Where an individual lives can play a role in shaping their employment opportunities and interactions. While issues related to where a person is located have been overshadowed by issues related to an individual’s personal circumstances, this is starting to shift.

During this seminar, presented by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on April 2, 2026, experts from research and policy discussed how location affects job markets and can contribute to income inequality.

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Place-Based Strategies: Strengthening Local Economies in Low-Income Communities (video, 1:28:23).
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Transcript

Whitney Felder

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the first seminar in the Federal Reserve’s 2026 Community Development Research Seminar series—Place-Based Strategies: Strengthening Local Economies in Low Income Communities.

I am Whitney Felder, marketing communications specialist with Fed Communities. Today’s seminar is brought to you by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and we’ll explore how location affects job markets and can contribute to income inequality. During today’s 90-minute session, there will be a panel discussion and there will be the opportunity for you to ask questions.

Now, for just a few housekeeping notes. First, we would like to share that this session is being recorded. The recording will be available within two weeks after the event on the Fed Communities website. Secondly, please keep in mind the views shared during this event do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors or the Federal Reserve System. One more thing as a logistical note, all microphones will be muted during the duration of this session. We will, however, be taking questions during portions of today’s session. You can submit your questions through the question and answer feature built into the Zoom app.

I think that’s all for me. Now I will turn it over to Angelyque Campbell, Senior Associate Director at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, for a brief welcome and intro. Angelyque?

Angelyque Campbell

Great. Thank you so much, Whitney. Good afternoon and welcome. I’m Angelyque Campbell, Senior Associate Director in the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board. And I’m so happy that you’re with us for the first session in the Federal Reserve’s Community Development Research Seminar Series. This series was designed to serve as a forum where research and practice come together. At the Federal Reserve, we understand that strong communities and well-served consumers help support and drive economic growth and facilitate economic mobility. And this goal is especially important for consumers and communities as they navigate recent economic shifts and a faster pace of technological change.

The Federal Reserve seeks to better understand the impact of these changes by conducting high-quality research and data analysis about the financial experiences of consumers and communities and the factors that contribute to their financial well-being. For the first session, the focus of this year’s series, as Whitney said, is on place-based strategies, and we feel this session provides this opportunity for looking at those financial experiences of consumers and communities in a deeper way.

For the first session hosted by the Federal Reserve Board, we are joined by three experts who will share their research on job market conditions, the impact of community-focused strategies, and how investments can help local economies thrive. For the second session in the series, we’ll welcome you back when the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond will host a discussion on how place-based strategies can strengthen rural economies through investment, and that will take place on June 25th. And the last session of the series, Place-Based Strategies: Strengthening Local Economies Through Labor Market Policies, will be hosted by the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Philadelphia on August 12th.

So before I close, let me take a moment to thank my Federal Reserve colleagues who have helped to organize this year’s series, and to the colleagues at Fed Communities who have made all three sessions and content on a range of community development topics accessible on its website, fedcommunities.org, and to thank all of you for joining today. We at the Federal Reserve look forward to working with you to translate research and insights from this series into strategies and solutions that serve local communities well and to continue our dialogue and partnership.

So with that, now I will turn to Heidi Kaplan to begin today’s discussion. Heidi?

Heidi Kaplan

Hi, thanks, Angelyque. It’s great to see so many people here today. It looks like we have a couple hundred people online, and I’m excited that there are so many of you who are interested in this topic of place-based strategies that also is dear to my heart. I’m a lead community development analyst at the Federal Reserve Board, here with Angelyque, and I’m here to kick off the series that she just described to you. So again, today we’ll be talking about place-based strategies, particularly strengthening local economies in low-income communities.

So as you all know, where people live can affect their financial well-being and job prospects. This is especially true for residents of low-income neighborhoods. So today we bring you three experts to discuss how location affects job markets and can contribute to income inequality.

First, you’ll hear from Tim Bartik, a leading researcher in the field of place-based policy. Tim is the co-director and senior economist for the Policies and Places Research Center at the Upjohn Institute. His research focuses on how broad-based prosperity can be advanced through better local labor market policies.

After Tim, you’ll hear from Emily Parker. She will present a few findings from her research on the geography of federal funding. Emily is an assistant professor at Rutgers University in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. Emily’s primary research interests are in how public policy and community contexts matter to the longstanding link between health and poverty.

After Emily, I’ll have the pleasure of introducing you to Dana Inman. And Dana is going to describe a very specific program in Atlanta. She serves as a chair for the Metro Atlanta Exchange for Workforce Solutions, also called MAX. MAX is a convener and connector for Atlanta’s regional workforce development community. And Dana is also the president and CEO of the Atlanta Center for Self-Sufficiency. So please check the website for links to their organizations and the chat here for links to their bios. And again, thank you all for joining us. I’m going to turn the mic over to Tim.

Tim Bartik

Well, thank you, Heidi, and thanks to the Fed for inviting me. So what I’m going to talk about today is what I call place-based jobs policy. So my focus is on how to get more people into jobs, how to increase employment population ratios, increase employment rates, particularly in good jobs. I don’t really think I need to extensively justify why jobs are so important. I mean, they clearly have great individual benefits as well as huge spillover benefits for families and for the community. Any event, that’s my focus. Next slide.

Perhaps the key thing I want to emphasize today, if there’s anything permanent you take away from what I’m saying, is that we need to distinguish between two different kinds of distressed places and two different kinds of place-based jobs policies, and particularly the distinction between local labor markets and neighborhoods. So what do I mean by these things? Well, by a distressed place, I simply mean a place with a low employment rate, a low employment to population ratio. By a local labor market, I mean a place like a metro area or a commuting zone that is one or more counties that have sufficient commuting links [so] that if there’s a shock to labor market conditions in one part of that local labor market, it tends to spread throughout the local labor market. And by a neighborhood, I simply mean one or more census tracts that are adjacent and have similar characteristics and that for some reason have a distinct identity of their own.

Now, the thing to realize is that if you’re trying to solve the employment rate problem of distressed places, that the solutions you need are very different in local labor markets versus neighborhoods. So in a distressed local labor market, job creation is what’s needed, and that will help solve the problem if you can do it in a cost-effective way. And so the research pretty conclusively shows that in a distressed local labor market, up to half the jobs created increase the employment rates of residents. The other half increase the population. Jobs don’t just increase employment rates, they also attract in migrants. That’s very different from, say, a booming area where, really, when you create jobs, almost all the jobs result in population increases, not in employment rate increases. So distressed local labor markets need job creation.

Distressed neighborhoods, the reality is neighborhoods are not distinct labor markets. Most Americans do not live and work in the same neighborhood, and that’s true of most low-income Americans. So simply plopping down more jobs in the neighborhood doesn’t do very much to help residents of that neighborhood. What the residents need is better job access, broadly defined. And I’ll explain this more later, but what I mean is that job access is more than improving transit access, transportation access. It’s also access to things like childcare, it’s access to job training, placement services, and many other services that are needed to get people into jobs. Next slide.

