Dollar for dollar, successfully influencing where public money goes can be one of the most powerful actions philanthropy can take. While we often think of philanthropy as a wealthy sector, its assets pale next to federal and state resources. That’s why we often write so favorably about advocacy funding. If it works, it can leverage public spending to much greater effect than philanthropic dollars deployed on their own.
But advocacy is only one lever philanthropies can pull to make the public funding spigot flow in tandem with their missions. Another strategy involves providing public officials with types of technical and implementation support to improve how they govern, and in some cases, to help them access public funds.
Former Mayor Mike Bloomberg has long been an avid advocate for that brand of technocratic philanthropy. And he isn’t the only one. Over the past decade, philanthropy-backed “public-private partnerships” have become a common fixture on the local level. But Bloomberg is pretty much the face of technocratic localism in the national philanthrosphere, so it’s no surprise to see him backing the latest big-ticket collaboration in that space.
Despite its unassuming name, the Local Infrastructure Hub is actually quite an interesting development for anyone keeping an eye on big-picture philanthropic trends. Founded on an “initial investment” of $50 million, the hub will pursue a specific mission — making sure small and medium-sized metros can compete for and access more than $1 trillion in federal funding coming through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.
“Over the next 24 months, local governments will be sorting through roughly 400 programs that are designed to aid everything from ports and parks to rural broadband and green buildings,” Bloomberg wrote in a piece on the new hub, co-authored with LaToya Cantrell, mayor of New Orleans, and Vince Williams, mayor of Union City, Georgia. “But the fact is, many cities and towns don’t have the staff to identify all the funding that may be available to them. And once they figure out which funding they are actually eligible for, they don’t have the capacity to complete the necessary applications.”
Set to launch on July 1, the Local Infrastructure Hub will provide those municipalities with technical support to help them level the playing field with larger cities gunning for the same funding.
The hub is a successor of sorts to the numerous COVID-responsive funder collaborations that popped up during the pandemic’s early days. Like many of them, it draws on funding from major living donors, Bloomberg and Laurene Powell Jobs, as well as resources from two legacy foundations, Ford and Kresge.
While plenty of questions remain about how the hub will distribute its assistance, and to whom, it’s safe to say this is a growing space for big-name philanthropic collaboration. It’s also an implicit vote of confidence in the power of federal spending, and the role private funders can play to support sweeping government initiatives.
Funders old and new collaborate
When the pandemic first struck in 2020, U.S. philanthropies promptly responded by standing up a wide variety of collaborative funding efforts. From national pooled funds drawing on the resources of major foundations and billionaire donors to modest local relief outfits, this COVID-era turn toward collaboration has caught on, and now we scarcely go a week without hearing about some new funder collaborative setting up shop.
Part of what makes the Local Infrastructure Hub stand out from the crowd are the funders involved. The Ford Foundation, of course, is one of the nation’s premier foundations and a serial collaborator on a whole host of COVID-era initiatives, including the economic-justice-oriented Families and Workers Fund, and its partnership with other major funders (including Bloomberg) on America’s Cultural Treasures, designed to help BIPOC-led arts groups weather the COVID storm.
The Kresge Foundation, no stranger to public-private collaboration itself (including to rescue the city of Detroit from bankruptcy), has been a staunch proponent of the idea that philanthropy can be, at once, deeply local as well as nationally responsive. In that sense, it has much in common with Bloomberg Philanthropies, despite the obvious differences between the two funders.
Then there’s the Emerson Collective, the mysterious LLC funding platform of another major living donor, Laurene Powell Jobs. Like Bloomberg, Powell Jobs has shown a lot of willingness to collaborate with other major funders in recent years. She also occupies a unique position as the only billionaire member of the Ford Foundation’s board of trustees, where she’s a bridge of sorts between an older order of foundations and the brave new world of contemporary billionaire giving.
In addition to support from these four funders, the initiative will draw on expertise from the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National League of Cities, Results for America and a number of other national organizations. Offerings will include technical assistance as municipalities navigate the application process, as well as aid in identifying which opportunities to apply for, with an eye toward racial equity and climate action.
Making federal recovery funding equitable
The Local Infrastructure Hub will be one of the largest and most geographically expansive efforts we’ve seen to date in which philanthropy backs the equitable distribution of public COVID relief and recovery funding. But it’s not the first time that’s happened.
For instance, Bloomberg Philanthropies has been working with the U.S. Conference of Mayors since early 2020 to help U.S. cities keep track of federal relief opportunities, an effort that eventually manifested as a resource hub built in collaboration with Johns Hopkins, called Federal Assistance e311. It’s kind of like a prototype for the Local Infrastructure Hub.
Other philanthropies, like the Joyce Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, have already been working with the National League of Cities to provide technical assistance to local funding applicants. And on the state level, still other funders have collaborated to back similar efforts to steer federal recovery funding in an equitable direction. The California-based Community Economic Mobilization Initiative is one example, backed by The Center at the Sierra Health Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation.
These are much-needed and still all-too-rare instances of philanthropy bringing its ample technocratic chops to bear on a problem that can actually benefit from technocracy. This isn’t advocacy in the typical sense, nor is it particularly edgy (it’s infrastructure we’re talking about, after all), and that makes it appealing to liberal funders — like Bloomberg — that generally shy away from progressive power-building. At the same time, progressive power-builders also have no qualms chipping in.
Many questions remain
The big question going forward will be whether this new infrastructure hub delivers on its promise to level the playing field for small and medium-sized cities, and which municipalities actually benefit. There’s also the question of how far this effort will go toward ensuring federal infrastructure funds make it to historically marginalized communities.
Earlier this spring, Kresge’s Lois DeBacker and Joe Evans tackled that topic at length in Nonprofit Quarterly. Underwriting technical assistance for smaller cities with leaner budgets was one philanthropic measure they recommended. But they also called for more advocacy around the development of better criteria for these competitive programs — an arena where industry lobbyists play heavily — as well as more funding for local community development institutions and other nonprofits with a role in implementation.
Kresge President Rip Rapson made a similar point in a guest contribution for Inside Philanthropy last December. “Stated simply, the nonprofit sector is often the execution arm of the municipal public policy apparatus,” he wrote. “Philanthropy will need to ensure that the right organizations are well-positioned, well-resourced and well-informed about the legislation in all its dimensions.”
All told, assistance of the kind the Local Infrastructure Hub plans to provide is just one piece of the pie. We’ve dinged Bloomberg in the past for his unwillingness to complement technocratic local support with values-based arguments about how society should be organized. That critique also applies here. Without victories in the war of ideas around public spending, victories that can translate to policy wins, and yes, political wins, the risk is that initiatives like this will be reduced to refereeing a fight over scraps.
And then there’s the whole separate issue of perennially inflated U.S. infrastructure costs and rampant waste, problems that have a lot to do with hobbled governmental authority and the power of the industry lobby. What philanthropy can do about that, if anything, is an open question.
As the Local Infrastructure Hub and similar philanthropy-backed collaborations come online and begin to provide technical assistance, one hopes that coming to grips with these larger questions will also be on the agenda.