Public Infrastructure for an Equitable Future

Improved public infrastructure can help all members of our society thrive. This report presents six solutions for philanthropy to address the converging crises of COVID-19, racism, climate change, and economic inequality through public infrastructure. Infrastructure policy should facilitate health, well-being, education, social connections, and economic opportunity for everyone. Instead, America’s deteriorating, and in some cases absent, infrastructure hurts children’s education, puts families further into poverty, interferes with access to healthcare, and pollutes communities. All of this adds up to billions of dollars in lost economic activity and costs American families. These costs are not borne equally. Due to a long legacy of discriminatory policies, today’s infrastructure perpetuates and enshrines in concrete and steel longstanding racial, economic, and geographic inequality.