Welcome back to Know Your Network, TFN’s blog series highlighting the people making an impact across our community of funders, partners and allies — and beyond.
For this latest installment of KYN, we sat down with James Hardy — a Senior Program Officer, Strategic Portfolios at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Akron, Ohio. James also serves as co-chair of TFN’s Inclusive Economies working group.
Read on to learn more about James’s take on the structural forces shaping community health, why small and mid-sized cities are laboratories for innovation, and where he’s finding hope in these challenging times.
TFN: Hey James! Your work at RWJF spans housing, community development and economic development. What does your work look like today, and what feels most important about it in this moment?
JH: So RWJF is a national funder but my work is currently regionally focused on a few different but mutually reinforcing areas. I steward RWJF’s work in small and mid-sized cities impacted by significant economic difficulties. I work in the affordable housing space, and I also partner closely with local and regional funders in economic justice in the American South. We consider not just the historic injustices the area faced, but more importantly, how that history continues to show up today in the economic and community development practices in the region. We explore how to back the leaders and nonprofits working to replace extractive economic practices with ones that are more inclusive and healthy for communities.
TFN: You’ve described economic development as a key driver of health outcomes. What’s a lesson you’ve learned about the relationship between economic opportunity and community health that you wish more people understood?
JH: A good job is preventative medicine for an individual or family. I think that has been proven for decades. And when I say a “good job,” I mean a job that offers a family-sustaining wage with benefits that allows the family to thrive.
But what’s less proven, and what we’ve been working to change, is the connection at a community level. All of the conditions that build a community — the built environment, transportation systems and water systems and affordability of housing — contribute to community health and are inherently economic investments.
Same goes for how mayors, city councils and county governments engage in community and economic development. Their priorities ultimately impact the larger regional economy. Elected officials, nonprofits, and community members have some level of control locally, but these issues are all connected to the national and global economy.
And then there’s the structural issues in our economy that reward certain cities at the expense of others. The most recent example is AI data centers being rolled out in communities across the country with little consideration of community health outcomes.
Environmental and systematic choices have a greater impact on family and community health than individual choices. And so in my work, I try to bring that lens to my colleagues — reminding them that economic decisions, at every level, shape what people are able to do for their health. And so we’re working on all of those factors to ultimately support thriving communities from a health perspective.
TFN: A lot of your work focuses on small and mid-sized cities. What are you seeing in those communities right now that larger national conversations might be missing?
JH: In my opinion, small and mid-sized cities have a scale that makes innovation much more possible than you might find in the larger metros. People know one another and see their neighbors at the grocery stores. You can access the decisionmakers quicker, and connect with them more effectively.
These cities are great laboratories of new and innovative economic development and policies, and they’re also dealing with the same challenges that larger metros are. Every city has a housing crisis, there’s no jurisdiction immune from it, and we’re all feeling the acute diminishing of public resources with which to respond to those challenges. The bread and butter resources that small and mid-sized cities relied on in the past are in real jeopardy, and so these smaller cities are responding to the same crises with a lot less support.
The other thing I would say about small and mid-sized cities that I think a lot of folks miss is that about a quarter of the country lives here, and they’re not interested in leaving. The notion of picking up and moving for a good job isn’t working anymore. People are much more fixed to place.
They’re not trying to be the next Silicon Valley, but they would like for their people to live outside of poverty and to be able to raise a family, to have a tax base that can support their schools, transit, and public investments.
The fact that we have a structure and system right now that is making it really difficult to do that is often left out of the larger economic development conversation. People don’t want to move; they want there to be better opportunities in the places they already live.
TFN: From your vantage point, what does it really take to build more inclusive economies, and where do you see the greatest opportunities for funders to support that work?
JH: Well, this is the $64,000 question, right? The real answer is there is no one way to do it. Local and regional context matters, but economies don’t stop at the municipal boundary line. An essential piece of building an inclusive economy is collaboration, coordination, and alignment of local assets across a whole suite of actors.
And broadly, we are in dire need of new economic policy. New ideas for how to address inequality at the household wealth level and also between communities. What might have made a lot of sense in the 1960s doesn’t necessarily work in a 21st century context, so we need new tools and policies to address the challenges of our current system. Things like universal basic income, which is something RWJF and other funders at every level have been funding and evaluating for many years now.
We’ve seen lots of ideas being pitched in the most recent election cycles and from think tanks around new tax credit programs and incentives. I think it’s still too soon to tell what lessons we’ll gain from those, but that’s the exact kind of experimentation that funders need to be looking at.
Whether you’re a community foundation or a national funder, we all have a role to play in incubating these new ideas that tax dollars are too risky for. Innovation needs space and freedom to think, and funders can create that space.
As a co-chair of TFN’s Inclusive Economies working group, what feels most urgent for funders working to advance inclusive economies right now?
JH: Like I said experimentation is definitely something we’re working on, but we can’t forget that basic needs are strategic too. I worry about this greatly in the philanthropic sector, especially for those of us that see ourselves as strategic funders. We overthink it and forget that people need help now.
It doesn’t matter what program or policy you put out; it’s going to be difficult for households to take advantage of it unless a basic level of human service is met. So even if we’re place-based or don’t have a basic needs line item in the budget, we have to ensure we’re not forgetting the basics.
Because there’s also a trust component to basic needs. If you don’t respond to the wildfire fallout, how can a community trust that you have their best interests at heart when you come in with a new strategic program around inclusive economic development?
And while we can’t replace government, philanthropy needs to continue to advocate on behalf of our communities and our constituencies. I personally reject the notion that there’s nothing we can do, and I see my colleagues all across TFN and the country in philanthropy responding in inspirational and innovative ways to try and stem the impact of this decline in basic needs in our communities.
TFN: Looking ahead to TFN’s 2026 Fall Convening, what are you most excited to learn from or explore with fellow members?
JH: TFN gatherings are the best professional development opportunities I get in philanthropy. The peer-to-peer learning, the insights from the sessions, but especially the informal connections that occur with peers working in similar spaces or on similar topics.
And oftentimes, these conversations are ad hoc, even though they end up being some of the most generative conversations I get to have around my work.
Getting together at a TFN event is also a great way to get out of my bubble and hear what my colleagues at the state and local level are facing. I have yet to leave a TFN event without a new idea or additional clarity!
TFN: Zooming out a bit, what’s shaping your perspective these days? What’s giving you energy and hope right now?
JH: In addition to my work, I’m currently in a master’s program at Starr King School for Ministry, focused on faith-based organizing and theories of praxis around social change from a faith-based lens. It’s given me so much hope and connected me to millennia of examples of eras and seasons where humanity has faced significant challenges, and how we have emerged from those challenges with all kinds of art, music, philosophy, and ideas that have propelled humanity forward a little further down the arc of justice.
So it’s really dark right now, but I continue to be buoyed by the energy, innovation, and commitment of not only our grantees but my classmates and professors. It can be really hard to watch the news, but it can be so inspiring to volunteer. There’s such a response happening all across the country to meet this moment, and it really does lift my spirits.
James, his wife Chrissy, and their kids Will and Sophia helping to move Sophia into her college dorm room.