Community members. For the purposes of this toolkit, community members are people who live or work in a certain geographic area. They are a critical part of your Mobility Coalition because they can contribute unique perspectives that those who have traditionally held wealth or power cannot. Community members can help to cocreate policies and programs with policymakers and other stakeholders by participating in community visioning exercises and deliberative forums, where they can share their lived experiences and provide feedback on existing programs, help collect and analyze community data to make sure they are interpreted correctly, and serve as decisionmakers on how community resources should be allocated. They also have the power to hold stakeholders accountable by voting in local elections, donating to campaigns, and organizing community outreach.

Given the history of structural racism, discrimination, and disinvestment in the US, it is important that you seek to engage community members who are people of color, people with low incomes, people with disabilities, immigrants, English-language learners, people experiencing housing instability or homelessness, young people, people involved in the justice system, and anyone with lived experience of poverty or discrimination.

Even when some community members work for organizations you may be considering for your Mobility Coalition, you should invite them to participate as individuals who have engaged with local services and systems designed to alleviate poverty. Careful attention should be paid to how power dynamics in the coalition might discourage some community members from speaking up or block them from leading pieces of the work.

It’s critical to compensate community members who agree to serve on your coalition for their time and expertise, especially because they may not be participating in their professional capacity like other coalition members. Note that inviting community members to join your Mobility Coalition is supplemental to doing community engagement. You will still need to engage a wider group of community members to inform your upward mobility work. See chapter 3 for more information on community engagement.

Nonprofits and community-based organizations. Local and national nonprofits may include charitable and direct service organizations, volunteer service organizations, labor unions, chambers of commerce, and child care organizations. They may be based around a specific issue such as homelessness, or they may serve as an intermediary and provide technical assistance to boost the capacity of other organizations. Intermediaries are organizations that connect groups working on the same topics or in the same geographic areas. Community-based organizations (CBOs), such as community development corporations, community development financial institutions, social service providers, advocacy groups, and neighborhood groups, are typically structured as nonprofits and work at the local level to meet community needs.

Nonprofits and CBOs can be valuable members of your Mobility Coalition because they can use their programmatic expertise and relationships in the community to help elevate issues of concern for residents and connect them to resources. For instance, organizations that deliver programs and provide services to community members are likely to have strong relationships with residents. Nonprofits that serve as intermediaries can also be valuable members of the coalition because they may be skilled in providing training and technical assistance or conducting policy research.

Advocacy groups. Advocacy groups are organizations that advocate on behalf of a specific cause or community. Because they are typically nonprofit organizations, they may function similarly to nonprofits and CBOs described above. Their goal is to elevate and promote policy priorities to private and public actors who can draft policy and enact systems change. Advocacy groups can be valuable members of your Mobility Coalition because they can help provide data on specific policy topics and build support for the coalition’s priorities while holding other actors accountable for following through on their commitments. They can also help develop and execute narrative change strategies.

Philanthropy. Philanthropic organizations, such as community foundations, provide financial support (typically charitable in nature) to other organizations. They can be valuable members of your Mobility Coalition because they can contribute financially to a cause and use their status to advocate for policy change. Through their relationships with grantees, philanthropies can encourage program evaluation and promote specific goals and outcomes. They can also play important research and development functions by funding local pilot projects.

Research organizations. Research organizations, including universities and think tanks, can be valuable Mobility Coalition members because they can collect and analyze data, evaluate programs and policies, conduct original research on specific topics, and provide training and technical assistance. They can also serve as neutral conveners that bring groups together around a specific issue.

Anchor institutions. Anchor institutions are local or regional for-profit and nonprofit organizations that have significant and long-standing presence in a community, such as universities, hospitals and other health care providers, financial institutions, religious organizations, and arts and cultural organizations. They can contribute to your Mobility Coalition by leveraging their status in a community and their political and financial capital to support cross-sector goals. Anchor institutions are often major regional employers and buyers of goods and services, which gives them additional power over mobility-boosting systems. They may also play a convener role and lend financial or technical support to other organizations.

Private-sector actors. Private-sector actors are individuals, for-profit businesses, and other organizations that do not belong to the public or community sectors. They can be valuable Mobility Coalition members because they can support specific policy agendas or interventions and adopt more equitable business practices (e.g., living-wage policies). They can also contribute financially or provide other resources to social causes. Private-sector actors may need to be brought in with a persuasive strategy that convinces them of their value to the work and how the work aligns with their goals, which are generally more profit-oriented.

