In 2021, 11th Street Bridge Park (Bridge Park) in Washington, DC, received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the JPB Foundation to establish a “five-city pilot” to expand its highly regarded workforce-development approach to similar equity-focused parks around the country. The Five-City Equitable Workforce Development Pilot brings together five equity-focused infrastructure-reuse projects with the goal of developing a scalable, replicable workforce-training model to ensure neighborhood residents benefit from new infrastructure-reuse projects. In addition to Washington, DC (Bridge Park), the pilot sites are located in San Francisco (India Basin Waterfront Park), Buffalo, New York (The Riverline), Grand Rapids, Michigan (Grand River Corridor), and Dallas, Texas (Trinity Park Conservancy). These sites represent a diversity of city sizes and geographies and a blend of high-growth and rust-belt economies.

This brief documents the sites’ efforts in year two of the pilot, covering May 2022 to April 2023. The first section discusses each of the five sites, concentrating on partnership structure, outreach strategies and results, and workforce development strategies and results. The second section details two key themes that emerged across sites in the pilot’s second year: commonalities in addressing barriers to employment and persistent challenges to data collection. The brief concludes by looking forward to potential developments going into the pilot’s third and final year.