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Jonathan Morgan, PhD, is a tenured professor who focuses on economic and community development in his teaching and applied research. He has directed the IEDC-accredited Basic Economic Development Course at UNC-Chapel Hill since 2004, and further serves the field as a member of both IEDC’s board of directors and its Racism in Economic Development Committee. In this article, Prof. Morgan talks about the importance of lifelong learning, working effectively with public officials, the role of economic development in pandemic recovery, and more.

Dear friends and colleagues: I’m closing out 35 years leading a wonderful organization that has made an enormous difference in the lives of millions of people and in communities around the country. Thirty-five years. “That’s a long time,” is what some of you are probably thinking. “That’s too long,” might be your next observation. “Only 35 years?” might be the reply if you are a relative of mine. I want to draw your attention to something that the IEDC board likely wished it had known before hiring me, way, way back when Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Here is what I mean. My father worked for Westinghouse for more than 30 years; my sister worked for Ohio State University ...

Leaders in the innovation and technology space are stepping up to tackle staggering disparities for BIPOC and low-income communities by increasing the number of regional technology hubs, including current proposals in Congress to implement large-scale federal R&D funding for Midwestern and Southern metro centers. A recent Brookings webinar titled Leveraging Regional Tech Hubs to Advance Racial Equity discussed additional solutions to these disparities such as upscaling BIPOC talent and targeting companies to invest in their location’s talent base. From 2005 to 2017, five metro areas—Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego—contributed more than 90 percent of the U.S. innovation sector’s growth. ...

Last month the Business Forward podcast invited the Clean Slate Initiative’s managing director Sheena Meade and Microsoft’s director of justice reform and racial equity policy Danyelle Soloman to chat about what the Clean Slate Initiative is and how businesses around the country can get involved. The Clean Slate Initiative challenges status quo criminal justice laws which have historically excluded those with a criminal record from the workforce. Between 70 and 100 million people today, around one in three adults, hold a criminal record that limits them from opportunities in employment, education, and housing. Meade emphasized that over-incarceration in the United States is as much a workforce issue as it is a social justice ...

BIPOC communities have always carried a disproportionate environmental burden because they are frequently home to facilities that pollute and contaminate. IEDC recently hosted a webinar on environmental racism and sustainable development methods. Panelists discussed how to use sustainable development strategies to help build back these marginalized communities and end the cycle of environmental racism. A major takeaway from the discussion is that environmental racism is a complex issue that requires holistic examination. In impacted communities there has been a lack of community building and investment, leaving them easy targets for hazardous facilities to locate. Legislation has historically perpetuated environmental racism, and today ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of having a strong manufacturing sector in the United States. Even before the pandemic, estimates showed that an additional 2.4 million U.S. manufacturing workers would be needed in the next decade. The Urban Manufacturing Alliance and The Century Foundation’s Racial Equity and Advancing the Future of Manufacturing report presents seven important points for developing a racially inclusive manufacturing workforce in the wake of the pandemic: Move frontline production workers, who are most likely to be people of color, into better-paid skilled jobs and management positions. It is more important than ever for manufacturing workforce organizations to coordinate between industry ...

As part of IEDC’s Take Action Against Racism in Economic Development webinar series, four presenters spoke about the geography of inequality and the relationship between place and economic opportunity. Robby Habans, PhD, economist at The Data Center in New Orleans, and Robert Manduca, PhD, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, gave an overview of place-based economic disparities on a micro and macro level. Habans presented his work on how life expectancy and economic mobility can vary at the neighborhood level within a single metropolitan area. In New Orleans and across the country, data show that life expectancy in majority Black census tracts is consistently lower than in majority non-Black census tracts ...

From March 15–16, IEDC held the 2021 Leadership Summit, a virtual conference that was hosted in Phoenix. One of the sessions addressed the lack of useful and accurate metrics for economic inequality. Economic inequality is multifaceted and complex, making it difficult to measure its impact on local economies. The speakers agreed that inequality should be viewed as an intricate system and that good metrics could explain the relational outcomes. To measure inequality, the first step is to ask what the costs are, how large they are, and who pays them. This helps to quantify inequalities since costs are typically measurable. By examining inequality costs, the metrics and outcomes become more apparent. The costs of inequality can be ...