Well, how big is the distressed local labor market problem? So over the years, I’ve done a number of attempts to try to quantify this. This comes from a presentation I did about a year ago at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and you can find it at their website. And so basically, based on how low the employment rate is, about 10% of Americans live in severely distressed local labor markets. Another 30% live in moderately distressed local labor markets. And this is even when overall, the Fed and other macro authorities are doing a pretty good job of keeping the overall national unemployment rate pretty low. So this map shows you the picture. A lot of rural areas are clearly distressed, particularly in the South and in Appalachia, but then there are a lot of urban areas that are distressed, have low employment rates. Fresno and Bakersfield out in California, Spokane in Washington, Detroit and Flint in my home state of Michigan. So there’s a lot of distress both in urban and rural areas at the labor market level.

How about the neighborhood level? Next slide. Well, I’ve done some classification of this. And roughly speaking, about 11% of the national population live in neighborhoods where the employment rate is significantly below that of the surrounding local labor market area. They’re not doing as well as you would expect given the local labor market they’re in. This varies a lot across places. So if you look at the 30 biggest local labor markets in the US, three have very high rates of neighborhood distress, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. And on the other hand, three of those top 30 local labor markets have pretty low distress, the Twin Cities up in Minnesota, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. So there is quite a bit of variation in the rate of neighborhood distress. Next slide.

So how do we solve the problem of distressed places, either local labor markets or neighborhood? And what I’m going to argue is that the most cost-effective solutions are different types of customized services, public services. In the case of local labor markets, we need customized business services to create jobs. In the case of neighborhoods, we need customized household services to increase job access. So this is a chart that looks at the cost per job created in a local labor market of different types of policies you might consider. So the main thing that we’re doing in this area right now are business tax incentives. So states are handing out all kinds of business tax incentives. There are property tax abatements, job creation credits, investment tax credits, R&D credits, all kinds of things, to try to create jobs. This calculation is a little bit complicated. It basically tries to look at the literature. First of all, to what extent do tax incentives actually induce jobs? We can give companies cash. Does it actually cause that location to differ from what it otherwise would be? Sometimes it doesn’t, in which case it doesn’t really create any jobs.

The other thing, of course, is there are some multiplier effects of when we directly create jobs in some incentive company. There are some spillover job creation in suppliers to that company and in local retailers as the workers re-spend the money. And then finally, as I mentioned, in a distressed area, only half the jobs created increase the employment rates. So this particular calculation is the present value cost because these incentives are provided over time generally. And we take the present value, we discount at an appropriate rate, and we ask, How much in present value terms does it cost to create a job through business tax incentives that increases the employment rate by one job? And the answer is almost half a million dollars. And that’s because not all jobs are induced by incentives. A lot of the incentives are wasted. Multiplier effects, while they’re significant, are not always as big as they sometimes claim. And as I mentioned, only half the jobs actually increase employment rates of local residents.

Now, I should say that the fact that it’s a half million dollars doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. You can look at what the benefits are of job creation, if people are able to keep those jobs over time, and the evidence is in many cases they can, you can come with figures for the benefits per one job increase in the employment rate that’s like a million dollars per job. So in distressed areas, this could pay off, but it is expensive. And in non-distressed areas, where, as I said, very few jobs increase the employment rate, the cost per job could easily be two million, three million [dollars] for business tax incentives. Such policies make a lot less sense in booming areas. But we’re in a time of fiscal stringency, and there are alternatives. We can use customized business services to create job, firm-specific infrastructure, customized job training, and business advice programs.

So what do I mean by firm-specific infrastructure? Things like highway access roads, industrial parks, customized training are things like where community colleges provide a firm with free training for its new workers that’s suited to the firm’s needs. And business advice are things like small business development centers or manufacturing extensive services. Now, why are these things more cost-effective? Because in general, they are providing things that firms have difficulty providing efficiently on their own. Essentially, the cost [to] the government of providing these services is less than their value to the firm. So you can cut the cost per job created in half by doing infrastructure and to one-fourth or less using customized training and business advice. So in general, right now, states are spending 80% or 90% of their money on tax incentives, and my recommendation over the years is to cut that back a little bit and to shift more into these business services. Okay, next slide.

What about the neighborhood level? Here we have less hardcore research evidence, but there is some evidence from studies, for example, of the empowerment zone program that we can increase employment rates in a neighborhood through job access service at a cost of perhaps a hundred thousand per extra job for a neighborhood resident. I want to just give one example of a job access service that my employer, the Upjohn Institute, runs. In addition to having a research operation, we have been running job training programs in Southwest Michigan since the 1970s. And one thing we run are employer resource networks. They provide success coaches that participating employers get this service of a success coach who works with disadvantaged new hires, tries to help with attendance and workplace relationship issues. It’s kind of a soft skill type training, if you want to look at it that way. They try to help people locate childcare and they can provide up to a thousand dollar loan to get a car fixed. So this is what I mean by job access services, the household services to help people get jobs and to help people keep those jobs in the long term.

Well, let me stop there and I will now turn things over to Emily.

Emily Parker

Okay. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for taking time to be here today, and thank you to Heidi and all of the organizers for putting together this fantastic webinar. So again, I’m Emily Parker. I’m an assistant professor at Rutgers, and I’m going to be sharing with you co-authored work with Laura Tach, Alex Cooperstock, and Sam Dodini on federal place-based policies and the geography of inequality. Next.

So we know that areas of concentrated disadvantage have long been features of the US landscape. Concentrated disadvantage is often marked by substandard housing, under-resourced schools, fewer employment opportunities, more hazardous health conditions, as well as greater exposure to crime and violence. And racially and economically exclusionary public policies have played a significant role in creating, institutionalizing, and reinforcing the concentration of poverty. This includes practices such as redlining, citing of public housing, discrimination in lending, and so forth. Collectively, these policies have contributed to spatial inequalities and access to neighborhood amenities and resources, and these environments can in turn impact residents’ well-being as well as children’s prospects for upward mobility and intergenerational accumulation of wealth. Next.

So against this historical and ongoing exclusion, some public and community leaders have worked to alleviate these forms of concentrated disadvantage, and a particularly popular mechanism they have turned to is federal place-based policies. As the name suggests, place-based policies define eligibility based on geographic characteristics and target resources to disadvantaged areas, typically through using measures such as poverty rates, unemployment rates, et cetera. Broadly speaking, these policies aim to improve various aspects of neighborhood environments and enhance opportunities for residents within target areas. Next slide.

So what do we know about the impact of place-based policies? So first, most existing research tends to focus on a handful of high-profile place-based policies. One that Tim just mentioned is particularly popular, focusing on empowerment zones for those of us interested in economic development. In the domain of housing, many have examined the impacts of HOPE VI as another example. And typically, we approach this study of policies by looking at one at a time, rather than looking at all of the ones that affect disadvantaged places, even though they have multiple funding streams often coming through. To the extent that scholars have looked at multiple policies together, this tends to be local case studies of specific cities or neighborhoods. These do provide really rich information on those communities, but they don’t tell us about the scope or impacts at a national scale. So currently, we are left with a limited understanding of the scope and significance of place-based policymaking as a whole. Next slide.

So in this recently published paper, which I encourage you to access for free using the QR code on the slide, we examine these questions, [including] how much federal place-based investment has occurred, and where has the money gone? Secondly, what kinds of places have tended to receive more or less federal place-based funding? Next.

So we collected data on 25 federal place-based programs that are listed here across multiple domains, including housing, economic development, crime, education, health, and what we call multidimensional programs that have multiple domains that they focus on. These programs include a range of funding forms that include competitive grants, tax credits, as well as formula funding. All of these are federal programs, so note that we are not including very important actions taken by states, local governments, or private or philanthropic efforts, and all of our data was collected from publicly available sources. Next.

