M.L.K. had unfinished business confronting U.S. poverty - can tech innovation ecosystems play a role?

“It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.” - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

This weekend, we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As efforts are underway to establish and nurture tech innovation ecosystems in cities left behind by previous waves of growth will the places and people Dr. King advocated for benefit?

Many will rightfully remember Dr. King for his masterful and poignant “I Have a Dream” speech. But you would be wrong to extrapolate from this speech that Dr. King was merely a dreamer. Dr. King was a strategist committed to substantive plans of action. As such, poverty was Dr. King's primary focus in the last years of his life, and today poverty remains a crucial challenge to realizing inclusive economic growth and opportunity.

Poverty Reduction as a Priority in Large-Scale, Place-Based Investments

In 2021, I led a philanthropic effort at SpaceX to connect unconnected student homes in rural Wilcox County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in the nation, to an emerging technology and internet service known as Starlink. Wilcox County is 70% Black, and residents have had limited access and ability to afford high-speed broadband internet for decades. In 2021, Wilcox County had a median household income of $36,385 compared to a national median income of $70,784. Alabama is in the top 10 poorest states in the nation and Wilcox County has been dubbed the worst place to live in the state.?

Private sector technology companies are committing to equitable plans in workforce pipelines, procurement, and internal diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in future industries. In addition, the federal government is making once-in-a-generation investments in broadband, semiconductors, biosciences, and other industry ecosystems.?Whatever can be said about the potential to create economic opportunity through technology and industries of the future it is clear that communities like Wilcox County have a long way to go to benefit from them. Private investment often follows talent networks, capital and research and development ecosystems that allude high-poverty regions. And while federal, state and local governments are stepping up their game to promote investment funding formulas can make it difficult to use such funding for less densely populated rural areas such as Wilcox County, Alabama.

The bottom-line is historically opportunities for tech innovation and entrepreneurship and resulting new wealth have been unequal in the nation. What will it take to begin to change this in the coming decade?

Using Rich Income/Poverty Data-Sources and Models to Show Outcomes from Correlations

Facing the crucial national challenge of creating new inclusive models of economic growth, leaders want the concrete and specific targets that a strategic focus on poverty can provide. Household-level income and poverty data is concrete, accessible, and tracked over extended periods through datasets like the American Community Survey. Evaluating the first and second-order outcomes of large-scale private and public investments on longer-term poverty reduction is possible using straightforward Logic Models and other tools.

Using income and poverty?data, we can also prioritize states and local areas within states for targeted technical assistance and funding support for high-poverty regions, as I shared from my antidote earlier about Starlink and Wilcox County. Veteran telecommunications consultant Paul Garnett of the Vernonburg Group has new digital equity maps to demonstrate broadband adoption is highly correlated to income and poverty even when accounting for racial differences. The exact correlation could be and has already been tested in other sectors and with other emerging technologies.?And yes, there continue to be significant race-based and geographic gaps in economic opportunity just as there were in Dr. King's time.

Finally, as a strategic planner I often rely on data-rich GIS mapping applications to help groups see the trade-offs between various courses of action. Income and poverty data can be mapped against other variables to demonstrate the possible linkages between program-level interventions and population-level impact.

The Role of Place-Based Coalitions and Intermediaries

Dr. King realized that poverty is a ready-made opportunity for coalition-building because it lives as the intersection of many other complex challenges in the nation's life. Dr. King spent the last year of his life connecting multi-racial coalitions, anchor institutions, and community-based organizations with direct experience serving key constituencies in high-poverty areas. These same alliances can help investors and intermediaries work to drive the success of place-based economic development and workforce initiatives today.?

The question for investors is how to independently vet the track record and potential of intermediaries or coalitions to engage underserved populations in high-poverty regions.

Often there is a need to support the capacity of institutions and community-based organizations in high-poverty areas or to incubate new ones. This is a place where philanthropy can play an important role providing flexible operations and program funding to support this important work. And, of course, directly involving people who live in poverty in the design and implementation of programs to address equity gaps is a moral imperative in addition to a strategic one.?In many federal grant formulas state governments and others are required to have detailed community engagement plans in order to be eligible for funding.

Looking Ahead: Models for Tech Innovation Ecosystems that Benefit High-Poverty Regions

What will technology-driven economic opportunities such as the CHIPS/Sciences Act mean for high-poverty regions like Wilcox County, Alabama or communities across Appalachia or Maricopa County, Arizona?

I am eager to learn more about evidence-based strategies for investors and intermediaries to drive inclusive economic development and workforce strategies that benefit the people and places Dr. King advocated with and for and invite you to join me on that learning journey. In many cases, programs designed to benefit the highest poverty regions will be more expensive, time intensive and require enormous effort. You could make the case that focusing on tech innovation in high-poverty regions is a fools errand altogether and that other strategies may be better equipped to support people such as direct cash payments. However, I would argue that the costs of widening racial, economic and geographic inequity in a new era of innovation in industries of the future are too high.

We don't know yet what the end result of the push for inclusive economic growth will be on high-poverty states and communities when it is all said and done. But I am not willing to wait to find out. Dr. King spoke about 'the fierce urgency of now'. And I believe we need that urgency to confront poverty before and not after new waves of opportunity pass communities by.

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Thank you for reading. If you are interested on Thursday, January 19, 2023 at 1 pm EST, the U.S. Census Bureau will be demonstrating the use of online demographic and economic data tools using data from the American Community Survey and other sources to support undeserved communities. You can register here.