Economic Mobility Catalog

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Strategies
September 14, 2022
Government decision-making and budgeting to reduce disparities

Government decision-making and budgeting to reduce disparities

Contributors
Anjali Chainani, PhD
Jacques Colon
Candace C. Moore
Marisa Waxman

Last Revised: May 27, 2026

Issue Areas
Health and well-being Housing and community development
Outcomes
Effective and inclusive government

Strategy overview

  • Championing equal opportunity at the highest levels: Closing racial disparities in a specific community requires bold, visible leadership from the top. When mayors, city managers, or county executives consistently champion equal opportunity, they signal its importance across government and create the conditions for meaningful change. Leaders with the authority and standing to drive reform can mobilize departments, align decision-making, and sustain momentum over time. These initiatives often require a whole-of-government approach and the willingness to challenge and change long-standing practices.
  • Shared definitions around disparities: Institutional reform efforts to strengthen opportunity across groups often includes developing a shared framework for understanding societal disparities, building awareness of the severity of current inequities, and cultivating an understanding of the historical and contemporary factors that perpetuate them. To support these goals, many local governments have convened commissions or working groups to conduct research and publish findings; developed frameworks or tools that allow leaders to examine disparities using shared criteria and metrics; or declared racial disparities as a public health crisis to help galvanize action across departments and external partners.
  • Setting institutional goals and adopting action plans: Successful local efforts to reduce disparities typically define explicit goals and develop step-by-step action plans to achieve them. Formalized decision-making aids that ensure fairness considerations are incorporated early in policy and program design are frequently used. Action plans can help structure a local government’s approach by defining desired outcomes, identifying relevant data sources, articulating specific actions, assigning responsibilities to staff, and establishing monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. While some jurisdictions specifically elevate racial disparities as the core focus area, others have developed a broader suite of outcome goals.
  • Bringing fairness considerations into the budget process: Localities can advance more equitable outcomes by reforming the structure of their budgeting processes, their approaches to funding decisions, and their methods of collaboration. Local governments can also engage community members in the budgeting process by creating public-facing budget dashboards or offering participatory budgeting opportunities. Experts noted that embedding frameworks into standard budgetary processes can reduce the implementation burden on departments and more deeply institutionalize practices to reduce disparities.
  • Staffing for success: Successful institutional and process reforms to reduce disparities require strong leadership and dedicated staff capacity. Many local governments have found success in creating offices or departments explicitly focused on achieving equitable outcomes. These offices typically work across departments to advance reforms, provide training for staff, conduct research to identify priorities and assess progress, and manage action plans. At the same time, experts emphasized that reform work must also be embedded within individual departments; relying solely on a centralized executive office can undermine long-term sustainability. Depending on local capacity, some jurisdictions initially contract out specialized work and later build expertise in-house, while others focus on leveraging existing staff capacity from the outset

While this strategy has not been widely subject to rigorous, independent evaluations, it is generally recognized as a best practice among experts in government performance and decision-making. The following case studies provide illustrative examples.

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in reducing obstacles to receiving public benefits. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

Mathematica's Education-to-Workforce (E-W) Indicator Framework helps local leaders identify the data that matter most in helping students and young adults succeed. Local leaders can use the E-W framework to better understand education and workforce conditions in their communities and to identify strategies that can improve outcomes in these areas.

One, education-focused indicator in the E-W Framework may be improved with investments in this strategy. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in this strategy could help, examine the following:

  • Civic engagement: Percentage of individuals reporting a high level of civic engagement on surveys such as the Index of Civic and Political Engagement.
     
