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Meet Margo Iñiguez Dawes, our Fairness Coordinator for the Levy to Transfer Seattle. She integrates division values and fairness targets right into a framework that guides how we distribute funding in Seattle. She works to ensure that Metropolis investments serve folks and communities that authorities has traditionally underinvested in by way of transformative infrastructure initiatives, sources, and programming.
Just lately, Margo was invited to be certainly one of eighteen fellows within the very first Transformative Justice Infrastructure Fellowship hosted by the Communities First Infrastructure Alliance, PolicyLink, and Race Ahead’s Authorities Alliance on Race and Fairness (GARE).
These eighteen infrastructure-related public sector leaders have been chosen for his or her dedication to proactively addressing historic and structural inequities by way of their work.
The Transformative Justice Infrastructure Fellows met with Jenny Yang (Deputy Assistant to the President for Racial Justice and Fairness) and Ryan Berni (Senior Advisor to the President on Infrastructure Implementation) on the White Home to debate alternatives for centering fairness in native infrastructure investments utilizing federal sources.
We sat down with Margo for a Roadside Chat to be taught extra about this Fellowship alternative, the historic surge of federal funding the U.S. is at present seeing, and what it means for our work at SDOT.
Hello, Margo. To start out us off, are you able to inform me about your position at SDOT?
I’m the Levy Fairness Coordinator, so I work on our Levy to Transfer Seattle (“the Levy”), which is a nine-year, over $900 million property tax levy authorized by voters in 2015 that funds virtually a 3rd of our work as a division. Whereas advancing fairness was a part of the unique imaginative and prescient of the Levy, the 30 packages funded by it have taken totally different approaches to incorporating fairness metrics and knowledge into their particular person prioritization frameworks.
My position is about bettering and updating how we combine our division values into our work outcomes and introducing a constant fairness framework for the way and the place we distribute our Levy deliverables citywide.
I’m working with Levy program homeowners and the portfolio administration workforce to attain a extra equitable geographic distribution of our Levy investments, which is able to appear like prioritizing these investments in neighborhoods the place we’ve traditionally underinvested.
What’s the goal of the Fellowship you’re collaborating in?
I’m collaborating within the Transformative Justice Infrastructure Fellowship this 12 months alongside 17 different native, regional, and state-level public sector leaders with affect over infrastructure funding of their jurisdictions. The aim of the fellowship is to heart a racial fairness evaluation as we make the most of this once-in-a-generation stage of infrastructure funding that we’re experiencing proper now.
With a number of trillion {dollars} in federal funding from the assorted current infrastructure payments, we’re wanting to make use of this chance to make some transformative impacts in racialized communities which were demanding and actually needing vital infrastructure enhancements for a very long time — or who’ve been traditionally harmed by earlier infrastructure investments that authorities has made, like highways, for instance, going by way of neighborhoods as a substitute of connecting them to alternatives.
And whereas we take into account transformative funding alternatives, it’s also critically vital that we be taught from our historical past and work to keep away from and mitigate the potential for additional authorities hurt by way of this bonanza of infrastructure funding. For instance, in a rising metropolis like Seattle, we have to take into account the potential for vital infrastructure investments to exacerbate current displacement pressures.
What do you hope to be taught from this chance?
On the technical facet of issues, I actually need to have a sturdy plan for what kinds of knowledge and indices ought to go right into a decision-making framework about the way to prioritize the place we spend funding. We’re attempting to introduce one thing that many alternative packages throughout SDOT can simply use and apply to their different current prioritization frameworks, even and particularly after this Levy as we glance towards a future funding package deal.
Extra broadly, I’m additionally grateful to be discovering group and accountability in the identical place and to have folks to remind me to not get too targeted on the info and overlook about essentially the most vital component, which is having actually robust connections to group management and understanding what the group precedence initiatives are in these totally different excessive fairness precedence areas.
We’re excited to see what Margo will develop by way of this fellowship! We stay up for studying from and advancing the work being performed to heart fairness and group all through Seattle.