So in total, we identified $471 billion in federal place-based funding from 1990 to 2019, and we linked all of this funding to its geographic target, so either at the county level or at the census tract level, if possible. So this total amount equates to a per capita basis of nearly $1,700 per person, or close to $12,800 per person in poverty. And you can see in this map that the funding has really been widespread over this period. Notably, only 23 counties received no funding at all. Next slide.

As for neighborhoods, these are the cities in which a census tract topped our list of the most funded neighborhoods. You’ll see that New Orleans is at the top of the list, and it has the only billion dollar tract. This was largely following the recovery efforts following Hurricane Katrina, and even though none of these are specifically disaster-related funding, they’re responding to the distress following Hurricane Katrina. Another important thing to note is that we find 60% of high poverty neighborhoods did receive funding from multiple place-based programs, which underscores the importance of policy layering. Next slide.

This figure shows the growth of federal place-based investment over time. This started at less than $5 billion per year in the 1990s, whereas by the end of that decade, it grew to about $10 billion, so doubling in the first decade. Annual funding then continued to substantially increase during the 2000s, which was largely due to the creation of economic development programs such as the New Markets Tax Credit. Federal place-based funding then peaked during the Great Recession at about $23 billion annually, which was fueled by additional temporary relief for existing programs, as well as the creation of several new programs. So after this spike during the recession, place-based funding declined slightly, but has remained higher than pre-recession levels. Next slide.

So this figure looks at what happened to high-poverty counties that received different levels of initial investment in the 1990s. So what we’re particularly interested in is that top line here, which is the 95th percentile of high-poverty counties. So those are the places that received the most money initially. And over time, these initial disparities in funding amounts compounded substantially over those decades. So by 2019, this had accumulated so much that the initial highest-funded counties received $2.6 billion annually compared to just $742 million for the next set of line there, which is the middle 50% of counties. So this is a gap of almost $2 billion, again, comparing between similarly high-poverty counties. Next slide.

To examine what kinds of places were more likely to receive place-based funding, we use a pooled OLS regression at the county level, as well as [at] the census tract. We use predictors and controls from the beginning of the decade. And then finally, for our tract-level analysis, we use multi-level models and cross-level interactions to examine how the broader county-level context matters to those neighborhoods. Next.

So we have a lot of results, but I’m going to just briefly highlight the main ones here. I encourage you to look at the paper for the full story. We find that places received more federal funding if they have greater levels of economic disadvantage. This is expected based on the funding priorities and eligibility criteria. We also find that net of economic disadvantage, greater shares of Black residents also predicts more federal place-based funding. Although none of the policies that we examine are explicitly racially targeted, the history of disinvestment in minority neighborhoods means that they are more likely to be eligible for this type of funding. We also find that places with strong and improving housing markets tend to receive more funding. This means places that have lower vacancy rates, more new construction, and greater home value appreciation.

Finally, we find that areas with higher densities of nonprofits also received more funding. So for many of the programs that we are studying here, nonprofits are often the beneficiaries of funding and apply for grants and distribute the programming to their communities so that higher density predicted more funding. The results are generally consistent across the county and neighborhood level, but the broader context is also very important for neighborhoods. Next slide.

This figure shows a cross-level interaction between the neighborhood and the county-level economic disadvantage. These are separate regression lines for tracts between the fifth and 95th percentile of economic disadvantage. So what we find is that the most economically disadvantaged tracts received more federal place-based funding if they were located in more economically advantaged counties. So that’s the circle on the slide here. Those are those places.

The opposite is true for more economically advantaged tracts. Being in a more economically disadvantaged county was positively associated with significantly more place-based funding for those more economically advantaged tracts.

So the interaction between different levels of geography also provides greater context for interpreting where a place-based funding is more likely to go. Next slide.

So to summarize, we find that federal place-based funding has grown substantially since the 1990s and now touches most parts of the country. However, we find that some disadvantaged places benefit more from this type of funding than do others, and our study aims to explain why. We find that high-poverty counties receiving large amounts of funding initially in the 1990s would go on to accrue the most funding over the whole period, spurring a process of cumulative advantage. Our findings also show the importance of nonprofit density and housing markets for attracting federal place-based funding. This could potentially exacerbate spatial inequality, so we argue that these existing resources could compound over time, giving the more advantaged of disadvantaged places a competitive edge for receiving greater federal place-based funding.

We have a number of ongoing projects. First, examining the cumulative and collective impacts of these policies jointly on neighborhood change. I’d be happy to discuss the preliminary findings in Q&A. We’re also studying associations with growing place-based disparities in mortality, as well as analyzing overlaps with person-based safety net programs at state and local levels. So stay tuned for those papers in the future. Next.

So just to wrap up, thank you so much for listening. I look forward to any questions or comments, and you can find my contact information here as well as another QR code to access the paper that I presented. And I can now turn it over to Dana.

Dana Inman

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for this opportunity to present about the Metro Atlanta Exchange for Workforce Solutions, also known as MAX. We are a regional collaborative and membership organization based in the Metro Atlanta area in the state of Georgia. We represent a place-based effort to really bring together economic development, workforce development, and job seekers and employers to really strengthen Atlanta’s workforce ecosystem, which for our purposes covers about 11 counties. Some of those [are] mostly urban counties, however, we do also have some rural counties that are included in that catchment area. Next slide.

So the planning for MAX actually began in 2013. About 10 or so leaders came together to try to respond to the need for a better connected workforce ecosystem. Some of the things that were happening at that time really were that workforce development, economic development, employers, job seekers, et cetera, weren’t in the same rooms. So no one knew who was doing what and for whom. We also realized that our workforce providers needed better access to their services and better awareness of the services they provided. Also, from a research perspective, we realized that we needed more information, more data on what was happening, what wasn’t happening, where the gaps were, and how these services were aligned to the regional labor market.

In early 2014, that steering committee came together to really start focusing on how do we at least gather information about what services are available. So they started with creating a provider portal. This portal from the beginning combined about 400 programs that were being offered within the Atlanta area and mapped those programs so that people at least were aware of what was happening. The steering committee continued to meet, and then in December of 2014, they launched MAX as a workforce development network. As you can see, really the focus then was to build, nurture, and maintain connections.

So initially it was about, how do we know each other? How do people get to know each other within the ecosystem? And then we really thought about, how do we continue to improve the MAX provider portal to raise visibility about programs and services that were being offered to develop consistent and aligned research agenda? So a lot of information was being distributed, but there wasn’t really a consistent and aligned agenda for how that information was being dispersed and who was using that information. And then to continue to convene stakeholders to develop strategies and mitigate access issues.

So after we launched in 2014, for the next several years, we really continued to meet as the steering committee. They launched some additional services, created some initial goals around what MAX was going to do and really worked to align the system overall. In 2017, we adopted some organizational bylaws. We launched a provider council. So to bring together the nonprofit organizations and the workforce boards to talk about what providers were facing and how we can help them to increase their access. And we also launched a data council in 2018. So the data council really was, again, how do we combine all this research and data tools into one area so everyone had access to those?