  • Assess existing decision-making processes and identify key disparities: When launching efforts to improve outcomes for underserved groups, experts recommend starting with a clear assessment of existing conditions. This includes mapping how decisions are made and where power resides, identifying who benefits from and is burdened by current practices, and using data to surface key outcome disparities. This assessment helps leaders identify leverage points within government and informs the design of a focused, effective strategy.
  • Consider multiple channels for impact: Governments have several avenues to embed disparity reduction as a core operating principle. Key channels include the budget process, procurement and contracting, and program and service delivery. Budgets set priorities and allocate resources that shape outcomes. Procurement and contracting decisions influence how public dollars support jobs and economic development. Service delivery choices allow governments to adjust eligibility, targeting, and access to better meet the needs of underserved communities.
  • Embrace a multi-phased process: Experts advise governments to phase in reform initiatives over multiple years and budget cycles to support lasting change. Rather than pursuing comprehensive reform all at once, jurisdictions can begin with departments that have strong alignment and capacity, using early successes to build momentum and make the case for additional resources. Sequencing also matters. For example, budgeting reforms may begin with shared definitions and training, followed by structured questions about disparities in budget requests, and later by more detailed action plans to improve outcomes for disadvantaged groups.
  • Provide transparency and focus on priorities: The range of demographics these initiatives seek to serve may span many dimensions, including race, ethnicity, gender, disability, immigration status, English as a second language, and more. This can make prioritization challenging, particularly for resource-constrained governments. Experts emphasize the importance of being transparent about what an initiative seeks to achieve and why. Clear priorities help avoid spreading efforts too thin and support accountability. Jurisdictions may focus on specific populations or outcomes for a defined period or pursue an ongoing cross-demographic approach, but clarity of focus remains essential.
  • Reducing disparities is not just an outcome but a process: Advancing opportunity for disadvantaged groups requires careful attention to how initiatives are designed, implemented, and communicated. Many governments begin this work with jurisdiction-wide strategic planning processes that incorporate deep community engagement, helping to identify the values, priorities, and pillars most relevant to their communities.
  • Build on existing community relationships: Experts advise building on existing community engagement efforts, drawing on community-based and population-specific advisory councils, and leveraging established projects or organizations that have built up trust. Strong relationships are a necessary precondition for effective implementation. These relationships should not reside solely within executive office teams but should also be embedded across departments.
  • Executive and legislative leadership: Strong public leadership is essential to elevate and sustain reforms to decision-making and budgeting processes. This work is often led by executive offices such as mayors, county presidents, or city managers, with critical support from legislative leaders who help set priorities, authorize reforms, and reinforce accountability.
  • Finance and budgetary officials: Finance and budget leaders are critical partners in reducing disparities, given their central role in shaping how public resources are allocated and monitored through the budget process.
  • Community organizations: Community organizations provide essential insights into the challenges that different disadvantaged populations face every day. They are also valuable partners to help facilitate direct outreach and engagement efforts.
  • Residents: Residents who have experienced historic and ongoing marginalization are best positioned to inform government priorities for advancing equitable outcomes and to identify both persistent and new challenges and potential solutions.
  • Information technology and GIS experts: Partnering with internal and external technology and GIS experts supports the development of strong, data-driven decision-making tools. This work often includes mapping efforts to identify where disparities and opportunities are concentrated and using frameworks to inform resource allocation, community engagement, and evaluation of service delivery.
  • Philanthropy: Philanthropic partners can support expanded community engagement, investments in technology and external expertise, and the testing of innovative pilots. These investments can serve as a foundation for sustained government action, investment, and long-term reforms.
  • Building buy-in, skills, and capacity among government employees: Engaging staff early and consistently is critical to building support for public sector reforms to reduce disparities. In the initial phases, staff input helps create a shared understanding of local disparities and identify priorities. Regular check-ins and share-out sessions reinforce alignment, while targeted trainings equip staff to use decision-making tools effectively and operationalize their use throughout government processes.
  • Integrate frameworks into decision-making processes: Decision-making tools are most effective when used early in policy and program design. They help leaders consider who will benefit or be burdened, how marginalized communities will be engaged, and how accountability will be maintained. This can include assessments in legislative proposals, budget requests, resource allocation plans, and applying environmental justice or cumulative impact analyses to decisions such as the siting of polluting developments.
  • Change narratives around racial disparities: Shifting both internal and public narratives is essential for sustained progress. Internal stakeholders need a clear understanding of the government’s historical and current role in creating inequities to fully engage in new processes. Externally, communicating the factors behind racial and social disparities and the steps needed to address them helps build public support for decisions and reforms.
  • Collect and share data, then evaluate progress: Data strengthens reforms to reduce disparities at every stage. Leaders should gather and share data on unequal outcomes to build awareness and urgency. As action plans are implemented and investments made, establishing clear evaluation processes ensures accountability, measures impact, and fosters a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Look at both population-level and intermediate metrics: Reform efforts are often motivated by the imperative to eliminate large outcome gaps across social groups, yet these population-level outcomes can be daunting for local governments to shift quickly. Tracking intermediate outputs of day-to-day service delivery helps bridge this gap. Both types of metrics should be considered together when monitoring progress on initiatives to create more equitable outcomes.
  • Embed disparity reduction in department-level service delivery metrics: Departments should build the capacity to track data that matters and understand the implications of their services. For example, analyzing patterns in infrastructure improvements, such as streetlight installation, can inform investment prioritization. Department-level metrics should align with broader strategic goals to ensure consistency across the organization.
  • Disaggregating existing data: Experts recommend disaggregating both population-level data and service delivery outputs by demographics or proxy measures, such as geography. Beyond race and ethnicity, this can include age, gender, income, language, and other socioeconomic characteristics. This may require overhauls to existing data collection practices. Cross-department collaboration is also essential, as data held in one department may be valuable to another.
  • Look at both numbers and narratives: Quantitative metrics should be complemented by qualitative stories of impact. Departments can share case studies internally and externally to highlight successes, illustrate challenges, and deepen understanding of how policies and services affect different communities.

