Case Study

Challenge: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a leading national philanthropy dedicated to taking bold leaps to transform health in our lifetime, aimed to identify capacity and financing gaps impacting the progress of water infrastructure projects amid unprecedented levels of federal investment thanks in part to the American Rescue Plan Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This effort required the engagement of subject-matter experts active in water infrastructure financing, planning, and construction. The overarching goal was to understand how philanthropy (and, more broadly, private capital) can help unlock and accelerate public financing dollars for equitable water infrastructure, particularly in economically disadvantaged communities.

Solution: Summit organized a technical working group with project stakeholders and performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of financing available in the water infrastructure sector. Relying on the team’s experience supporting federal infrastructure programs, Summit researched, detailed, and compared all available federal and nonfederal financing sources for water infrastructure projects. The Summit team observed increasing demand and competition for a finite amount of public financing dollars, highlighting the need to address gaps before the most incentivized capital is expended.

Summit then identified subject-matter experts—including technical assistance providers, engineers, State Revolving Fund leads, and federal credit managers—for inclusion in the engagement. The team planned, scheduled, and facilitated 20 interviews to identify the most pressing capacity and financial gaps to better understand project-level challenges in completing or improving drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater systems. Throughout the interview process, the Summit team gathered a diverse and detailed accounting of issues from multiple perspectives, setting the team up to provide sound recommendations backed up by data for the role philanthropic capital can play in the water infrastructure space.

Summit developed an internal report with recommendations for the foundation detailing the financing available for project funding, key insights from interviews, and examples of successful projects. The team emphasized and helped illustrate the important themes of necessary and inevitable projects (e.g., public health and regulatory-driven projects), project and geographic prioritization using tools like the Climate and Environmental Justice Screening Tool, ballooning project costs and rising interest rates resulting in a real cost of waiting, and blending capital sources to manage rising costs for especially disadvantaged communities.

Result: Leveraging the Summit team’s final report, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation now has time-sensitive solutions to help fill gaps in the water infrastructure sector. The proposed solutions empower the foundation to allocate philanthropic capital with maximum efficiency and provide a road map to prove and replicate financing approaches and interventions in the water infrastructure sector. Summit’s support helped inform a joint article by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation team members that was published by the Joyce Foundation and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago as well as investments by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to develop scalable financing programs for equitable water infrastructure.