Washington, District of Columbia
| Program Category | # of Grants per state | Sum of EDA $ |
|---|---|---|
| Disaster Relief | 1 | $100,000 |
| Economic Adjustment Assistance | 1 | $600,000 |
| Research and Evaluation | 1 | $1,098,990 |
| Technical Assistance | 4 | $898,540 |
| Grand Total | 7 | $2,697,530 |
The District of Columbia is home to many national organizations that contribute to economic success in areas across the country, including the Urban Institute (Urban). Celebrating a 50-year legacy of impact, Urban has been an independent, authoritative source of evidence and data analysis to ensure that important decisions are rooted in reliable information. Urban serves a wide variety of stakeholders including national programs, state and local governments, nonprofit organizations, foundations, philanthropists, journalists, and communities.
Urban is conducting a large-scale program evaluation of EDA’s impact using data from 1997-2017. In FY 2018, EDA entered a 2-year, $1,098,990 Research and Evaluation cooperative agreement award with Urban in which EDA is providing data and input into Urban’s models for evaluating the success of EDA’s past projects, with the goal of communicating those project successes to EDA stakeholders and to better understand the pathways which enable the success of EDA’s investments. Urban will improve and expand analysis of the impact of EDA’s investments by building on the existing body of work produced by EDA-funded Grant Thornton and Rutgers University analyses, as well as SRI’s (Stanford Research Institute International) assessment of the link between EDA’s non-infrastructure programs and capacity building outcomes associated with long-term economic growth.
The results of this research will be accessible to both technical and non-technical readers, with the goal of better informing the economic development community at large. This project also includes the development of data visualizations and immersive narratives around EDA projects and their transformative and catalytic nature. Urban will be creating a new website to highlight EDA’s work and the results from the research completed under this award. The focus of this new site is to make research findings and EDA materials available to economic development stakeholders and practitioners for the purposes of improving outcomes at local levels and for the benefit of future EDA applicants.