In 2019, we also relaunched the provider portal with more functionality. So if you go to our website, you can see the portal is still there. It’s about 600 programs that are being featured. You can see it as a list, you can see it as a map, and you can also filter by different criteria. So it is a great tool that has continued to exist. In 2021, we decided at the end of a pandemic to launch as a membership organization, so that was a lot of fun. Next slide, please.

So today, MAX really exists, we are a standalone Georgia-based 501c3 and we are a blend of a couple different components. So we serve as an umbrella entity for better accessing the system overall. We are a membership association, so we have about 400 active members within the organization. And then we also serve as a backbone for helping to facilitate a large-scale workforce development and economic development projects within the Atlanta area. Next slide.

Here is our mission. We adopted this mission in 2024 to advance economic resilience in the Atlanta region by strengthening connections, collaboration, and practices. And I will go into more detail about how we do that, but we really wanted to come together to think about what is not happening already. We didn’t want to duplicate services that were already being done with other organizations or other collaborators, but what wasn’t happening and really coalescing around a mission that really talked about economic resilience. Next slide.

Here is our four big goals that we work towards as it relates to MAX. Improving alignment, so that is a really big thing for us. We want to make sure that the ecosystem works for everyone, for providers, for employers, and for job seekers. So we approach the work from that perspective as, does this work for everybody? We work to increase awareness and visibility of things that are already happening within the workforce system. We provide a lot of opportunity to increase the quality, capacity, and effectiveness of a workforce system. And the fourth one is probably the most important in terms of remaining a very neutral third-party convener. And so sometimes that’s easier said than others, but we’re really, really focused on trying to be neutral and bringing people to the table that can have these really strategic conversations about how we move the system forward. Next slide.

I think one of the great things about MAX is that we connect all the dots together. So everyone is represented within MAX, from the local workforce boards, the educational systems, state and federal agencies, nonprofit providers. We have funders at the table, we have employers at the table, we have economic development at the table, which is a little bit different than some other collaboratives, but it really does build a robust system so that we are all working together in unison as we are coaching how to increase the talent within the state of Georgia. Next slide.

I’ve included this slide so you can see what our leadership structure looks like. It is definitely thinking about how do we engage not only multiple systems, but how do we engage those systems at multiple levels within their systems? So we start off with a board of directors. It is a powerhouse of really great state and local leaders. We have on our board of directors the Technical College System of Georgia, the University System of Georgia, Department of Education, Department of Labor, Department of Human Services. We have the Environmental Finance Agency. We have all five workforce boards that represent our 11 counties [that] are represented on the MAX board. We have two Chambers of Commerce, the local Metro Atlanta Chamber, as well as the Georgia State Chamber. We have economic development agencies and large employers like Georgia Power. We also have nonprofit agencies. We have just a number of organizations that are all committed. And last but not least, obviously the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. We definitely appreciate them being at the table and have to give a personal shout-out to Karen Leone de Nie for her work and all that she does to support MAX. And her team [too].

So there’s some other things on the screen in terms of how also we serve the community and our leadership structure. We have a collaborative council, which is senior leaders within the ecosystem that come together to discuss really specific strategies and things that are affecting all of the ecosystem overall, and think about how do we work together to address those issues and to promote best practices? Our provider council, again, is the leaders of nonprofit and community-based organizations that are working to inform the work of MAX, but also increase access to the job seekers that we serve. Our workforce boards are also represented on the provider council as well, as well as our technical college system.

And then we have a data council. So that data council is data experts and researchers who inform the work of MAX and each other. They all come together once a month really to think about data, to review data that is impacting the system, and then they curate those data resources and place those on our website. And finally, we have a member engagement council that really is more of an internal focus on how do we improve the experience of all of our members? Next slide.

So a couple of ways that we serve. We have a lot of things going on, so I just wanted to summarize those for some of you who may be thinking about how to create a regional collaborative similar to what MAX does. We have a MAX Mondays, which is our weekly listserv that goes to about 2,600 people. That features anywhere from 80 to 100 pages of content every week. So we are doing a lot of work to make sure that we are curating information from different parts of the ecosystem and putting them together in one place. So that goes out every Monday. Our website obviously has huge resources, calendar of events, we have job boards, we have an RFP board as well. So if an agency is looking to hire or looking for consultant and project managers, they’re able to place those on our website and get interest from that way. I mentioned the resource library. Again, that is managed by our data council. It’s a great resource—studies, reports, data tools, links to other data sources, and it really is a great list. They make sure that it’s updated and that it’s relevant to the work that we’re doing. Next slide.

Professional development is a huge focus of what we do because we want to make sure that we are empowering our agencies and our members to do the best work that they can. And so we do that through a couple of different ways. Our MAX Academy is probably our largest offering as it relates to that. We host that four or five times a year, and it is specific to mostly frontline staff and direct service staff. It’s a full day of workshops related to a specific topic. So previous topics include, and have included, second chance employment. It has included working with seniors and older adults and reengaging them into the workforce. Our next one upcoming is around apprenticeships and how to start and build on apprenticeship programs. So those academies really do provide a lot of detail about how to do the work that we all are working towards.

MAX Minutes, that’s our monthly webinar series where we provide timely insights from key experts on workforce trends, opportunities, and hot topics. MAX Talks is our employer-facing initiative. So we go onsite to employers and hear more about their business needs, their hiring needs, and any trends that we need to be aware of as we are trying to help them with their talent needs. And then Leadership MAX is our newest offering. It is a full-year cohort-based leadership development program for existing and emerging leaders within the workforce development field. And we launched that two years ago. We’re in our second cohort now. Each month that cohort gets together and focuses on specific topics within workforce. We bring in speakers and it’s really interactive and it’s a way to really increase the capacity of the workforce development system within the practitioners that work in it. Next slide.

And lastly, just in terms of building awareness, so I mentioned our provider portal, again, that is available on our website. There’s about 600 programs that are featured on there that can be filtered based on what you’re looking for. We have a member portal, so the backend of our website is also there, is for our member-only section. We can collaborate with each other, connect with each other, build on our expertise. We have a blog, we have member spotlights, and we also do an annual meeting as well. So there’s a lot of ways to plug into MAX, and we try to make sure that everyone has the same access so that everyone feels like they have a seat at the table. Next slide. So I just wanted to talk about a couple of things that have worked well and some lessons learned as we have gone over this last 10 plus years as it relates to MAX. Next slide.

So one of the things we always talk about is the speed of trust. So for us, that really means because we are all online, we’ve all come together and are working towards common goals. It really does speed up the trust that it takes to move the system forward. So if a large employer is coming and moving into Georgia and they need 500 new people to hire, it’s going to take all of us working together. And so I know what Goodwill does, I know what Jewish Family Career Services does, so we can move together quicker because we all have that kind of speed of trust built in. I think also what works well is the coordination between the five workforce boards.

So as many of you guys know, workforce boards are very particular. They have their own processes and we’ve worked to make sure that things are working, aligned, between those five boards, including a common application process now. So you can apply to one portal and it will route your application to the correct workforce board so that you don’t have to figure that out on your own. We also remain neutral. So I mentioned that before, that helps us to bring people to the table and have conversations because they don’t feel like we are representing one agency versus the other.

Because of the work with MAX, we have helped to retain more federal dollars. So Atlanta has historically had some challenges with having to return funds for underspending, and so we have really focused on making sure that that doesn’t happen. So every dollar that comes into Atlanta is really maximized as much as possible. We’ve increased partnerships and collaboration and increased capacity with some organizations, and more importantly, have reduced duplication. And then focusing on the professional development of workforce staff has been really key to make sure we are having better retention and better outcomes as it relates to the work that we’re doing. Next slide.

