Jessica Grant-Domond is a senior community development analyst and Suzanne Cummings is community development outreach communications manager, both in Regional & Community Outreach at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Over the past 150 years or so, New England has witnessed economic changes across many urban and rural places. To understand what enables some communities to fare better than others through economic challenges and inform the development of successful revitalization strategies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (Boston Fed) conducted research in the late 2000s on older industrial cities across the nation. In 2009, we released a report titled Reinvigorating Springfield's Economy: Lessons from Resurgent Cities,¹ which highlighted principles of effective community adaptation learned through this research.

One of these principles is cross-sector collaboration on shared economic goals, which, today, we recognize as essential for catalyzing resurgence, resilience, and growth in smaller postindustrial cities and rural communities, where economic opportunity is often hard to come by.² In addition, several other systemic principles were identified as contributors to successful community efforts, accomplishments, and momentum. Together, they constitute the core elements of the Boston Fed’s Working Places (WP) initiative, a groundbreaking effort to provide places in New England with the economic opportunity and purpose needed to grow our local economies.

This Invested Interprets series highlights the voices of local WP team members as they describe navigating community change using the initiative’s five core elements:

• a shared long-term goal for economic and community well-being,
• collaborative leadership,
• community engagement,
• learning orientation and use of data, and
• systems change.

Each video in this series illustrates one of these elements through the lived experiences of some of WP’s initiative participants. Our interviewees represent places all around New England—from urban centers to suburban landscapes and rural terrains. The insights they share from their economic projects bring these principles to life and help audiences imagine how they could be used to inform and guide similar efforts.

We believe WP teams and others engaged in community development work, both locally and nationwide, could benefit from these learnings. And we hope that seeing these key principles in action will help community champions visualize the work on the ground and steer them toward a path to better, more inclusive, and sustainable economic outcomes throughout New England and anywhere that these principles can be applied.

¹ Kodrzycki, Y.K., Muñoz, A.P., Browne, L.E., Green, D., Benton, M., Chakrabarti, P., Plasse, D., Walker, R., & Zhoa, B. (2009). Reinvigorating Springfield’s Economy: Lessons from Resurgent Cities. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/public-policy-discussion-paper/2009/reinvigorating-springfields-economy-lessons-from-resurgent-cities.aspx

² Kodrzycki, Y.K., et al. (2009).

The views expressed are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System. Information about organizations, programs, and events is strictly informational and not an endorsement.