Ramsey County, along with Saint Paul, join the Brookings Transforming Cities Lab to make federal funding work long term
Ramsey County and the city of Saint Paul, along with the cities of Detroit and Cleveland, are participating in the Brookings Metro Transforming Cities Lab (TCL). The Lab is structured as an initiative to promote experimentation and piloting of new ideas and practices through a series of meetings and educational sessions.
The center of this peer learning project will be the strategic use of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to maximize sustainable investment in inclusive and equitable growth. Local leaders will specifically focus on ways to organize their communities to invest in the “long-game” of building the institutional capacity needed to create more prosperous local economies that advance inclusion by income, race and place. Ramsey County and Saint Paul’s work will center around the co-investment of ARPA funds for workforce initiatives.
Staged over a span of nine months, the TCL will help local leaders overcome the challenges of coordinating the multi-issue, multi-jurisdictional, and multi-sector coalitions required to set recovery goals and strategies, blend recovery funds at scale, and sustain financing in ways that build durable civic capacity.