Some lessons learned is just intentionality is key. So people need to believe that you say you’re going to do what you’re going to do. So we make sure that we are not … Although we have a lot of things going on, we want to make sure that everything that we do has intention and that it is working, again, towards those common goals. That need to maintain neutrality. I’ll say that again because that really is important in terms of being a convener. We always ask ourselves, if not, but for MAX. So we don’t want to duplicate what other people are doing. If someone else has a business council, we’re not going to create a business council. But if that business council obviously is not working well, then we’re going to try to work with them to get that to where we need to get it to for it to function for the entire ecosystem.

We really believe that every partner at the table should have an equal seat. We’re willing to make the table longer, not shorter, to make sure that everyone, again, feels like they have an equal seat, their equal voice. The Department of Human Services is equally as important as Strive Atlanta in terms of the work that they’re doing. And so we want to make sure that everyone feels that there’s equality at the table. We stay flexible and nimble. And this last couple of years, particularly last year, as things have been changing on the federal landscape, we have to make sure that we are addressing the needs of member organizations and members as their needs have changed.

As an example, for last year, we added a strategy around, how do we help smaller nonprofits who may have lost funding because of some of the federal changes continue to exist and sustain? And so we’re partnering with the Georgia Center for Nonprofits to make sure people or agencies have resources to do things like cash forecasting and things like that, that they maybe [do] not have the ability to do on their own. And lastly, just to crawl before you walk and walk before you run. So we take our time to make decisions to make sure that we are not biting off more than we can chew, but really trying to, again, do as much as we can to move the system forward.

Next slide. So that’s it on my presentation. And again, thank you, and I will turn it back over to Heidi.

Heidi Kaplan

Pressing my buttons too many times on muting and video. Anyway, first I want to thank all of you because I really enjoyed all those presentations. And for the audience, I hope they enjoyed what I did, which was seeing a very big picture theoretical on what place-based policies can be or might be. And then going to look at some actual practices around federal funding and finally looking at a practice on the ground that I think is quite unique. I want to ask each of you a couple questions about how you measure success. And Tim, I’m actually going to start with you and thinking about, you had a slide there on cost per job created, and I was curious what went into how you determine the cost per job and what type of things you measured there and whether you measured for, we’re always looking to define, quality jobs and whether there was any place in there that you considered only certain types of jobs in your cost per job.

Tim Bartik

Well, the cost per job does several adjustments. I’m looking at the cost of actually increasing the employment rate by one job. I mean, I’m not just looking at what the cost is to create a job. I want to know whether someone actually gets a job who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten it. So that’s what I mean by cost per job in that table. And there are a couple adjustments. One is that when you provide a tax incentive or, for that matter, when you provide customized job training or infrastructure to try to encourage firms to expand, you don’t have a 100% success rate. In fact, the estimates are, for most of these, the success rate is like 25% or less. That is, 75% of the time the same jobs would’ve been created anyway and you just provided cash or services that you didn’t need to do in order to create the job. And only 25% of the time would the job not have been created but for the incentive.

So you need to adjust the cost per job for that. You need to adjust for the multiplier, which is very important. You directly create jobs in some auto electric vehicle plant or a battery plant or whatever, or for that matter, a data center. Are there any spinoff jobs? Are there any multiplier jobs in suppliers or in retailers? And you have to correct for that. And finally, you have to correct for, do the jobs actually lead to increased employment rates? And one of the key aspects of my research is this [factor of whether or not the jobs increase the employment rate] differs a lot between distressed local labor markets and booming ones. In distressed local labor markets, half the jobs increase the employment rate. In a booming local labor market, almost none of them do.

So frankly, from a point of view of local residents, simply increasing jobs in an area that already has a very high employment rate just fuels in-migration, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t do anything necessarily to raise the living standards of the current residents.

I know that you asked about quality jobs. I should mention that. We don’t really know whether the cost per job differs between quality jobs and non-quality jobs, to be honest with you. The research, we simply don’t know how the cost per job created differs between different industries and different types of jobs. It would be nice if we did. It’s an important area of research. I agree with you that the quality of job’s important, although I would say quality adjusted for the credential requirements. In other words, a real quality job is not necessarily one that pays well, but has such high credential requirements that people can’t access that. It needs to pay well relative to the credentials required. And we really don’t have great research on what types of programs are … Are those types of jobs easier to affect than say jobs that are lower quality? We don’t know.

Heidi Kaplan

Thank you. I appreciate that. And I particularly appreciate the context with what booming economies look like and it makes a big difference thinking about, have the jobs creating a job compared to a distressed area. Emily, a similar question on success measures. Have you done any looks at return on investment or whether there’s a bang for the buck on some of these communities that were receiving large amounts of federal dollars?

Emily Parker

Yeah, we haven’t done any sort of specific impact analysis in that way, but I’ve had several questions in the chat there asking about our work on the collective and cumulative impacts. And for that ongoing work, which hopefully we should have a working draft once the semester finishes and we can get back to research, we’re generally finding that the more different programs that are invested in a neighborhood tends to lead to more neighborhood change. So more than just one program having a radical change on a neighborhood, it really matters how many types of funding they are getting, and also the mix of that funding. So in that particular paper, we’re focused mostly on the economic development and housing programs. And when we see them coupled together, we tend to see the best benefit.

So for example, economic development programs that meet our definition of place-based, we find that they collectively improve the local economic and housing indicators, but also can induce racialized patterns of residential displacement. When those economic development programs are coupled with place-based housing programs, someone brought up LIHTC, yes, that’s included, and is our biggest place-based program. When those housing programs also go to the same place as the Economic Development Program funding, this is when we really see the biggest bang for the buck in terms of neighborhood improvement and less displacement of what we think are incumbent residents. We also see that the amount of time that neighborhoods are receiving this funding matters, so one-off or short-term programs, less of a bang for the buck than those that are receiving funding for a significant number of years. So that’s the best way I can answer now, and I’m happy to respond to any emails if you’d like to see a working draft when that’s available.

Heidi Kaplan

Well, that sounds amazing. I’m sure you’re going to get a large response from that offer. Dana, how does MAX think about success and how has that changed at all over the years?

Dana Inman

So we think about it in two ways. One, internal to MAX as an organization, a membership association, how effective are we at engaging members, engaging new stakeholders at the table, ensuring that we are creating opportunities to network and form additional partnerships? And then we look externally at, how are we doing as a region in terms of workforce? And so we’ve been focused on the internal part of it and putting systems in place. We do surveys and assessments with our members and now looking more external.

About three years ago, well, actually four years ago now, we did a community impact assessment that was led by our data council. Someone from Georgia Power—and also the Atlanta Fed—was really engaged in that. And we got a lot of data from our member organizations about what they were doing in the field, what their impact was, how many people they were serving, what the outcomes were related to that service. But there was such a huge disparity in the type of agency that responded that it was hard to put it into a really comprehensive report.

So you have an agency like the Goodwill of North Georgia that serves 20,000 people and an organization like Atlanta Center for Self-Sufficiency who serves 500. And so it was really hard to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. And so what we’ve decided to do this year is actually create more of a “state of the workforce” impact report in collaboration with the Metro Atlanta Chamber. And so we are looking at it from both an employer side and a workforce provider side and going to combine some data together to create an annual report of, what does workforce look like in the Metro Atlanta area?

