Why We Created the Equity Resource Navigator

Local government officials across the country are developing, implementing, and iterating on all types of equity interventions. Drawing on the Urban Institute’s extensive engagement with stakeholders in local governments, including chief equity officers, chief data officers, offices of equity and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), government staff committees, and elected officials, we began to identify some common challenges and needs among stakeholders.

In many cases, local officials spend their limited time and resources searching for the right resources and “reinventing the wheel” when they cannot find what they need. Local officials and government staff actively seek resources to help advance their internal and external equity efforts, such as resources on how to conduct equity-related assessments, engage and empower community members, hire and retain diverse staff, equitably allocate resources, deliver programs that close persistent disparities, and develop and advance policies that remedy inequities.

Despite this clear and increasing need, the field still needs a central, open-access repository for resources that local governing entities can use at various points along the continuum toward equity. To address this gap, the Urban Institute created the Equity Resource Navigator (the Navigator): an open-access, user-centric tool for local government officials to find resources to help them embed equity into different areas of their work. Building the Navigator was a 24-month-long process between 2022 and 2024 that included speaking with key stakeholders, such as local officials from various jurisdictions; drawing from Urban’s research and other literature; creating a grounding framework and corresponding focus areas; compiling and organizing relevant resources; and testing the Navigator user experience with various local officials and government staff.

How the Navigator Can Be Used

The Urban Institute developed the Equity Resource Navigator for local officials, including chief equity officers, government staff, and other audiences interested in advancing equity through various levers of local government. The Navigator provides easy access to a wide range of resources across multiple topics, including staff capacity building, policy development, budgeting, procurement, contracting, community engagement, and communications.

The Navigator uses a user experience (UX) design that guides users to the most relevant resources via a user survey, automatically producing a customized list of resources relevant to their work and interests. Additionally, users can easily access and explore our entire repertoire of resources, using filters and text search capabilities to facilitate the browsing experience.

We hope that the Navigator can help local leaders find a variety of resources designed to help them improve current equity efforts as well as launch new efforts. For example, the Navigator can

• help identify an equitable budgeting tool that a chief equity officer can implement in their locality,
• introduce a data officer to a new tool that supports spatially equitable decisionmaking, and
• provide community engagement guidelines and frameworks to an office seeking to incorporate residents’ perspectives in their rulemaking process.

How the Navigator Is Organized and How to Get Started

Using the Navigator starts with filling out the user survey. Before filling out the survey, we recommend reviewing the full list of questions and multiple-choice items and preparing responses for the applicable questions (based on focus areas of interest), gathering any information needed. 

The User Survey has three sections: 

• An About You section to enter information about your local government agency, department, or office, as well as your professional contact information, including name, email, and job title. In this section, specify the focus areas for which you—on behalf of your agency/department/office—are interested in receiving resources.
• An Internal Infrastructure survey section to respond to questions and multiple-choice items to help us understand how your agency approaches equity work at an organizational level. Since institution-wide commitments, agreements, and structures are foundational to ensuring successful efforts to advance equity, this survey section is required for all completing our survey. Through these questions and multiple-choice items, we hope to understand the institutional supports available to you and your team(s), how these supports are prioritized, and how your agency keeps itself accountable to staff and community members.
• A Focus Area survey section to respond to questions and multiple-choice items that correspond to the focus area(s) of interest selected in the “About You” section. Please note that the survey will only populate questions and resources for the selected focus areas. For the focus area section(s), you will answer the questions on behalf of your agency/department/office, rather than as yourself in your role.
  • The focus areas were developed after consultation with local leaders and partners, including the Government Alliance on Racial Equity (GARE), as key levers for local officials to advance equity within their jurisdictions.
  • There are seven focus areas to select from: budgeting and financial management, community engagement, data collection and analysis, external communications, procurement and contracting, policymaking, and staff capacity building. 

Questions or multiple-choice items that end in “more information” have a dialogue box that includes additional guidance for understanding and responding to the question/multiple-choice items. Users can click on the “more information” text to reveal the dialogue box.

