A Strategic Plan to Rebalance Power in Fresno for Inclusive and Equitable Growth

DRIVE members participate in a July 2019 data walk to help develop a shared understanding of Fresno’s history, assets, and challenges. (Photo courtesy of the Central Valley Community Foundation.)

Across the country, cities routinely invest significant time and money into creating individual economic development projects or programs that—while steeped in good intentions—fail to make a meaningful difference in a community’s trajectory. For at least 20 years, that was the case in Fresno, a city of about a half a million people roughly 200 miles southeast of San Francisco, deep in the heart of California’s agricultural Central Valley. A majority minority city, Fresno is the heart of one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions but is also the most economically and racially inequitable of California’s 59 largest cities: 43 percent of residents live in poverty, with Black, Latinx, and Asian residents experiencing poverty at 3, 2.6, and 2 times the rate of their white counterparts.

In recent years there’s been a growing recognition that, to break the cycle of economic inequity and distress, Fresno needed a city-wide economic development strategic plan to guide and help align public, philanthropic, and private resources, and position the city to successfully compete for investment with the wealthier, more prominent Bay Area, Los Angeles, and San Diego. But just bringing in money wouldn’t be enough. Fresno had to reckon with the histories that produced those racial inequities, and commit to moving forward.

How to go beyond lip service and actually transform how a city pursues economic development? By establishing a shared understanding of Fresno’s racist policies and practices, sharing power with residents who are routinely excluded from important decisions, and committing to new policies and programs that explicitly prioritize racial equity.

Many of these tenets underlie The Shared Prosperity Partnership (SP2), a collaboration of The Kresge Foundation, the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, the Urban Institute, and Living Cities launched in 2018 that—in Fresno and seven other cities—brings together local leaders to address challenges to inclusive growth and provide data, research, and access to national experts, networks and financial resources.  

“The Shared Prosperity Partnership is an attempt to get national organizations together with local organizations to create a different kind of alchemy for change at the local level,” said Rip Rapson, president and CEO of Kresge. “In Fresno, we served as a neutral convener that united representatives from a number of sectors while being attuned to the community context and supporting the development of a shared vision for a more economically inclusive city.”

For years, local leaders in Fresno had been discussing how to create this new sort of cross-sector investment plan, centered on racial equity and driven by community leaders. In August 2018, the Central Valley Community Foundation (CVCF), joined SP2, and together they convened a roundtable to explore these issues with SP2’s data, research, and technical support. Building on these initial SP2 conversations, dozens of local leaders came together in the summer and fall of 2019 to launch Fresno DRIVE (Developing the Region’s Inclusive and Vibrant Economy), an initiative to make this new plan a reality. In the coming months, stakeholders identified key actions and investments needed to achieve the 10-year vision, determined community impact of those investments, and reviewed, categorized, and assessed 125 existing initiatives for inclusion based on alignment, momentum and community buy-in, impact, feasibility, and diversity of impact. A year later, DRIVE members had created a strategic plan detailing 19 initiatives that collectively call for $4.2 billion of investment across three major areas: economic development, human capital, and neighborhood revitalization.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has hailed the plan as a “template for the state” and included $65 million in California’s 2020 state budget for three DRIVE projects (later adjusted to $17 million as funds have been redirected in response to COVID-19, in addition to $10 million appropriated to DRIVE projects in the 2019 budget). DRIVE also received a $15 million grant from the James Irvine Foundation to elevate the voice and role of the community, support meaningful community engagement, provide startup funding for initiatives, and build civic infrastructure to ensure DRIVE can achieve its vision of equity and inclusion.

These are still DRIVE’s early days, and creating a more genuinely equitable community is a lifelong endeavor However, here are three approaches that have allowed DRIVE to pursue a development model that creates meaningful opportunities for economic mobility that are accessible to people of color and other residents who have been overlooked for too long.

1. Establish a Shared Understanding of the Community’s Assets, Opportunities, Challenges, and History

At the first SP2 convening in August 2018, The Brookings Institution presented eye-opening data on Fresno’s regional economy, human capital, and neighborhood quality. The Urban Institute presented additional data showing that Fresno ranks a stunning 59th out of California’s 59 largest cities for economic inclusion, and 263rd out of the nation’s 274 largest cities.

That data proved invaluable in helping to align DRIVE members behind the pressing need to break from Fresno’s status quo. “When we were suddenly all together—those of us who understood the racial disparities and those of us who didn’t—and we had this very real data from a very real think tank that everyone respects, everyone had to agree not to dismiss it anymore and instead, to face it,” explains Sabina González-Eraña, a program manager at The California Endowment who focuses her work on Central and West Fresno City, and the co-chair of DRIVE’s Race Equity Advisory Committee. “That’s when people who maybe hadn’t wanted to see that data previously had the humility to be a little vulnerable and say, ‘Yes, this is the same stuff that has been elevated many times and it’s so dire that we can no longer look away.’”

It was only then that DRIVE members could take the next step to start working to identify the root causes of the city’s economic and racial inequities. In the case of DRIVE, that has meant professionally-facilitated conversations among members to discuss both Fresno’s history of discriminatory practices as well as members’ personal experiences, and their contributions to Fresno’s current inequities. These are frequently very painful conversations, but they help members build stronger relationships, learn to give one another the benefit of the doubt during inevitable disagreements, and stay at the table at moments when some may want to walk away.