So it’ll include information about services and providers and include information about outcomes related to that work. And then it’ll also include, from the employer perspective, identifying any gaps that they have as it relates to filling their talent needs as well. So we are working on that this year.

Heidi Kaplan

Thanks, Dana. I know quite a bit about MAX because of your relationship with the Fed, as you’ve mentioned. I think it’s amazing to see this level of collaboration on the local level. I’ve always been curious, is this program replicated anywhere or [is there] anything similar to it? And, because it’s not, as far as I’m aware. If it’s not, what do you think the barriers are to other communities building out a similar type of collaboration?

Dana Inman

Honestly, I have not heard of anyone that does it on our scale. There are obviously some other kinds of regional collaboratives that mostly focus on either workforce or economic development and not bringing those together. We have talked about, right now we’re regional, do we go statewide and think about how we increase our reach as well? And we’re happy to talk to any organization that’s willing or wanting to replicate what we do. I think the most important thing in terms of, rather than phrasing it in terms of barriers, I think in terms of what assets you need, I think there has to be this public will between the public systems first to see that there is a need for them to work together. I think in Atlanta, we had some really key leaders at the steering committee level that really were able to galvanize people to say, this is necessary.

I will also say data helps to drive that point home. So a few years ago, the Raj Chetty data that said Atlanta was ranked 49th as it relates to economic mobility helped to fuel some of this work, too. Well, yeah, so I think bringing the data to the table to tell people, “Listen, this has to happen, otherwise we’re going to continue to fall behind.” I think also creating those equal slots at the table. So again, those workforce providers, being at the table with Department of Human Services and the large public systems, I think those are needed to make sure that you’re being successful. And I would say having that neutral party in the middle of the dots to connect everybody together is also really crucial in terms of replicating what we’ve done at MAX.

Heidi Kaplan

Thanks. I think Chetty’s work has motivated a lot of people. I saw there was a comment about some of his work in the Q&A as well, so I think there’s a lot of references to that and spurring people to learn from each other. Emily, you talked quite a bit about the areas that receive the most funding, including areas with the most economic distress, which is, I suspect, a good thing. You also talked about those areas with greater nonprofit capacity. Do you have any thoughts on how we can improve capacity in areas that don’t have a MAX or don’t have other nonprofits in place to help attract funds and distribute funds?

Emily Parker

Yeah, great question. It is a bit of a chicken or the egg problem because in order to get funding, you need the resources to apply for it. So it’s hard to figure out the right mechanism to address. But I would say from the federal policymaking perspective, to potentially put a little bit less emphasis in evaluating proposals on the existing nonprofit infrastructure. I think it’s a low-risk approach to try to provide funding to places that already have that infrastructure in place, but a lot of places get left behind. The ones that don’t have a strong existing nonprofit sector, they are not getting the same amount of funding, even though they have similar need.

So from the federal policymaking perspective, trying to take that criteria or that preference for existing capacity and finding places that don’t have that capacity, but perhaps funding initiatives targeted at those places to build up their system of the nonprofit sector. Yeah, so I think that would help a lot with spreading the funding more evenly.

I also think that coordination between federal agencies is really important and something that would probably improve their targeted focus on certain neighborhoods because, as I said, in our ongoing work, we do find that investing a lot from different funding streams in one neighborhood really matters. And if federal agencies were to coordinate that, I think it could be potentially more equitable and more effective. I think those were the main points that you asked about. Yeah, thanks.

Heidi Kaplan

Perfect. Thank you. And Tim, a similar question. You pointed out, I couldn’t help but notice, that there was quite a few older industrial cities that were on the top of your list of most distressed. So I don’t know what the capacity is, nonprofit capacity, in each of those cities that you named, but clearly they’ve been distressed for a long time, for decades now. And I didn’t know if you had any thoughts about, again, building capacity or thinking about how to distribute federal funds in a different way.

Tim Bartik

Well, first of all, from my perspective, we first of all would have to decide either at the federal level or at the state level to actually significantly fund what I’m calling place-based jobs policies. So I don’t really quarrel with Emily’s definition of what she’s defining as place-based policies. I would just note that a lot of them, as she kind of alluded to, they’re basically real estate development programs. And frankly, a real estate development program may improve a neighborhood in the sense of, you put in some nice buildings, the amenities improve somewhat, but why on earth should the original residents of that neighborhood care? How is it good for them? I mean, it makes it maybe a little more pleasant place to live, but it just drives up the rents.

So unless you are actually getting more people into jobs and into good jobs, you’re not working on the right problem. You’re not targeting the right problem. So I think the first thing to do is to have the federal government actually focus on this. You can find in the Washington Center for Equitable Growth [report], and other things I’ve written, proposals for up to $20 billion a year in federal block grants. There’s already an existing program.

What I think is needed to help communities is, you need some kind of grant program that rewards either local labor markets or neighborhoods that are able to come up with a comprehensive strategy for getting more people into jobs. And you need to have it be at a level that will actually make a difference. You need to fundamentally believe that there are huge spillover benefits of getting more people into good jobs in neighborhoods or in local labor markets. If you don’t believe that, there’s no point in any of the place-based policy. You have to believe that there’s strong spillovers here, that it can help increase the overall national employment rate. It can help us improve the inflation–unemployment trade-off, which is something the Fed’s interested in.

So we need to really, first of all, decide to invest in this, and then we need to basically provide technical assistance to help people get their act together to come up with a comprehensive plan. Because I would agree with you that there is a problem of capacity in many communities. Certainly this is true of many rural communities. It also can be, in many cases, true of urban neighborhoods. They don’t have sufficient leadership capacity to effectively administer these funds, and you need to help, try, to generate that. But you first of all need to decide, are we going to actually invest in this? And what I pushed over the years is, states are spending about $70 billion a year on business tax incentives. Why not divert $20 billion to what I’m calling place-based job strategies?

Heidi Kaplan

Thank you. That’s definitely food for thought. So we have a huge number of questions in the Q&A from the audience, but I’m going to put one more question to each of you from myself first, and then I’m going to turn to this large queue that we have. One thing that we did not talk about today is self-employment as a way to generate jobs, whether that is just purely self-employment in a non-employee-based firm or just very small businesses. Have any of you thought about small business in your work and how to address employment issues in distressed areas in this way?

Tim Bartik

I’ve done some work on small business development. And I basically consider entrepreneurship training, there is some research indicating it can work. I see that as simply another form of job training. Some people are interested in starting their own business. A lot of people aren’t. That’s all good. You’re not trying to push people into starting up their own business if they don’t really want to do it. On the other hand, you want to empower people to be able to do it.

Now, whether or not … And there’s a lot of evidence that business advice as well as some financing can be very effective. In other words, people don’t necessarily know how to do market research and how to figure out whether or not this restaurant has a chance of surviving. You don’t want people losing their shirt on starting up their own business. And sometimes the best thing you do is talk someone out of starting a business and say, “Look, what you want to do is not going to be feasible, at least at this location.”

But yeah, I think that that should be part of the portfolio of job training programs broadly defined that, say, a distressed neighborhood undertakes. At the local labor market level, if you want to boost local labor market, you need to focus on small and medium-sized businesses and so-called export-based businesses that ship their goods and services outside of the area you’re in. And again, business advice programs can be very effective in doing that.

