County of Marin Creates New Site with ArcGIS Hub to Engage Local Community and Promote Racial Equity Projects

Marin County, located in the northwestern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, ranks among the healthiest and wealthiest communities in California. However, several equity indicators show that communities of color in Marin County are experiencing significant disparities in areas such as affordable housing and economic mobility, making it the third-most racially disparate county in the state.

To address the growing racialized disparities, the County of Marin created the Office of Equity. The primary mission of the Office of Equity is to promote an anti-racist and multicultural workforce in the county, with a commitment to accountability, community engagement, and transformational change. A key initiative that embodies this mission is the launch of the county’s first-ever Participatory Budgeting (PB) process, in which community members decide how to spend a part of a public budget.

This dynamic process invests in community-driven ideas to advance racial equity and focuses on engaging communities typically left out of government decision-making and budgeting processes. The Marin County Board of Supervisors allocated $2.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for the pilot PB cycle.

Jamillah Jordan, director of the Office of Equity, says, “Marin County boldly reimagined how to make public spending more equitable and effective by adopting the framework of giving people real power, over real money through its inaugural PB process.”

In partnership with the county’s Information Services and Technology (IST) Department, the Office of Equity created a Hub site to collect ideas, accept grant proposals, and gather votes from the public. IST’s data/geographic information system (GIS) team developed the site with ArcGIS Hub, a community engagement platform powered by GIS. The site has garnered positive feedback and allowed the team to work with residents more easily to help advance racially equitable ideas.

Launched in 2022, Marin County’s Participatory Budgeting initiative included a multiphase plan to engage community members to decide how to spend $2.5 million to improve the quality of life and advance equity for all who live, work, and learn in Marin County.

The first phase involved asking the community for ideas on how to spend the funds to advance racial equity in the county. The ideas were focused on four key communities where notable racial disparities exist: Marin City, Novato, West Marin, and the Canal Area in San Rafael. Hundreds of thoughtful ideas—including creating disaster preparedness programs, building community gardens, creating affordable homeownership opportunities, and developing youth enrichment classes—were submitted.

After the county received ideas, the second phase entailed inviting community partners such as nonprofit and community-based organizations to submit grant proposals. Grants from $10,000 to $250,000 were awarded to the finalists. A diverse committee of community members of different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds was assembled to review and evaluate the 104 proposals received.

“Our community partners were instrumental in codesigning the process with us to ensure that we centered the needs and perspectives of community members at the margins of our system,” says Jordan.

The committee evaluated proposals based on feasibility, need, and intended outcomes. The proposals were narrowed down to 24 ideas, which were then placed on a ballot for county residents to vote on. All community members aged 14 years and older who lived, worked, or attended school in the county were eligible to vote, regardless of immigration or criminal justice status.

With the goal of meeting people where they are, voting took place online and in person at several locations throughout the county. Over 3,600 votes were cast and the 16 projects with the most votes received the grant money.

The multiphase PB process led the Office of Equity—partnering with the IST Department’s data team, led by IT manager Marina Raskin—to develop creative solutions to make the process as accessible as possible. Raskin and her team had previously worked with the Office of Equity to create a website with ArcGIS Hub. ArcGIS Hub is an easy-to-configure, cloud-based collaboration and engagement platform that organizes people, data, and tools to accomplish initiatives and goals.

“It was a very natural next step to create an initiative for Participatory Budgeting on the same platform,” says Raskin. “Initially, we were looking at Hub because it is user-friendly, and it provides a modern look and feel.”

Raskin says she arranged for a presentation with Esri for her team and the Office of Equity to get an overview of the features of Hub. This helped both groups decide to use ArcGIS Hub as a platform for the PB website because it had the functionality needed for the project. Raskin also liked that premade templates were available, which allowed her and her team to brainstorm different web page elements and layouts and visualize the page.

“There was already work that has been previously done using ArcGIS Hub technology, and we were building upon that work. Building a Participatory Budgeting website was easy from that perspective,” says Raskin. “We already knew what layouts and page elements to use."

The ability to integrate surveys, maps, data, and other tools into the Hub site was another benefit provided by ArcGIS Hub. She also notes that Hub made communication with residents easy, which helped foster community engagement.

Raskin and Jordan began creating the site by discussing the goals of the project and the features needed to support them. One important feature was delivering content in different languages. The IT and Office of Equity staff delivered materials in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese to support an inclusive experience. Other features were added to ensure that the site was digitally accessible.

Jordan explains, “[Accessibility] was a critical lens that we applied throughout the entire process, with the goal of making sure that all of our tools were accessible for a range of diverse audiences and community members.”

Raskin adds, “Digital accessibility was one of the reasons why ArcGIS Hub also was selected for this project because we already knew how to make ArcGIS Hub pages digitally accessible to meet the standards of our digital accessibility program.”

The Participatory Budgeting solution, an ArcGIS Solutions offering, includes a configurable application that allows users to submit problems or observations. Raskin notes that the solution was easily integrated into Hub.

Following voting for the final 24 grant proposals, the data/GIS team led by Raskin created a map of the winning proposals that was also displayed on the Hub site. Raskin says this project was challenging and involved a lot of trial and error, but she and her team were enthusiastic about the work.

“What was exciting is that it was all new, and we had to develop tools,” says Raskin, adding that she and her team had to “think innovatively every single step of the process.”

Community engagement for the PB process was very high, with a total of 350 ideas being shared and receiving 2,675 likes on the Hub site. Using Hub assisted the county in efficiently communicating information and getting residents involved.

“The main goal was to be able to collect the information from the public, especially the ideas, and present the information back to the public,” says Raskin. “So, Hub was very useful for presenting the information.”

The county’s Hub site features a page for each winning project with a description of it and its milestones. There is also a map of winning projects, and each project has a pop-up with a link to the Hub site’s project page, a convenient feature provided by Hub.

Raskin and her team have trained other departments in Marin County, including the Office of Equity, to make updates to Hub site such as changing content or images. For example, the projects map is fully editable so that projects can be updated as they evolve.

“This is one of the features of ArcGIS Hub that we like. It's intuitive enough and easy enough for a nonprogrammer to come in and make these changes and keep the site up-to-date,” says Raskin.

The feedback received on the Hub site has been positive, and Jordan says Marin County residents liked the look of the site and appreciated the multilingual aspect of it. Jordan wanted the site to be user-friendly for community members of all backgrounds and abilities to connect with the overall goal of advancing equity in the county.

“Our goal was to appeal to a wide range of audiences and community members. We were very intentional with the design of our tools, [including] the multilingual features, digital accessibility, and avoiding jargon in our content,” says Jordan. “The site is a powerful way for us to tell our story of how PB can transform the way governments share decision-making power and engage with community members.”