Tacoma’s Strategic Plan, Tacoma 2025, is about creating the opportunity for Tacoma residents to enjoy a high quality of life, earn a living wage, have access to education, and help shape their neighborhoods and city. In Tacoma, equity and empowerment are top priorities, meaning that all Tacoma residents must have equitable opportunities to reach their full potential and share in the benefits of community progress. In other words, equity is when everyone has access to the opportunities necessary to satisfy their essential needs, advance their well-being and achieve their full potential. 

Very High Opportunity represents locations that have better outcomes because of access to better opportunities to succeed and excel in life. These better outcomes include things like high performing schools, access to adequate transportation, safe neighborhoods, livable wage employment, good health outcomes such as higher life expectancies, and safe and healthy environmental conditions.

In contrast, Low Opportunity areas have worse outcomes because they have more obstacles and barriers to opportunity within the area. These communities have limited access to institutional and societal investments that limit their quality of life. 

Achieving equity requires intentionally building equity into what we do, how we do it, and how we approach our collective vision. This means recognizing that historical policies and practices have made vastly different investments in different communities. It means centering the voices most impacted by the issues we face as a community. It means reflecting the community we serve. In addition, it means that we should develop our policies, programs, and services with equity as an intentional, central component of everything that we do. 

Tacoma 2025 is the Strategic Plan for Tacoma, a community-designed vision developed by more than 2,400 Tacoma residents who worked together to envision what the future of Tacoma could look like. It is a strategic plan that acts as a compass for the City, pointing us in the direction of what we need to prioritize in order to achieve that vision. It does this by helping to direct our efforts and resources in ways that reflect our growing community’s evolving needs, while centering equity.  

In 2015, The City of Tacoma adopted the Empowerment and Equity Framework and Tacoma 2025. These two products combined set a community vision for Tacoma as an inclusive and equitable place to live, learn, work and play and gave staff a directive to make our service delivery more equitable and commit to equity in policy decision making.  

The City of Tacoma worked with the Kirwan Institute out of the Ohio State University to develop an opportunity index that evaluates census block groups within the City of Tacoma. Community Attributes helped to develop the user interface tool. This allows us to operationalize equity and make data informed decisions for equitable service delivery. The Equity Index is just one tool in the toolbox and should be paired with additional data, research, community engagement, and more to make an equitable decision. 

The Equity Index allows us to identify disparities in outcomes faced by those most likely to experience inequity and track them over time; guide decisions about the allocation of resources and policy development; increase transparency and accountability; and give communities tools to share in successes and advocate for change. 

The inequitable opportunities available to Tacoma residents didn’t happen overnight, nor did they naturally occur. Decades of systems, policies, and practices shaped the city we see today, and they prevent us from meeting the full potential of our community laid out in Tacoma 2025. 

The Equity Index helps provide the data to inform decisions and prioritize things like new streetlight installations, COVID relief funds, resource distribution, grant allocations, budgeting, policy development, etc. It helps support our planning, outreach, and engagement. It helps with our service delivery as we identify service impacts, service gaps, propose new programs, and develop racial equity action plans.  

Based on the strategic planning process and final Strategic Plan, community priorities were synthesized by the Tacoma 2025 Advisory Committee into five key focus areas: Livability, Economy/Workforce, Education, Civic Engagement, Equity and Accessibility. 

Not every indicator will directly be associated with a department or service but it gives guidance on how to rethink decision-making using an equity lens by visualizing patterns that can be addressed by policy change and investments.  

The 29 indicators for each of the five determinant categories of the index (Accessibility, Economy, Education, Livability, and Environmental Health) were meticulously and collaboratively chosen. To create the calculations behind Tacoma Equity Index, we collaborated with the Kirwan Institute to select an array of community indicators of well-being, each of which has been shown in the social sciences literature to influence one's ability to succeed in life. The data for these indicators were collected at or aggregated to the Census Block Group level and rolled up to the overall Equity Index into a single measure based on several factors that can be compared across the city. 

The Equity Index includes data for race and ethnicity, foreign population, languages spoken, and top countries of immigration. It also has a map option which visually highlights where people of color live. This helps us to identify disparities in outcomes by those most likely to experience inequity and track over time. This data also helps inform community engagement and language access work.

The purpose of the Equity Index is to look for ways to add opportunities to communities that address disparities by area and race. We don’t include race as an indicator because race is not the cause of low opportunity, racism especially systemic racism, like redlining, racist covenants, and racist policies have intentionally excluded people of color from opportunity. Racism is real and the data shows us that areas with higher opportunity have fewer residents of color and more white people than areas of low opportunity which have more residents of color and fewer white people. That's why we have demographic information included on our Equity Index but it is not calculated in the equity score.