, through field trips, and through what we're calling mini-grants? We're really hoping to have a bigger tent for those places to get involved in the work.

And then as projects come in, we're offering an opportunity we're calling “labs.” And that's a way to access larger grant dollars to deploy projects so that teams can really demonstrate the impact of an idea and make their projects really investible, so that they can attract longer-term investments. And especially in this era with lots of federal funding available for communities, we want to make sure communities are positioned for that. The labs are our way of helping places demonstrate that they're positioned for bigger and longer-term investments.

We're really taking what worked best in the WCC, which is, first of all, meeting places where they're at, and helping leaders organize on their own timelines around the issue areas that matter most to them. And then connecting them with flexible resources that they can deploy to test new ideas, expand new ideas, and build new partnerships.

JAY LINDSAY:

Great. Thanks. I'm sure we'll be talking about this as the years go on. Colleen, that's all I've got. Thanks a lot for being with us today. I really appreciate it.

COLLEEN DAWICKI:

Thanks for having me.

JAY LINDSAY:

You can find more interviews with thought leaders from around the Boston Fed on bostonfed.org/sixhundredatlantic, and you can also check out our podcast seasons there. The latest season is Season 6, and the topic is full employment. That's the lesser-known half of the Fed's dual mandate from Congress. While you're on the site, subscribe to our email list, and please be sure to follow us on social media. And we here at Six Hundred Atlantic would really appreciate it if you'd rate, review, share, and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app. I'm Jay Lindsay signing off on another episode of Six Hundred Atlantic. Thanks for listening.