Contributors

Anjali Chainani, PhD

Anjali has 20 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations and local government, as a social worker and a researcher. Anjali is the Founder and Principal of Anavi Strategies, a public impact consulting firm that works with non-profit and philanthropic clients who are committed to accelerating social change and measuring impact. As the former Policy Director for City of Philadelphia Mayor James F. Kenney (2016-2020), Anjali supported the development of key strategic priorities for city agencies including but not limited to early education, literacy, public health, workforce development, and sustainability among others, gaining experience in organizational development, cross-agency collaboration, measuring performance, and evaluation.

 

Anjali has a BSW, MSW, and MPH from Temple University, and a PhD in Health Policy from Saint Joseph's University (formerly University of the Sciences). Anjali currently serves as an Advisor for the Fels Institute of Government Master’s in Public Administration program and teaches at Widener University’s School of Social Work.

Jacques Colon

Jacques Colon serves as the Director of Equity, Strategy, and Human Rights, where he leads the Office of Equity and Human Rights and the Office of Strategy. In this role, Jacques is responsible for overseeing the equity work of the City, as well as supporting organizational and cross-departmental strategic planning for the City of Tacoma. Prior to serving at the City of Tacoma, Jacques served as the Health Equity Coordinator for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, Policy Analyst for the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), and as a middle school science teacher with Teach for America.

Candace C. Moore

Candace Moore, Esq., Senior Strategic Advisor provides direct leadership to the organization’s Place-Based Strategies, which focuses on bridging the work of local community and public institution stakeholders to advance racially equitable results. Moore brings executive government, legal practice, and community-based advocacy experience to this role.

 

Moore joined Race Forward after serving over four years as the City of Chicago’s first Chief Equity Officer and Senior Advisor to Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot and Mayor Brandon Johnson. Throughout her tenure, Moore drove institutional change processes that resulted in the codification of Chicago’s annual budget equity process, the development and publication of 25 department Racial Equity Action Plans, and the creation of Chicago’s first annual equity progress report. Prior to this, Moore served as senior staff attorney for education equity at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights where she litigated matters challenging racial discriminatory education policies and practices and partnered with community-led coalitions on statewide reform efforts.

 

Moore is a proud graduate of Loyola University Chicago’s undergraduate program (B.A. and B.S.) and School of Law (J.D.).

Marisa Waxman

Marisa Waxman joined PICA in October 2023 to serve as Executive Director. Previously, as the Budget Director for the City of Philadelphia, she managed its substantial operating and capital budgets, focusing on equity in budget development. Her previous roles included First Deputy Revenue Commissioner, where she dealt with revenue policy, regulation, and communications. Her career began in the City Controller’s Office in Philadelphia, and she has worked in various roles with the City of Philadelphia, New York City Department of Finance, the US Department of the Treasury, and the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia. 

 

Marisa is a University of Pennsylvania alumna with a Masters in City and Regional Planning and a proud member of the 255th graduating class at Central High School.

Learn more:
Results for America, Using data to improve opportunities for all: Tacoma, WA Government Alliance on Race and Equity, Resources Race Forward, Toolkits