How can GSA measure the impacts of community engagement on how public funds are spent?

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL)), signed by President Biden in 2022, makes historic investments in strengthening supply chains and improving our nation’s ports, airports, rail, and roads. The BIL includes $3.4 billion for the General Services Administration to improve our nation’s land ports of entry (LPOE) along America’s northern and southern borders. The BIL LPOE program will undertake 26 major construction and modernization projects in 11 states across seven GSA regions. One of the program objectives is to strengthen community livability and advance community goals around LPOE projects.

To meet this objective, the LPOE program is providing LPOE regional points of contact (RPOCs) with resources to engage with the surrounding communities, identify community goals and barriers, and support the community in advancing their local development goals (e.g., linking to other funding opportunities to support the community). The theory of change is that this community engagement will meaningfully change how the LPOE program is funded and implemented, relative to if no or limited community engagement were done.

This proposed project aims to assess whether and how much the theorized impacts do, in fact, occur. To that end, we seek a partner who can:

1. Conduct a literature review, which identifies different ways to operationalize and measure community engagement in the context of construction and modernization projects;

2. Identify relevant outcome metrics for assessing impacts; and,

3. Design an evaluation plan, using those operationalized metrics, which will empower us to learn about the economic and environmental impacts associated with community engagement in the context of the LPOE program (relative to if no such engagement had been done).

For more about the BIL and LPOE, see here.

Project last updated August 2, 2024.