2. Center Policies and Programs on Racial Equity

As DRIVE members have developed a shared understanding of Fresno’s history, and of the very real differences in how today’s residents of color experience life in Fresno, members have recognized the need to embed the goal of racial equity into every component of DRIVE.

To that end, DRIVE members have gotten more intentional about language. “We don’t pull any punches around who it is DRIVE is talking about when talking about financial success,” says Lindsay Callahan, President and CEO of United Way of Fresno and Madera Counties, and Co-Chair of DRIVE’s workgroup on Wealth Creation in Communities of Color. “Look at the name of our workgroup. It isn’t framed around helping everyone to be richer. It’s about generational wealth very specifically for communities of color. And that is a huge, huge difference. We have gotten brave enough to use those words and be unapologetic about it, to be explicit that this is about inclusion and what is best for people of color. It’s not necessarily the way we are all used to working.”

Using specific language is also helpful in tailoring solutions for people of color, says Tara Lynn Gray, CEO of the Fresno Metro Black Chamber of Commerce and Chair of DRIVE’s Betting Big on Small Businesses Owned by Women and People of Color workgroup. “You can say that systemic racism is a problem in small business contracting, and that’s true, it is. But how you solve that problem is very important. If you want to solve it in a way that specifically helps Black women, for example, we need to unpack why black women earn so little. We need to address their lack of access to capital and social networks. We can’t address those things unless we build a plan with very specific supports, and we can’t do that unless we name our target as Black women and tell the harsh, unadulterated truths about those disparities.”

To further reinforce racial equity as a priority, DRIVE established a Race Equity Advisory Committee that evaluates each of the 19 workgroup’s plans to ensure that the workgroup’s recommendations promote racial equity. The Race Equity Advisory Committee reviews each workgroup’s proposal across a range of criteria designed to increase equity and assists the workgroup in revising their plans. “The Race Equity Advisory Committee is a bright light focusing on equity, but also more than that,” says Callahan. “They reflect back to us our work and use consultants and trainings and technical feedback to help us see how our work plan fits in the larger DRIVE framework. It’s like we, the workgroups, are the trees, and they are the forest.”

3. Transform Community Engagement to Facilitate Power Sharing

From inception, DRIVE members committed to engaging community members in ways that were new and different for Fresno. As a first step in demonstrating a commitment to rebalancing power in Fresno, DRIVE crowdsourced investment ideas from a 300-person, cross-sector steering committee. But across the board, instead of cursory townhalls designed to solicit feedback on ideas (created by people removed from the community), DRIVE opted for focus groups across the city and “worker voice” interviews among employees from low-wage industries..

“We want to create power sharing, to get to a place where we can say, ‘I need to move over and make room so that you can stand right next to me in the decision-making,’” As Dr. Tania Pacheco-Werner puts it, a research scientist at the Central Valley Health Policy Institute and both a member of DRIVE’s Race Equity Advisory Committee and the leader of a series of community focus groups organized by DRIVE last year. “It’s about acknowledging that unless you have lived through not being able to find a job because the bus doesn’t come to your part of town at night, you won’t know what changes need to be made when we talk about job creation, for example. That’s different than simply asking for someone’s opinion but then holding onto all the power to craft the systems, which is what we have had in Fresno and is clearly not working.”

To develop an awareness around how they engage with residents, DRIVE adopted the International Association for Public Participation’s five-step community engagement scale to help identify where members’ interactions are on a spectrum from marginalization of the community to a community that places decision-making in the hands of residents. Here, too, language is important. As Andrew Feil, director of Every Neighborhood Partnership and co-chair of DRIVE’s workgroup on Civic Infrastructure for Low Opportunity Neighborhoods explains, “This process has forced us to have to clarify what we mean when we say ‘community engagement,’ or ‘advocacy,’ or any of those types of terms because we are learning that we all use them differently to mean different things. We have to ask, ‘If I am doing a community-led process, is most of my time being spent actually partnering with residents or am I just promoting an event? And when I held a meeting, did I just hand out a fact sheet and make a presentation or was it actually a process in which residents could not only speak and be heard, but that they actually shaped and led?’”

Recognizing the unlikelihood of shifting the entirety of Fresno’s balance of power simultaneously across the city, DRIVE’s civic infrastructure work plan initially focuses on six Fresno neighborhoods that collectively serve eight elementary schools and are in need of a wide and significant range of investments, including improvements in air and water quality, educational outcomes, and employment opportunities. In an effort to shift more power to residents in those communities, DRIVE members are providing mentorship and resources to a handful of small neighborhood-based organizations and community leaders, with a goal of repeating the coaching process with community organizations and leaders in other neighborhoods every three years until DRIVE has reached all of Fresno’s underserved communities.

Lifelong Collaboration

While the members of DRIVE are excited about the progress, these are the early days in a lifelong collaboration to create a more equitable Fresno. After all, it took 135 years of discriminatory policies and practices to get where the city is today, so the idea that the DRIVE initiative can fix it in a single decade is unrealistic. Nor is it an easy task. Reckoning honestly with the reality of economic, educational, and political systems that have intentionally served some people so incredibly well while systematically and intentionally failing others so miserably has proven painful for all of us, no matter which side of that dividing line we are on.

But that’s the point. The only way to make change is to find a way to unite. And the only way to do that is to engage in this type of work. Because it is through these sometimes-wrenching conversations that DRIVE members are deepening our empathy, grace, humility, and a shared commitment to righting institutionalized wrongs to create stronger, healthier communities for everyone.

Read more stories by Gretchen Moore, Chantel Rush & Joseph Schilling.