Heidi Kaplan

Emily, any thoughts?

Emily Parker

Sadly, we don’t really have a focus of self-employment or small businesses because we are just following what the federal policies, where they take us. So if there are new initiatives at the federal level that target small businesses or self-employment, we would certainly start to include that in our data collection. But Dana, do you have any …

Dana Inman

Yeah, I agree with everything that Tim said. I think there’s a growing appetite to include those into more of the workforce programs. I think a lot of that is tied to public workforce dollars, and if they count those self-employment jobs as placements, so a lot of workforce boards … And someone asked in the queue, what is a workforce board? So I will make sure I cover that. So those [workforce boards] are how the local, at least in Georgia, the dollars flow from the federal government to the state, to the local boards that are then in control of how those dollars get to providers, businesses, et cetera. So there’s local control over how those dollars are spent. At least currently; that may change. But I will say there have been more conversations around, how do we include self-employment when we are reporting on placement and outcomes because we recognize that there is a gap—that we’re missing a lot of people who could be counted as successful outcomes, but we’re not counting them now because it’s a self-employment outcome. So, definitely agree with Tim. We need more work in that area.

Heidi Kaplan

Fantastic. Thank you all. I’m going to start in with … I think you can see there’s a lot of questions in the Q&A, so I’m going to start in with a question for Tim about the neighborhood data you presented and whether you have neighborhood-level data for rural areas or whether there’s any way to study what’s happening on the neighborhood level in rural areas.

Tim Bartik

Yes. If you Google Upjohn Institute Economic Distress Map, you will find a map of the US [that] allows you to look at distress in terms of the employment, the population ratio or employment rate for so called prime age workers, age 25 to 54 at the state level, at the county level, at the local labor market level, and at the census tract level. So if a neighborhood … Now, it doesn’t go below the census tract level, but it has data on that, and then it classifies areas as either being fully employed, close to fully employed, marginally distressed, distressed, and severely distressed. So yes, you can find data on this, and hopefully you’ll find that map easy to navigate, and there’s a methodology [section] that explains how we do the calculations.

Heidi Kaplan

Great. Another data question, and I know that Upjohn has a lot of data available. Do you have data that you can relate to distress on broadband, climate resiliency, or transportation vulnerabilities?

Tim Bartik

No, I have not looked at that. So I don’t have … I think all those things are important. Certainly the broadband thing is very important, particularly in the era when we move more to remote work. I actually think one area that typically rural areas need to think through—and is a matter of national concern—is what effect national policy towards remote work might have on distressed rural communities. If you give people more of a chance to live where they want to and work in other places, it could make a huge difference for certain rural communities as one viable way of increasing their economic base. And there needs to be a lot more research on that. There is some research that’s been done, but my colleague Brian Asquith at the institute’s done a little research on that, but it’s something we need to do a lot more with.

Heidi Kaplan

Thank you. So here’s a question for Emily, and it’s a pretty philosophical question. Somebody is asking how we can, as a society, assist targeted or distressed areas without creating a culture of dependence? Just curious of your thoughts on this one.

Emily Parker

Yeah, that’s tough because I understand the argument that you don’t want places to be reliant upon continued funding and you want them to become sustainable on their own. I do hope that in the context of our ongoing work, we can try to identify some sort of ideal length of time in which neighborhoods are receiving support, the ideal coupling of these programs together, the policy layering that I mentioned to help neighborhoods become the success in terms of neighborhood improvement and revitalization, that those could be continued without continued federal support.

I do think that although the federal funding is just the tip of the iceberg and there’s a lot of other public and private efforts going into a lot of these neighborhoods, the federal funding is really important, I would say, to spur those processes and get other actors involved in investing in communities.

So I do think that I don’t see the need of federal place-based funding to really go away, but I do think that there are important actions that can happen in a reasonable timescale to ensure that places can attract investment from other sources beyond the federal government. So that’s a preliminary answer for a tricky question and something that I really appreciate and we’ll keep considering.

Heidi Kaplan

Yeah. Sorry to put you on the spot. I appreciate that question from the audience, and I do think you could probably do a whole webinar on that topic and go forward with that. So thank you for considering it and thank you to the audience for providing it.

Dana, the audience is curious about the role of employers with MAX and how you keep them involved and how you work with them.

Dana Inman

Yeah, so great question. So they’re involved in every layer of the work that we do. So they’re represented on the board of directors. The largest employers in the state are the state agencies, and so they represent both the service side and the employer side in terms of what their needs are. We also have agencies like Georgia Power and Google and Amazon engaged in the work as well, both from a funding perspective, but also as participating in our different councils.

We have, right now kind of looking at, do we create a specific council around business and business development? And I’ll go back to the comment about we don’t want to duplicate what other agencies are doing. So the chamber has a business council, both chambers have a business council, Goodwill has a business council. There’s a lot of agencies that already do that, and so we didn’t want to duplicate that. However, we are finding that we need a place where we can discuss employers and economic development in a different way, and so we are considering what that looks like.

The additional thing is that we have a strategic partnership with SHRM, the Society of Human Resource Managers. And so they are actively involved in MAX and we are actively involved in the work that they do to ensure that there is some crossover in terms of what employers need from a hiring perspective, and that we are being thoughtful about that as we are creating programs or expanding programs that focus on the job seeker side. So that is something that is near and dear to our hearts, obviously.

I think having economic developers on our board is also key because one of the things that we want to think about is, as these large projects come online, Georgia likes to say it’s the top talent for …for business. And so they are actively engaging business to come into the state. And so how are those business needs aligned with the job seeker needs? And so we are having those conversations on the MAX board level and the collaborative council levels to make sure that we are training talent to meet the business needs as they are coming in. So it’s great to have the economic developers involved in MAX because we get an earlier view on what’s happening and what’s to come. So I’ll say we are still evolving that, but they are actively engaged in a lot of important ways right now.

Heidi Kaplan

Perfect. Thank you. I have another question for all of you that I think is a little bit challenging, but I’m guessing you’ve been thinking about, and that is the role of AI as we think into the future. And the question is, how has AI and other emerging technologies presented either opportunities or challenges for local economies and for low-income communities? Again, I think we can do a whole webinar on this, but I’m curious [to hear] your initial thoughts. I think it’s on everybody’s mind right now.

Tim Bartik

I think it’s on everyone’s mind, but frankly, we don’t really have a great idea about exactly how AI will affect the labor market. I do think, I mean, the technology’s still developing, people are still figuring out how to use it, and does it complement certain types of skills? Does it substitute for given skills? I think some of the best work [that’s been] done on this is actually David Autor at MIT. So I would follow his work. He had a really good [podcast] interview the other day with Yascha Mounk about AI that I would highly recommend. And the one thing I want to mention is, it’s also a policy choice, by which I mean we can have policies that try to encourage AI to be used in a way that more complements worker skills rather than substitutes for them. So it’s not something that is written into the technology that it can only be used in a certain way. Who controls what the technology can do and how it is used is a really crucial issue.

Heidi Kaplan

Agreed. Emily, any thoughts?