For survey questions or multiple-choice items that include “Other” “N/A” and “Unsure” answer options, please follow this guidance:

• Select “Other” when the answer options do not reflect an option that fits your agency. If you select this answer, please write in your response. Please note that “Other” responses will not result in a resource since the Navigator is not able to automatically code written responses and connect them to our resources. Although these responses won’t feed into the creation of the personalized resource lists users will receive upon completing the survey, these responses will be useful to our team as we consider potential refinements or future iterations of the user survey.
• Select “N/A” when the question is not relevant to your agency’s function.
• Select “Unsure” when you do not know whether your agency does the work referenced in the question.

How Navigator Resource Lists Are Organized and How to Maximize Utility

Immediately upon completing the survey, you will receive a customized list of resources—generated based on your survey responses and organized by your selected focus areas of interest. The list of resources will include links to the resources and key information about each resource (including the source, a brief summary of relevant content, and whether there are key sections of the resource to focus on based on your survey responses).

Since our goal is to provide a customized, user-friendly experience as well as customized and focused results to support action, our recommendation is to browse the focus areas descriptions in the full list of questions on the Navigator landing page before completing the survey. Then, select a maximum of three focus areas of interest when taking the survey.

Again, our full list of resources is available to browse at any time. You should expect to receive between three and seven resources per focus area, including for the required Internal Infrastructure section, but you should not expect a unique resource for each question or answer choice. For example, if four areas of interest are selected in addition to the required Internal Infrastructure section, you should expect to receive between 15–35 resources. We recommend considering this when completing the survey.

When you receive your personalized list of resources, you will be invited to provide feedback on your overall experience through a brief feedback survey. Feedback can inform future iterations and refinements to the Navigator to ensure it is a valuable and useful tool for local officials and government staff working on advancing equity within their jurisdictions.

We recognize that the Clearinghouse alone will not help local governments achieve the kind of transformational change necessary to advance equity, so we encourage users to view the Navigator platform and its resources to inform their agency’s broad, holistic, strategic efforts toward this goal. We aim for the Navigator to help users take the next steps or accelerate progress in their efforts to advance equity, regardless of where they are starting.

We encourage you to use the Navigator platform and its resources as an opportunity to facilitate shared learning with colleagues, practitioners, regional working groups, or forums for fellow government officials (such as GARE’s network) that you may belong to. This collective peer learning could involve sharing personalized resource lists, sharing a particular resource with an implementation partner, or connecting with organizations or localities whose work is featured in the Navigator. Our team is thinking about ways to refine the Navigator to encourage this learning among users, fellow practitioners, and subject matter experts and welcome feedback on how best to do this. For suggestions or feedback, please email the Equity Resource Navigator team at [email protected].

Terms of Use

By using the Navigator, the user agrees to the following terms of use:

• General Terms: Each time you use the Navigator (a) you acknowledge that you have read, understand, and agree to our terms of use; (b) you acknowledge that you allow us to use your data and/or content for tuning, research, and diagnostics of our services; (c) you acknowledge that your data and/or content may be deleted from our servers at any time, at our discretion; (d) you acknowledge that submitting information to this site is your choice and you do so at your own risk; (e) you explicitly agree not to provide any personally identifiable health data as defined by the HIPAA Privacy Rule; and (f) the Urban Institute will not use any personally identifiable information (your name, organization, or email address) in our research; and if we publish findings, they will be aggregated and anonymized.
• Limitation of Liability: The Urban Institute will not be liable for any damages arising out of or relating to the use of your data. The Urban Institute shall not have any liability or responsibility for your acts, omissions, or conduct, or for the conduct of any user or other third party.
• Indemnity: You agree to indemnify and hold harmless the Urban Institute and its board members, directors, officers, employees, agents, and contractors from and against any and all claims, damages, losses, costs (including without limitation reasonable attorneys’ fees), or other expenses that arise directly or indirectly out of or from (a) your breach of any provision of our terms of service; (b) your activities in connection with the website; or (c) unsolicited information you provide to the Urban Institute through the website.

All user data provided through the use of the Navigator will be kept strictly confidential and will not be publicly accessible.
 

Contact the Navigator Team

If you have any questions about the Navigator, including how to complete the survey and maximize your use of the platform, please email the Equity Resource Navigator team at [email protected].