What is Shared Prosperity?
Long before the coronavirus crisis hit, disparities were widening in metro regions across the United States. More and more, race, gender, and geography predicted sharp contrasts in individual health and household wealth. They indicated who was more or less likely to face day-to-day instability, like being priced out of a home or living with uncertainty about where tomorrow’s meals will come from. They pointed to who had access to education and job opportunities, who was being heard in efforts to shape and improve their communities. For many years, these gaps were becoming gulfs—and then the pandemic struck, making them even more extreme.
In the Seattle area, disparities likes these not only harm some people and communities more than others—particularly Black and Indigenous people as well as other people of color—they inhibit the wellbeing of the entire region. Flawed and imbalanced systems threaten our economy, undermine our democracy, and tear at the fabric that holds our communities together. Civic Commons support efforts to address these threats and inequities, and create a fair system in which everyone has access to the opportunity and resources they need to thrive.
Shared prosperity—the idea that we all do better when we all do better—is central to the way we approach this work and builds on recent research from the Brookings Institute and the Urban Institute. It isn’t about socialism or simply wealth accumulation; it’s a multidimensional way of thinking about how to create a variety of mutual gains throughout our region, looking at indicators that range from health to civic engagement. It recognizes the fundamental interdependence of everyone who calls this region home. A balanced view of shared prosperity is critical to inform cross-sector collaboration and decision-making that support a growing economy and a vibrant democracy for every individual, household, and community in the Seattle area.
Civic Commons recently convened a panel for a webcast exploring shared prosperity, what it means, and the possibilities it presents for making equitable change in our community. Moderated by Civic Commons’ Michael Brown, the conversation featured Seattle Foundation’s President & CEO, Tony Mestres; Phyllis J. Campbell, the Pacific Northwest Chairman of JPMorgan Chase & Co.; Gary Cunningham, President & CEO of Prosperity Now in Washington D.C.; and Bruce Katz, co-author of The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism. Together they discussed why now, more than ever, metro regions have a collective responsibility to recognize and dismantle structural barriers that lead to disparities based on race, gender, and neighborhood.
While many impediments block access to opportunity, money, and the way it moves, has a huge impact. “Capital's not the problem—it's how we organize and deploy it,” Katz says, pointing to the various “structural deficiencies” that keep resources from reaching certain communities, such as Black and low-income communities.
Many small-scale solutions have tried and failed to solve this problem in recent years. Real change depends on getting to the root of the issue, which requires not just a patchwork of programs but a shift in values. “You can't continue to squeeze the economic systems,” Cunningham says. “You can't continue to have all these injustices pop up within the banking structures and within other corporate structures. You can't continue to have this chronic ethical value issue that isn't being addressed. We can come up with all these little fixes, but they won't solve the issue. We need fundamental change in this country on how resources are distributed.”
To support this shift, “We have to have a very coherent view of what philanthropy is doing,” Mestres says. “We can’t lean on the old definition of charity as something based upon a spirit of benevolence and trying to help people who've fallen through the cracks. Those cracks have turned into crevasses.” Instead philanthropy can experiment and pilot new models, providing risk capital for society, until those models have matured to the point where they have broad public support. Cross-sector experiments like this are already underway with efforts such as the Evergreen Impact Housing Fund, which is working to create more affordable housing by offering a new way to finance it. (Seattle Foundation and Chase are both partners in that effort.)
“Risk capital can ignite entrepreneurial solutions,” Campbell says. “But how do you scale those up? How do we assemble some real infrastructure changes that will ignite the small business economy or the minority-owned business economy, and then hopefully pair that with some other solutions besides capital? Shared prosperity has to be under a vision of systemic solutions.”
One idea, Campbell offers, comes from a relevant chapter in history: The Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a part of the New Deal, put hundreds of thousands of people to work on infrastructure projects that included bridges, transportation, and various forms of conservation and land management. Campbell suggests taking a “page out of that playbook” today to create meaningful jobs on bridges, roads, and, broadband projects, all of which would impart lasting technical skills.
Whether through a massive multi-sector program like the CCC or another approach, inclusive innovation is the way to share economic growth throughout the workforce. The Seattle region already has “an innovation ecosystem that is second to none in the world,” Katz says. “You have a mature research institution in UW. You have mature companies in Microsoft and Amazon and Boeing. You have incubators and accelerators. You have human capital at the community college level. You've basically built an ecosystem to fuel an innovation economy.”
He continues, “But there is no ecosystem to build Black-owned business, right?” The region may have the financial products for those businesses, he explains, but not the foundation of strong intermediaries with the capital and capacity to nurture and mentor entrepreneurs. All sectors have roles to play in devising specific strategies to address these gaps and invest in historically under-resourced communities, both to create new jobs and businesses, and to help those businesses achieve their optimum scale, forming an ecosystem with regenerative opportunity built into it.
“How can we drive the right incentives to invest in the right things?” Mestres asks, citing values, relationships, trust, partnerships, new approaches, and disruptive thinking as crucial ingredients in the new models that lead to shared prosperity and a stronger region for everyone.
Civic Commons created the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity as a tool to support this generative, visionary work. It provides leaders in the private, philanthropic, government, and community sectors with a common set economic data tied to individual health, household wealth, community stability, regional business growth, and civic engagement. By collecting and sharing these metrics, the Scorecard fights fragmentation and sets the stage for the creation of collaborative strategies that drive change.