Education Parallel
Interviewee: Dan Ryan, Commissioner for Portland, Oregon and former Executive Director, of All Hands Raised
All Hands Raised is a nonprofit organization that advocates for excellent and equitable education for all students. The organization uses data and engagement to advance racial equity in education in Portland, Oregon. The work of All Hands Raised reveals several parallels between public education and public transportation, namely:
- Federal requirements have caused school districts to report test score data by race robustly – but have also suppressed creativity in the reporting process by encouraging school districts to simply assemble the required reports.
- Additional data is needed to paint a full picture of the student experience. Government entities tend to focus on internal data rather than constituent-focused indicators, and on “perfect data sources” such as student achievement rather than less conventional metrics. For exaEducation Parallelmple, All Hands Raised pushed the field to look beyond test scores to create metrics on the social-emotional realm.
- Ideas for policy changes and common-sense proposals often arose from teachers, counselors, and other frontline workers.
- The support of local leadership and strategic coalitions of stakeholders — including union members, business leaders, philanthropists, and advocates — are critical to winning equity advancements.
Energy and Water Parallel
Interviewees: Caroline Pakenham, Senior Manager of Water Programs, Elevate Energy and Anna McCreery, Research Manager, Elevate Energy
Elevate Energy is a nonprofit organization that seeks to create a world in which everyone has clean and affordable heat, power, and water in their homes and communities. The energy and water fields provide several parallels to public transportation:
- Bill discount and reduced rate programs are common within the energy field, and an emerging practice within the water field. These typically are available only to people who are behind in their payments or face other special hardship, and often require a complex application. An alternative practice would be to offer reduced rate programs to residents with low incomes proactively. For example, the City of Philadelphia’s Tiered Assistance Program provides an income-based bill rather than one based on volume of water consumed.
- Using simple applications to determine eligibility is recommended. The San Antonio Water System, notably, has streamlined the process for applying to its various affordability programs, including water and energy assistance.
- The energy field has determined eligibility for income-based programs with qualification for other income-based programs (like SNAP) — rather than requiring a separate verification. Some transit fare reduction programs, like ORCA LIFT, already do this, but most do not.
- A more advanced approach to determining eligibility involves qualifying individuals based on where they live, so that entire neighborhoods are eligible. Elevate Energy helped test out this approach in Chicago.
- Federal regulations affect some energy-related programs, like LIHEAP, but not for water programs. Additional federal policy would be helpful to push best practices to utilities.
Health Impact Assessments Parallel
Interviewee: Tiffany McDowell, Director, Equity Institute, YWCA Evanston / North Shore, and member of Chicagoland Equity Network
The Chicagoland Equity Network is a collaborative of individuals committed to promoting just and fair inclusion of all residents through education, outreach, and equity. The leaders of this coalition have experience conducting Health Impact Assessments and Racial Equity Impact Assessments on public policy decisions of various types.
- A Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a combination of procedures, methods and tools that systematically judge the potential, and sometimes unintended, effects of a policy, plan, program, or project on the health of a population and the distribution of those effects within the population. It also includes a thorough approach to evaluate impacts. HIAs continue to be used, but the public health field has shifted toward outreach approaches that don’t involve the community in a one-time assessment, which is often a characteristic of HIAs.
- A Racial Equity Impact Assessment (REIA) is a systematic examination of how different racial and ethnic groups will likely be affected by a proposed action or decision, and it can be expanded to also include components of an HIA. Generally, REIAs create a better starting point for equity evaluation than HIAs, because it is easier to add health to a broader racial equity lens than it is to consider all of the impacts of racial disparities through a health lens.
- Both of these methods have potential to be applied to transit investment or policy decisions. Groups like the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) offer training and assistance, or transit agencies can use toolkits available freely online to do this work themselves.
Housing Parallel
Interviewees: Miriam Zuk, former Senior Program Director of Enterprise Community Partners and Megan Haberle, former Deputy Director of Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC)
Enterprise Community Partners is a national nonprofit with the mission of creating affordable housing in diverse, thriving communities through policy change, technical assistance to communities, and financing. PRRAC is a civil rights law and policy organization that promotes research-based advocacy strategies to address structural inequality and disrupt the systems that disadvantage low-income people of color.
- Federal requirements play a central role in local housing decisions related to equity. The requirements of federal programs (like the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and fair housing regulations to disrupt segregation) drive local decision-making. Some jurisdictions go beyond federal requirements based on local support for equity (e.g. Seattle) or lawsuits that force them to (e.g. Maryland). However, most are focused on complying with federal requirements, rather than creatively going beyond them. Hence, federal oversight agencies play a key role in mandating accountability and compliance.
- Too much attention in the affordable housing field goes to new development, rather than preservation, even though preservation is more practical, cost-effective, and realistic. This parallels the partiality of many transit agencies to spend on expensive capital investment (e.g. light rail expansion) rather than maintenance of existing service, due to the preponderance of federal funding eligible for capital projects and the short-term political payout of delivering new transit projects.
- Housing is a regional issue that requires regional solutions. But current law empowers local jurisdictions to opt out of participating by granting them autonomy over funding and land use patterns which determine if affordable housing is viable. Federal funding can incentivize or require (serving as a carrot or a stick) local participation in regional housing programs.
- In the past, litigation was an effective route to spreading progressive housing policy by setting a legal, defensible model in one region that stakeholders elsewhere could replicate.
- Advocates have deployed economic and social science arguments to win bi-partisan support for housing programs (e.g. how children benefit from housing choice voucher programs, the economic impact of housing programs on the regional economy).