Emily Parker

Yeah, I think AI, I mean, we’re all waiting to see what the effects are, but I think it underscores the need for not just place-based investment, but also person-based investment. I do think that the range of policies at least that we’re studying will not at all lose their relevance due to AI, and in fact, could become much, much more important for ensuring there’s a backbone to every community that can catch people who become unemployed due to AI or who can’t get jobs, like a lot of my students who are worrying about entering the labor market.

This type of federal investment, as Tim said, this is a really important policy choice that we need to continue or to increase our investment to ensure that there’s a safety net to catch people who are not able to enter the labor market due to the rapid changes that we’re experiencing. So, to be continued, but I do think that this change underscores the need for more investment.

Dana Inman

And I’ll say on the practitioner level, we are already having to incorporate that into all of our training programs, all of our job secret services, all of our employer engagement activities, because yes, it’s a policy issue and the federal government and our current administration has made it a specific policy that they want to promote. And so if you’ve applied for any federal grants this year, everything requires you to speak to how AI is going to be supplementing or augmenting or involved in the work that you’re projected to offer. And so it’s kind of a “have to” at this point, not a “want to.” It’s a have to make sure that it’s included in any proposals or funding that are seeking from a federal perspective.

I will also say from a job-seeker side, obviously we’re trying to be very flexible and understand, how do we prepare people for not just jobs for today, but also for jobs for tomorrow? And a couple of years ago we were focused on automation, and then AI even blew that out of the water. And so across the board, all of our workforce providers have made shifts and are thinking about, how do we ensure that we are offering training programs and employment opportunities and prepare people for those opportunities with AI, knowing that AI is, again, going to part of their work life?

As an example, we have a training program, an IT support desk training program, where Georgia Tech is one of our major employers, and we’ve had to layer AI onto every aspect of that curriculum because again, they have to make sure that they are at least comfortable with it or aware of it as they are going into the labor market now. So it is something that, whether we want to or not, [we] have had to embrace and incorporate into the work that we’re doing.

And then through MAX, we have done a MAX Academy on AI for the last three years. We know it’s coming, and then now it’s here, and then what’s going to happen next? So we’re continuing to provide resources and best practices for our members to ensure that they are aware of what’s happening and how they can ensure that they’re not being left behind as programs, but also their job seekers, are more prepared for the workforce.

Heidi Kaplan

Perfect. As we wrap up, I have one last question for all of you. This question came from the audience, but it’s one of my favorite questions. So it’s a question about the role that the Federal Reserve can play outside of just [conducting] research to support the work that all of you do. I don’t know if some of you have worked with the Fed more than others, but we would love to hear what we could do to help you in thinking about policy and practice. And Dana, I’ll start with you because we know you have a relationship with the Fed.

Dana Inman

Yeah, I was going to say, I’m probably biased because I think the Atlanta Fed is great. So in terms of, obviously we utilize a lot of the research that they do, but also the listening sessions that they offer are really key in terms of helping to connect some of the dots outside of workforce. So how are we thinking about how workforce intersects [with] housing? How are we thinking about how workforce intersects [with] minimum wage and the benefits cliff? And so there’s a lot of great tools that the Fed has available that we are utilizing in the work that we’re doing both at MAX and also with our individual organizations.

I think obviously from a research and data perspective, it’s really vital and useful information. We have a lot of those resource tools on our website that you can link to and find more information about. And I would say the last thing is being a thought leader in some of these things, again, around the intersection of how things are playing together. We can’t think about just jobs. We have to think about housing and economic development and all these sorts of things. And I think the Fed does a great job of doing [work at the] intersectionality of those things, and so it’s helpful.

I think from a people perspective, I think it’s great that, in Atlanta at least, [Fed employees are] really engaged in the work and on the ground. They’re involved in a lot of our councils, they’re involved in the metro chambers and all of those things, so their people are actually present, which is really key. And we get the cool opportunity to go tour the building sometimes too and see the vaults. So that’s also very cool.

Heidi Kaplan

Thank you so much. Tim or Emily, other ways we can be helpful?

Tim Bartik

Well, I think the Upjohn Institute in general and the Place-Based Research Center in particular, one thing that the regional Feds have is tremendous convening power. You can really pull together, help pull together, a lot of people. So we’ve worked with Chicago Fed, Philadelphia Fed, Atlanta Fed, a bunch of the regional Feds on different convenings to discuss place-based policy, and I think that’s good to continue.

The other avenue though I’d like to encourage, which I don’t know how I encourage, but somehow this place-baked work needs to get integrated into the overall thinking of the research division, the national research division of the Fed. There’s an older line of research in economics that talks about trying to improve the inflation–unemployment trade-off by investing, by trying to target more jobs towards the non-employed. There’s a whole literature on this. You can find this going back the 1970s, and that line of research kind of dropped. It became unfashionable. I don’t know, there were a variety of trends in macroeconomics that went away for a bit.

I think that needs to be restored. I think we need to think through what can we do through policy to really better achieve the dual mandate of the Fed of maximum employment, yet keeping inflation down. And so anything you guys in the Community Development Division can do to say to the macroeconomists, why aren’t you guys doing more research that integrates in some of these place problems, and some of these problems under employee groups, into how we approach macroeconomic policy? I think that would be helpful. If the Fed was advocating for place-based job strategies as a way of improving the inflation–unemployment trade-off, I think it would change the national conversation.

Heidi Kaplan

Yeah, I really appreciate that, especially because we are a large organization and we’re constantly trying to improve our communication across groups. So I will take that as a directive and something to work on. Thank you. Emily, any last thoughts?

Emily Parker

Yeah, I think what you’re doing today, convening all of us, creating a conversation, that’s of course an amazing opportunity and I really am grateful for the invitation to do that and would be happy to continue participating. From the academic side of things, I think you probably understand our publication incentives are quite different and often don’t lead to dissemination of our research findings into the hands of people who could actually really benefit from it.

So some sort of collaboration with translating our research findings and potentially sharing a more applied version of our work for policymakers and practitioners would be very, very much welcome. We get a lot of inquiries about our data and questions about it, and we are a very small team and we also teach and do a lot of other things. And so we’re very limited in how much we can actually respond to individual inquiries, but that sort of assistance and connection with other scholars and practitioners would be really awesome for the future.

Heidi Kaplan

I appreciate all of your participation. This was one of many attempts to bridge research with practice, so hopefully we’re chipping away at that goal. And again, thank you to the audience for joining us. Thank you to all the panelists. I’m going to turn it over to Whitney to close us out.

Whitney Felder

There I am. Thank you, Heidi. And thank you, panelists, for your time and your expertise today. Attendees, we’d also like to thank you for your time this afternoon and leave you with just a few quick reminders. After today’s session, you will be sent a survey. We would appreciate if you took just a few minutes to fill out the survey. Your feedback is really important and it helps us inform future sessions.

As we previously mentioned, this session will be available on fedcommunities.org in the coming week, so be sure to visit us if you need to go back and hear some of the good things you heard today. And also, if you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to register for the next seminar in the series, Place-Based Strategies: Strengthening Rural Economies Through Investment. That conversation will be happening Thursday, June 25th, and you can check out other place-based content at fedcommunities.org/topics/place-based.

Finally, be sure to subscribe to the Fed Communities monthly newsletter to stay connected. You can do so by visiting the Fed Communities website, clicking on the About Us tab located in that upper right-hand corner on the homepage and clicking subscribe. Thank you all again. I hope you have a great afternoon.