What’s at stake?
Following a study in 2018 ranking Fresno among the worst cities in the country for social mobility, a local group of leaders and organizations sought outside investment to help remedy those shortcomings.
Five years into their lofty plans and their labor has already borne fruit. But a nuanced look into the data shows there’s still work to be done.
Posterboards covered in statistics and infographics populated a packed Valdez Hall inside the Fresno Convention Center on Tuesday. The displays informed attendees about the progress a local coalition of residents and organizations say they have achieved in trying to bridge equity gaps in the Central Valley.
The pageantry was brought on by Fresno DRIVE, a coalition of local leaders who hosted a celebration marking their fifth year of progress. The event, which drew a crowd of about 250 people, also served as the initiative’s official public release of data they say help prove the efficacy of their work.
“I believe that Fresno is in this great midpoint of hopefully positive transformation … roughly 20 years into probably about a 40-year fix,” said Ashley Swearengin, CEO of the Central Valley Community Foundation, a partner group of Fresno DRIVE.
The lofty timeline matches the DRIVE initiative’s ambitious goals, which include improving the economic mobility of California’s fifth-largest city.
Since 2014, Fresno County’s high school completion rate for 19 and 20-year old students increased from 84% to about 92%, virtually meeting the state average.
The DRIVE initiative first came about on the heels of published reports that Fresno’s economic and racial equity was ranked as one of the worst cities across the country, according to research by the Urban Institute.
Plans to help bridge those gaps have brought the region $635 million worth of investment in the last five years, according to DRIVE’s initiatives director Artie Padilla.
Among the ceremony’s attendees and speakers at Tuesday’s event included Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, Fresno City Council Vice President Miguel Arias, Assemblymember Dr. Joaquin Arambula, Fresno poet laureate Aideed Medina and David “Mas” Masumoto, a local writer and farmer.
Tuesday’s event also saw a group of panel discussions with local leaders, sharing their experience with DRIVE. Among the panelists was community member Juana Meza — a monolingual Spanish-speaker.
Meza, in one of a handful of emotional moments of the day, expressed appreciation for being invited to the event, in spite of the language barrier.
“It’s a very beautiful experience to be in spaces where people don’t speak your language,” Meza said in Spanish. “But at the same time, it’s a challenge because you want to create these connections, you want to have a conversation with people and form a bond.
“Us Spanish-speakers, we don’t want to just be a statistic at these events because we also have ideas,” Meza later added. “We want to have a voice, too. We want to contribute. We’re already helping in shaping the economy, but to be included in spaces like these, in spite of the language barrier, allows us the opportunity to come to these spaces and share the challenges that our communities face.”
What else does the data say?
The data DRIVE shared on Tuesday laid-out nuanced snapshots of many local sectors, like health, economic mobility and education.
Fresno County saw employment increase up to 74% in the last decade — getting close to the state average of 79%. However, the data also notes that the employment rate for Black workers is still lagging behind their white and Hispanic peers.
The county also saw a decrease in student homelessness, placing them lower than most counties across the state.
But while there were many data points to celebrate, other statistics showed much room for improvement and investment, particularly in education.
Christy Patch, chief impact officer at the Central Valley Community Foundation, said the data, as daunting as it may seem, is meant to clarify the type of support communities need.
“We need backpack drives, but you can’t backpack drive your way out of decades of disinvestment,” Patch said.
“We need programs that meaningfully engage the people who are most impacted by the issues that we’re trying to solve, partnerships that bridge sectors, neighborhoods, incomes,” Patch later added.
Fresno DRIVE: A retrospective, and where will they go from here?
Fresno DRIVE’s initiatives run on financial contributions from multiple sources, including The Kresge Foundation — a private philanthropic group that has invested in historically under-resourced cities.
The foundation began the Shared Prosperity Partnership, a plan to invest in cities across the country to help support “local efforts to create more inclusive economies,” according to the Kresge website.
Or, as the foundation’s CEO Rip Rapson said on Tuesday, an “attempt to deal with the first Trump administration.”
“We had all sorts of requests from national policy organizations to put a whole ton of money into federal policy,” Rapson said. “We’re anticipating that the Trump administration, its first time around, would be hostile to cities, and we suggested instead that perhaps what we would do would be to identify a handful of cities and ask them what they would need from the federal policy.”
Fresno is the only city on the West Coast funded by the partnership — and that’s thanks in part to Swearingen’s efforts to draw The Kresge Foundation’s attention.
As DRIVE’s plans continue, Rapson said he hopes to see Fresno show a “willingness to take risks that are commensurate with the magnitude of the challenge” ahead.
Dr. Venise Curry, a trained psychiatrist and one of the day’s speakers, said she hopes to see Fresno DRIVE more openly throw their newfound weight and legitimacy toward local issues.
“So that you can counterbalance what is the prevailing winds around status quo, land use decisions, areas where people are impacted but don’t necessarily have a way to make their voices really heard and attended to,” Curry said. “Look at these places where families have been fighting and families are challenged with structural issues, and that is the place where you can make the most impact.”
Disclosure: The Kresge Foundation and the Central Valley Community Foundation are Fresnoland funders.
