A policy on obligations of developers and contractors to seek local employees, service providers and businesses to meet their needs.

An ordinance requiring contracting companies to maintain, to the greatest extent possible, a workforce composed of 40% qualified Newark residents.

Inclusive contracting refers to the process of creating the environment for businesses owned by people of color and/or women to participate in a governmental procurement and contracting process. Inclusive business participation in local government procurement and contracting is an important source of income and jobs in communities of color and helps to strengthen community and business partnerships. It strengthens communities within the jurisdiction both economically and socially. It also allows governments to express their values with the dollars that they spend. Procurement is one of the more important local government functions - valued at $23.4 billion annually, for instance, in the case of New York City. Although procurement and contracting has become more formalized and codified over time, it is not necessarily more equitable.

Business incubators and accelerators have emerged as a popular strategy to support the growth of entrepreneurial ventures, especially in the high-tech sector. They are designed to address the networking, education and capital challenges all entrepreneurs face. These challenges are most acute for women and minority tech entrepreneurs, suggesting that incubators and accelerators could have the greatest impact on their ventures. Yet, women and minorities are not participating in high-tech incubators and accelerators at the same rates as their white, male counterparts. Given the growing commitment, by both public and private sectors, to increase the numbers of women- and minority-owned high-tech businesses, a critical step will be to make incubators and accelerators more inclusive of diverse entrepreneurs. In addition, because these organizations, particularly accelerators, are attracting many young entrepreneurs, the underrepresentation of minorities among the entrepreneurs they support is especially concerning given that 43 percent of millennial adults are people of color ("Millennials in Adulthood," 2014). Given this demographic trend, helping incubators and accelerators to become more racially inclusive is important to ensure that all future tech entrepreneurs are given the same level of support.

One in five City of Saint Paul (City) residents speaks a language other than English in their homes. This means that increasingly City employees are providing services to individuals who may be limited English proficient (LEP) as a result of national origin. Based on data collected from a variety of sources including the Saint Paul Public Schools and the United States Census Bureau, the City\'s primary non-English language groups include, but are not limited to Spanish, Hmong and Somali. The City\'s Limited English Proficiency (LEP) Plan outlines and describes how the City will improve access to its services, programs and activities for LEP individuals.

A fact sheet summarizing local hiring policy for San Francisco.

Most targeted hiring programs include mechanisms that do two things: 1) Maximize the chances that workers from the targeted category who are already in the construction industry will get called to work on that job. 2) Create opportunities for new workers - aspiring apprentices who want training and a construction career - to get trained and hired. Calling up workers who are already on the bench is sometimes referred to as zip-coding (meaning the hiring hall determines which workers meet geographical targeting) or name-calling (the hiring hall tags specific workers who meet other kinds of targeting criteria). Achieving the right balance of these two elements of a targeted hiring program requires local leaders to work together. How many workers are on the bench (and out of work), how many targeted workers are already in the construction workforce, how many apprenticeship openings the targeted projects will create - all of these considerations help determine the right balance.

Over the past decade, the community benefits movement has emerged as a powerful mechanism for challenging the political and economic realities that undermine urban communities. Community benefits campaigns strive to build new political relationships among unlikely allies, uniting labor, community, environmental and faith-based groups behind broad-based agendas focused on economic development that prioritizes high-quality jobs, creates new career paths for low-income workers, marshals resources for environmental cleanup and sustainability, and avails residents of access to more affordable housing options. In many cities where community benefits coalitions work, research has shown that, too often, new development fails to generate high quality jobs and career paths for residents of the poorest parts of the city. Local hire requirements are a critical component of the community benefits agenda because they create concrete mechanisms for ensuring that investment of public funds in economic development will direct resources into low-income neighborhoods. The point is not only to hire local residents, but to use local hire requirements to target opportunities to low-income residents and people of color who might otherwise not benefit from new development. Local hiring programs are on the strongest legal footing, and are likely to produce the most meaningful outcomes, when they are rooted in efforts to reduce poverty rather than merely to hire city residents.

Los Angeles is currently embarking upon one its largest investments in infrastructure in decades. Through these investments, we will be modernizing our port, fixing our roads, and undertaking the largest expansion of public transit in recent history. These investments, representing over $12 billion dollars in construction, will also result in the creation of thousands of jobs in communities slowly recovering from the Great Recession. In 2008, a broad coalition of community members, faith leaders, workers and labor leaders successfully passed a Construction Careers Policy at the Community Redevelopment Agency-Los Angeles, the first of its kind in the nation. This policy approach aimed to increase workplace standards in publicly-funded construction projects and increase access to quality construction careers for communities struggling under the weight of poverty and chronic unemployment. The policy met these goals by coupling a Project Labor Agreement with a targeted hire program. Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) are collective bargaining agreements made between contractors, government agencies, and construction trade unions creating quality jobs that guarantee prevailing wages and health benefits, in exchange for a guarantee of labor peace to protect the public investment. Targeted hire programs ensure that good jobs are created where they are most needed. When paired, PLAs and targeted hire programs can create a much needed pathway out of poverty for workers with limited education and career opportunities in low-income communities.