Remarks by President Lori K. Logan
Hello everyone, I’m Lori Logan, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
I want to thank Governor Michelle Bowman for kicking off our celebration and sharing her perspective on the Federal Reserve’s role in community development. I also want to thank all of you who joined us today, including our external partners and Dallas Fed staff.
I would especially like to thank our honored guests, the leaders of the four Advance Together communities.
Permian Basin Education Partnership; Big Country Manufacturing Alliance in Rural West-Central Texas; Family Pathways 2nd Generation Coalition of Travis County; Deep East Texas College and Career Alliance.
Community development is a key function of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and at the Dallas Fed we work to build a strong economy where everyone has the opportunity to participate and thrive.
The Dallas Fed saw an opportunity to address systemic challenges at the heart of the state’s K-12 education and workforce development ecosystem by convening passionate experts from a variety of backgrounds, including:
Public and private education professionals. Social service providers. Representatives of higher education institutions. Workforce training providers. Employers.
The diverse perspectives our partners provide are essential to the work of this initiative. We thank you for your hard work over the past four years and congratulate you on the great progress you’ve made. Your commitment to building a brighter future for all Texans is inspiring, and we are honored to be a part of it.
Development of Advance Together
I would like to provide some background on why the “Advance Together” initiative was developed and how it came to fruition.
Texas stands out as one of the nation’s fastest growing economies, but it also has the 10th highest poverty rate in the country. Across the state, many low-income and historically underserved communities face barriers that impede economic mobility and resilience. Significant disparities exist in indicators such as kindergarten readiness, grade-level reading proficiency, high school graduation rates, and postsecondary completion rates. At the Dallas Fed, we focus a significant portion of our community development activities on educational achievement and workforce development, aiming to close gaps in these areas. As we developed our Advance Together initiative, we made these areas our top priority.
Place-based community development efforts like Advance Together are built on research and practitioner dialogue that shows cross-sector collaboration is key to community economic growth. These efforts support local cross-sector partnerships that work to improve education and employment opportunities and outcomes in low-income communities, increasing the long-term economic resilience and mobility of individuals and families. This work strengthens our mission to build a strong economy for all people.
Effective solutions to complex local problems in areas like education and workforce development often depend on leaders from the public, nonprofit, and business sectors working collaboratively over the long term toward a common goal. Advance Together is the catalyst for this collaborative effort, coordinated by the Dallas Fed in its partner communities. Through staff and external consultants, it provides partners with customized guidance, technical assistance, and training. The Dallas Fed does not raise funds, fund grants, or participate in the selection of grant recipients. Rather, fundraising and grant delivery are coordinated by external philanthropic partners to deliver grants to participating communities.
The Advance Together Steering Committee selects grant recipients and manages program funding. Committee members include workforce and education experts from business, nonprofits, philanthropy and the public sector at the state and national levels.
Before launching the pilot round of Advance Together, the Dallas Fed and the steering committee researched existing cross-sector partnerships in the state that were addressing serious education and workforce development challenges. The research identified nearly 90 coalitions. While many of these coalitions had ambitious goals and aligned strategies, their biggest challenge was lacking the infrastructure and dedicated capacity to manage and coordinate this work. This is where targeted initiatives like Advance Together can make a difference.
Advance Together strengthens regional and local partnerships, builds collective capacity for this work, and leverages the expertise and experience of local leaders to drive change. Through our support and our role as impartial, neutral organizers and researchers, we have helped break down organizational silos and elevate the work of these community partnerships beyond individual-level impact. Our application of technical assistance at the local level creates opportunities for communities to come together around improved long-term economic goals, including for low-income families.
Community impact
We have seen meaningful impact from our pilot round sites and great progress towards our shared goals.
Key highlights include:
New engagement and leadership from anchor institutions such as local hospital networks, school districts, higher education partners, and employers will create opportunities for even more meaningful collaboration and systems-level change in the future. Great strides are being made in data-driven decision-making, particularly in collecting data, sharing data among partners to inform collaborative efforts, and setting joint goals that align with available information and data-driven strategies and approaches. Finally, teams in the Advance Together pilot round have secured additional investments totaling over $8 million, recognizing their successful collaborations to date and the value of these coordinated efforts in their respective regions.
I look forward to hearing from Advance Together team leaders in more detail about their progress on the ground at a panel discussion later this afternoon.
Conclusion/Acknowledgements
The Dallas Fed’s jurisdiction covers Texas, southern New Mexico and northern Louisiana. Texas was chosen as the focus for this pilot round because of its key economic driver in the district and the goal of this effort to generate state-level impact.
We want our Advance Together approach to be a model for communities across our district and across the country.
This afternoon, you will hear from a variety of leaders, including representatives from the four communities that participated in the pilot round of Advance Together, as well as partners who contributed to the design and development of this initiative. I want to thank these leaders for their contributions to their communities and their commitment to future generations. I hope their words will inspire many of you to apply for the next round of this initiative.
We would also like to thank our partners in the pilot round:
We would like to thank our experts on the Steering Committee, who have worked to ensure that Advance Together builds on this progress by aligning it with the state and local policy work already underway, our fiscal sponsor, the Dallas Foundation, our funding partners who made the pilot round possible, the Doris Duke Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, Texas Mutual, the Meadows Foundation, the Texas Community Foundation, and Mount Auburn Associates, our evaluator, and the external consultants and trainers who directly supported the Advance Together community.
I would also like to thank the staff at the Dallas Fed who contributed to the development and implementation of Advance Together.
The panel includes Alfreda Norman, who recently retired from the Dallas Fed; Roberto Coronado; Ksenia Benderskaya; Molly Hubert Doyle; Jane Santa Cruz; Marie Cruz de Leon; Carnelius Arnick; and Scott Wilkes.
This effort would not have been possible without the strategic support and guidance from our Communications, Legal and Procurement departments.
Finally, I would like to thank the Dallas Fed’s Board of Directors for their support of this impactful effort.
Finally, I want to thank all of you for joining us here today to celebrate the hard work and accomplishments of this team and our community partners.
Now I’ll hand the microphone over to Kseniya Benderskaya, who will tell us more about the Advance Together pilot round team.
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Federal Reserve System.
