Since 2023, the Urban Institute and the National League of Cities (NLC) have provided training and technical assistance to help seven US cities to apply and adapt the Compass. Though the Compass applies to a range of policy issues and processes, initial pilot projects in these cities have focused on 

• making local policymaking more proactive, especially as it relates to housing (2025);
• advancing equitable climate resilience (2024); and
• addressing wealth inequities (2023). 

2025 

In March 2025, Urban and NLC held a two-hour workshop at NLC’s Congressional City Conference in Washington, DC. There, local elected officials were exposed to the Compass’s four phases as they brainstormed a range of ways they could apply and adapt the Compass to their local policymaking.

In May 2025, Urban and NLC cohosted a two-part virtual NLC training on three of the Compass steps essential to proactive policymaking: root cause analysis, ecosystem mapping, and feasibility and impact assessment.

Separate from our work in partnership with NLC, the Urban team is also supporting a housing collective in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, facilitated as part of the Community Foundation of Jackson Hole’s Housing Solutions Initiative. Urban is leading the housing collective through nine months of intensive technical assistance with applying the Compass to address the area’s housing affordability and accessibility challenges.

2024

Urban and NLC supported four cities—Dearborn, Michigan; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Kansas City, Missouri; and Mount Vernon, New York—in developing policies that can make their built and natural environments more equitable and climate resilient:

• Dearborn established a framework that defines and applies climate resilience and equity principles for internal, cross-departmental prioritization of infrastructure investments.
• Grand Rapids proposed to pass a new home energy disclosure ordinance.
• Kansas City proposed an ordinance for mandatory healthy housing inspections for lead, mold, and other unhealthy and unsafe conditions in residential units.
• Mount Vernon’s Sustainability Office developed a proposal to create a local sustainability advisory group consisting of community members that would help the City establish priorities and undertake actions to advance equitable climate resilience.

For more information, read our blog post about the 2024 Compass Cohort.

2023

Urban and NLC guided teams from three cities—Dubuque, Iowa; Roanoke, Virginia; and Tacoma, Washington—through the first three phases of the Compass process. Made up of staff from different departments in local government, a city manager, and nonprofit partners, each city team explored a range of root causes of wealth inequities and devised strategies to tackle them in their communities—all of which was done virtually. The teams did the following:

• Dubuque developed a new data governance policy that will support it in collecting and analyzing data from different City departments.
• Roanoke identified access to affordable child care as a critical barrier to upward mobility and wealth equity for its residents, so its policy road map focused on creating a program that incentivizes businesses to provide on-site child care through performance agreements and updating its zoning code in order to make family day homes by-right permitted uses in their residential zoning districts.
• Tacoma adapted the Compass into a city-specific policy development guide to help departments in the city government make more intentional, focused considerations about their internal approaches to policy development.

For more information, read our blog post about the 2023 Compass Cohort.