Lessons from Tacoma, WA: Measuring Progress Towards Inclusive Procurement
Written by Betsey Suchanic
For most people, the topic of procurement doesn’t spark a lot of excitement. However, that’s before they’ve learned about the Tacoma Anchor Network’s work to advance inclusive procurement and address economic opportunity gaps in their region. The City of Tacoma and the Tacoma Anchor Network are changing the conversation about procurement in their community by understanding the sheer depth and breadth of the millions of dollars spent by their anchors.
In Tacoma, WA, we worked with the City of Tacoma and the Tacoma Anchor Network’s inclusive procurement working group to determine how they can measure inclusive procurement progress and identify opportunities as part of our Small and Midsized City (SMC) Economic Inclusion Incubator. The Tacoma Anchor Network serves a critical purpose in creating a network of all of the regional anchor institutions, defined as “public and private non-profit organizations with a significant economic influence in Tacoma — including purchasing power, workforce, and investments.” The Tacoma Anchor Network’s strategic engagement across institutions allows anchors to “work collaboratively to keep resources circulating locally and ensure that all people who live here can work here and all people who work here can afford to live here.”
Over 12 months, this working group mapped categories across all of their anchor institutions’ procurement data. With support from NGIN, the University of Washington Tacoma’s Center for Applied Urban Research used these categories and data to build a data portal and dashboard to allow each of the anchor institutions to submit their procurement data to visualize and understand where the opportunities for more inclusive procurement exist, both at the individual institutions and across the entire network.
In March, my colleague Jacqueline Robles and I went to Tacoma to support the local team and learn alongside these efforts. During our March site visit, we convened members from across the Tacoma Anchor Network to discuss NGIN’s work, opportunities for procurement in inclusive economic development, and dive into the implications for their local anchor institutions. We spent an afternoon with Chelsea Talbert and Danny Fisher-Bruns, where we sat down and explored the Tacoma Equity Index and how it informs decision-making within the city. They then gave us a real-time tour of the city in the context of the indicators that they used to define opportunity. Connecting data and theory to practice is something we strive for at NGIN, and we were excited to bridge this connection in place in Tacoma.
We gained a lot of local knowledge during this trip, and we also learned some key lessons that can help drive inclusive growth in all communities working towards similar goals.
Key Lessons from Tacoma
Procurement touches everything – from toilet paper to bear food.
This project, with its tremendous amounts of purchasing data, perfectly illustrated the huge opportunity for equitable procurement from anchor institutions in Tacoma and beyond. An incredible amount of dollars is spent when you look at these funds in aggregate across anchor institutions. Abigail Vizcarra Perez from Tacoma Metro Parks drove this point home when she shared about the opportunities to procure everything more equitably – from the toilet paper at recreation centers to bear food for animals in the city zoo.
You don’t know if you are making progress if you don’t know where you’re starting from.
The local team continued to reiterate across this project, and during our visit, this initial investment in measuring inclusive procurement served a critical role of becoming the baseline for the future. We can’t create benchmarks and metrics for success until we have a baseline. This is an opportunity to know how and where progress can be made.
We can’t just say we want more equitable procurement; we must make it happen.
Bold statements about and commitments to equity made by institutional leaders are not uncommon today, but how those statements translate to action can be muddy and lack accountability. In the same vein, inclusive procurement should be part of that institutional commitment to equity. There should be supports and resources provided to change organizational and governmental systems and allow for norms to shift. It’s hard work, but this work can’t just be talked about. We must change how we evaluate bids and incentivize teams to work towards equity, just as much as cost-savings.
There are opportunities to build the procurement pipeline, but these must be done intentionally.
While much of the work in Tacoma is focused on anchor institutions and how these institutions procure, they recognize that procurement is a two-fold issue. There must also be a pipeline of minority-, women-, veteran-, and LGBTQ+-owned businesses that are informed and prepared to take on these contracts. By having this information, they can see where they are or are not procuring equitably by sector. This information will allow them to start addressing those pipelines and barriers and taking action, such as identifying small business partners to increase the pipeline of diverse business owners in specific industries and sectors as a collective.
And don’t just take our word about the work this group of leaders are spearheading in Tacoma, the below video provides a snapshot of Tacoma, their local team and partners, and more about their project with NGIN.
The Economic Inclusion Incubator program launched in June 2023 as part of NGIN’s Small and Mid-Size City Hub. As this 12-month program ends, we are happy to share a selection of reflection pieces about the incredible work the four selected communities completed as part of this program. This piece is part two of a four-part series. The previous post highlighting the work done in Savannah, GA can be found on our blog.
NGIN’s Small and Midsized City Hub is a national community of practice for economic and community development practitioners across more than 700 cities in the United States. NGIN offers support to connect, engage, and share solutions and resources to bolster inclusive economic growth in these communities. We have been working directly with four cities piloting economic inclusion solutions in their city as part of our Economic Inclusion Incubator program. These four cities – Dayton, OH, Savannah, GA, Tacoma, WA, and Utica, NY – were selected following a national call for projects from Small and Midsized Cities and kicked off their projects in June 2023.
