Over the last few years, several pieces of major legislation—such as the American Rescue Plan Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act), and the CHIPS and Science Act—have made historic amounts of federal funds available for investments in communities across the country.
Governments at all levels, from small municipal governments to large federal agencies, have a role to play in ensuring that funding from these investments reaches individuals and communities in a timely and equitable manner. Many government organizations have adopted creative strategies to implement these major federal investments—building on existing frameworks or creating new tools or processes to ensure that programs and funding created by these bills achieve the intended public benefit.
These case studies describe examples of how federal, state and local government agencies are approaching implementation of these major federal investments, with a focus on ensuring the funding is distributed equitably. The examples in these case studies offer promising practices that government leaders—no matter their level—can adopt or use as inspiration for contributing to the equitable implementation of recent major federal investments.
The 2021 American Rescue Plan Act provided funding to help the nation continue recovery from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Act included programs focusing on vaccination and economic support for individuals, and also provided two disbursements of federal funding that state, local and tribal governments could use to advance their communities’ economic recovery from the pandemic.
To reduce the burden on individuals and organizations applying for grants from the city’s American Rescue Plan Act funds, Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development created an online universal application. Instead of mandating that individuals fill out separate applications for each type of funding offered, which required them to understand the eligibility requirements of each program so they could apply for the right one, the department now has only two applications: one for grants of less than $250,000, and one for all other grants of up to $5 million.
Applicants only need to fill out the appropriate application for the amount of funding they seek, and while they must select an initial program to apply for, the burden is on the city to match applications with the correct funding sources if another program would be a better fit for that application. “Based on where they’re geographically located, and what the general project scope of their work is, we decide ‘you’re going to be in this track and you’re going to be competing for these funds versus you’re going to be in this track and you’re going to be competing for these funds,’” explained Nina Idemudia, Chicago’s recovery plan director.
The change to the universal application has reduced the difficulty of applying for funds and increased the number of applications the city receives. Idemudia noted the city typically receives only a few hundred grant applications each year, but received and processed 8,100 applications in 2022, a substantial increase due at least in part to the transition to a universal application that lowered the barriers for initially competing for funds.
Chicago also prioritized equity in evaluating applications—for example, the city created data-based criteria to determine the areas where it would like to prioritize additional investment, focusing on areas that have historically had less access to funding. The city awards additional points to applications that meet these criteria, Idemudia said, “without applicants having to do anything.”
Additionally, although grants are available city-wide, applicants only compete for funding against other applicants from the same region, rather than against all applicants from across the city, to take into account the historic disparities in investment among areas of the city. “We’re correcting for the regional discrepancies and the regional inequities, so that people without as many resources are not competing against people with more resources,” Idemudia said.
Denver uses a data-driven strategy to guide its allocation of American Rescue Plan Act funding, drawing on a combination of public feedback and economic recovery data to understand where investment is needed most and what residents are looking for in the city’s economic recovery.
Recognizing the different circumstances of each of the city’s neighborhoods, Denver’s Department of Finance created a publicly available Neighborhood Recovery Index to help it track which neighborhoods were experiencing the most negative effects of the pandemic. The index includes economic, health and education data, and for each neighborhood it displays an overall well-being index as well as specific indexes for each of the three components. The index helps the city geotarget funding towards residents most in need of it, down to specific addresses.
In addition to the data in the Neighborhood Recovery Index, Denver also gathered feedback from residents to help officials understand the public’s priorities for recovery funds. Through focus groups with community leaders, and telephone town halls open to the public, the city collected information about which issues residents wanted prioritized for ARP funding. Outreach for these town halls focused on historically underserved communities, and the city held the town halls at a variety of times and in several languages to facilitate participation by a wide variety of residents. Data on the responses from the community outreach is available in an online dashboard, allowing residents to see the results of the process.
Denver is using all the data it collects to inform its decision-making around ARP funding. For example, during the town halls, residents identified affordable housing and support for people experiencing homelessness as a top issue. Investment in programs to address these issues became the top use of community funding from the city’s two batches of ARP funding.
Denver officials also plan to update the Neighborhood Recovery Index with new data each year, using the 2022 data as a baseline. The 2023 data showed improvement in many categories, but two indicators—the number of struggling businesses per neighborhood and a decrease in homeownership—stood out as areas needing additional help to continue the city’s economic recovery. Based on this data, Denver plans to prioritize those two issues for additional investment and will continue to track the effects over time.
Counties play an important role in the local distribution of federal funding, along with states and cities. One way many counties are working to ensure the equitable distribution of major federal funds is by expanding their community engagement and outreach.
Researchers who work with county governments note they have anecdotally seen increases in community engagement efforts as counties respond to recent major federal funding legislation. Although many counties already had in place mechanisms for community engagement in government decisions, recent funding—such as the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program in the American Rescue Plan Act—provided an impetus to expand that engagement or start it in counties that did not have practices in place.
“The ARP funds were an opportunity to [engage the community],” said Mark Ritacco, chief government affairs officer for the National Association of Counties. “To do things like, instead of having county meetings at the courthouse, to go out into the community and have a meeting in every corner of the county.” This engagement is helping county governments understand how residents would like to see funding spent, enabling them to route money more effectively toward the public’s priorities.
Ritacco notes that these practices help county governments distribute current funding with residents’ priorities in mind, and that the community engagement created in response to the funding will likely become institutionalized beyond any one federal investment. “This is probably a sustained practice after the ARP funds run out, one that will just lead to more community engagement [overall],” he said.
Beyond community engagement, counties also are using data that reflects local circumstances to help them distribute funding equitably. The State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds program allows communities to use their own data, rather than federal data, to identify disadvantaged communities for targeted investment. This data can be more granular than federal data, helping to ensure that counties’ investment take into account local nuances.
For example, Baltimore County, Maryland, created a data tool that incorporated county-level statistics as well information gathered through interactions with the community, to guide its distribution of ARP funding.
