Even as the American Jobs Plan, President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill remains mired in Congress, California is poised to pass a much smaller jobs package that nevertheless promises to be a game-changer. In his May Revise budget, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed $750 million for a Community Economic Resilience Fund that will use federal funds under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to accelerate California’s post-pandemic recovery.

What makes the $750 million fund transformative is that it will prioritize jobs that “[move] California toward a more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive future,” according to a press release from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. This is a major step forward beyond the standard framework for economic stimulus spending, which gives highest priority to “shovel-ready” projects, regardless of whether they make any meaningful progress towards improving climate resilience or economic equity. The standard model of “shovel ready” jobs also views processes of community inclusion as an afterthought or, even worse, as an impediment to progress that will delay economic benefits to communities that need them the most.

In order to make these aspirations of sustainable and equitable development a reality, we must have a clear understanding about what these terms mean, and we need to have good ways of measuring progress towards these worthy goals. At the University of California, Riverside, where I am a professor of public policy and direct the Center for Social Innovation, we have worked with community partners over the last year to develop a framework for what it means for economic development projects to be resilient, inclusive, sustainable, and equitable, and ready for investment (or RISE and Ready, for short).

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