Cross-sectoral collaboration is key to build bottom-up innovation economic results between businesses, communities, and federal, state, and local governments. The 10,000 Communities works with partners to create regional strategies and events to effectively link together investors, technical assistance experts, and community leaders to build local and national resilience and long-term competitiveness. In the year since it launched, the 10,000 Communities initiative has held a series of regional training events with business, government, philanthropic, and community leaders and capital providers across the United States in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Detroit, Sacramento, and in the Northwest.

Muni bonds fund 2/3 of all U.S. built infrastructure. Our better bonds team works to address the challenges of 50,000+ diverse muni market issuers, inspire outcomes-based thinking, promote equitable uses of bond proceeds, and incentivize critical best practices such as better asset management and procurement to scale up the impact of public financing. We also facilitate the CFO Forum, a semi-annual event gathering 10-20 municipal chief financial offers from major cities around the country to discuss relevant topics and share resources surrounding city budgetary and fiscal issues. These forums include guest panelists and tours of pertinent infrastructure projects. The most recent forums were in San Diego, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

The Community Infrastructure Center (CIC) is a platform designed to scale equitable capital deployment and accelerate community-led infrastructure projects in historically underserved communities. CIC provides free technical assistance to community project sponsors, tools to advance projects, and connections to a broad range of funding sources, including impact and institutional investors, philanthropy, public funding programs, and project development expertise.

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Small businesses are the heartbeat of our the economy. They account for almost nearly half of our US GDP and employ nearly almost half of all private-sector workers. Businesses owned by Socially and Economically Disadvantaged Individuals (SEDI businesses) are the fastest-growing segment of the small- business market, yet they often lack adequate access to growth capital. The Initiative for Inclusive Entrepreneurship (IIE) is a national effort to expand access to capital for SEDI businesses through public-private collaborations. 

The global economy is entering a new, more volatile era shaped by intensified geopolitical competition, the development of disruptive technologies and fundamental transitions in energy and knowledge systems. The interlocking nature of these transformations has placed geoeconomics at the center of long-term decision-making for policymakers, companies, and investors alike.  

In the post-pandemic world, cash-strapped governments with competing spending priorities need to harness private capital to achieve their economic development and growth goals. There has been a profound structural shift that will make the global economy and financial markets of the twenty-first century more volatile and disordered than those of the twentieth century. 

The Milken Institute's Geo-Economics Initiative delivers research and strategic insight to help businesses, governments, and investors make sense of this shifting landscape and act decisively within it.