10,000 Communities Initiative partners, including Milken Institute, Accelerator for America, Dream.org, Elemental Excelerator, Groundswell, HR&A, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, LISC, National League of Cities, Quantified Ventures, Rural Community Assistance Partnership, Social Finance, and Strive Together participated in Regional Rally Up Events on March 7th and 8th, 2023 in Atlanta and LaGrange, Georgia.
In the morning of March 7th, partners and regional leaders discussed equitable development and deployment strategies. In the afternoon, a community infrastructure project diagnostic training session was conducted with 12 cities from the Southern Cities for Economic Inclusion, including Birmingham, Chattanooga, College Park, Danville, Jackson, Knoxville, Mobile, Montgomery, New Orleans, Norfolk, Saint Petersburg, and Savannah by 10,000 Communities Initiative partners Milken Institute and HR&A. Moving forward, the National League of Cities, Milken Institute, HR&A and Open Grants will continue to work with the Southern Cities for Economic Inclusion to build a Southeast regional project matchmaking platform to connect NLC’s efforts designed to make it easier for smaller cities to apply to federal grant programs with the project readiness and predevelopment efforts of the Community Infrastructure Center that help local project sponsors define shovel-worthy projects and better access critical sources of capital, capacity, project expertise, and talent that they need to advance community infrastructure projects to become application-ready.