Designing and Structuring Your Mobility Coalition

While the exact structure of your Mobility Coalition will vary according to the needs of your work, you might consider organizing it into three groups: a management team, key stakeholder partners organized into working groups that focus on specific needs, and champions who can help support and advocate for critical aspects of the work. Figure 2-2 shows the frequency with which you should engage each group. The management team is central to the work and therefore should meet most frequently, while the champions are tertiary partners who should be engaged less often, most likely at critical junctures in the work.

FIGURE 2-2: Example of Mobility Coalition Structure

Management team. Your Mobility Coalition’s management team serves as the main body for planning and launching the process to build your coalition, along with later activities to support and sustain the coalition. The team should develop a road map to not only launch the coalition but also to facilitate and lead the implementation of the coalition’s vision. The members of the management team—and the members of the coalition more broadly—should have a variety of lived experiences and ideally reflect the diversity of your community along multiple spectrums, including race and ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, and more. They should also have the relevant experience and connections, authority, and access to information required to advance the work, as well as a commitment to racial equity, diversity, and inclusion, as demonstrated by their prior work or their organization’s stated values. Below we describe some key roles that make up the management team. Although most of these roles are essential to the work, you should decide how to operationalize them in your community because local resources and capacities vary.

• Project manager. The project manager is the operational lead and is responsible for developing your work plan, identifying and liaising with the various working group leads, making sure everyone follows through on their commitments, and troubleshooting challenges. We recommend that the project manager be a member of the convening or backbone organization with the authority and information to lead other team members. This person should be highly organized, have deep understanding of organizational structures and processes, possess strong communication skills, have expertise in advancing and communicating about racial equity, be able to coordinate work across departments and organizations, be a problem solver, and be able to delegate confidently.
• Data lead. The data lead will manage the collection, analysis, and visualization of data, as well as the development of mechanisms for regularly gathering and updating data and tracking success metrics. This person should have experience with disaggregating data, using data for storytelling and community engagement, and executing data-sharing agreements. Research organizations, anchor institutions, universities, or local governments might be good places to look for candidates.
• Community engagement lead. The community engagement lead will plan and possibly facilitate your coalition’s community engagement activities. This person should have extensive knowledge of engagement methods, be familiar with principles of inclusive and equitable engagement, and have connections to CBOs in your community. Nonprofits or CBOs might be good places to look for candidates.
• Communications and outreach lead. The communications and outreach lead will coordinate both internal and external communications regarding your coalition’s work. This person should be familiar with multiple communications channels, including social media and platforms used by harder-to-reach populations, such as English-language learners, people without access to the internet, and older adults. Philanthropies or anchor institutions might be good places to look for candidates.
• Learning and evaluation lead. The learning and evaluation lead will oversee the codevelopment of measures of success (along with the data lead and other relevant stakeholders and community members) and create an evaluation plan for your coalition’s work, as well as facilitate continuous learning and improvement activities so your coalition can course correct as needed and modify its approach over time. This person should have experience with multiple forms of evaluation, organizational improvement, and information-gathering methods, including performance management, results-based accountability, qualitative research and interviewing, and evaluating systems change. Research organizations or philanthropies might be good places to look for candidates. Your data lead may also be the right person for this role, but if you decide to keep these functions separate, the data lead and the learning and evaluation lead should work closely together to develop monitoring and evaluation mechanisms.

Each member of the management team may decide to organize their own small operations team to provide additional capacity. For example, the data lead might gather a group of data analysts from across partner organizations to assist with data gathering, cleaning, and analysis. The community engagement lead might assemble a small management team composed of individuals from local nonprofits or CBOs who have experience working closely with community members. However, before they do so, they should have a clear sense of what support they need, how much time they’re asking of people, and how they’ll work to minimize the burden on these individuals if the work is not their primary job. Each lead should communicate these expectations clearly in their requests.

Key stakeholder partners. Your key stakeholder partners are the members of your Mobility Coalition charged with executing tasks related to the strategic actions you intend to implement to advance upward mobility. They may be organized into smaller working groups to lead activities in specific areas. Keep in mind that your key stakeholders will likely grow or change as you deepen your work and clarify your key priorities and activities.

When forming a new Mobility Coalition, it’s helpful to begin by learning who is currently working on the issues you’re hoping to address and whether they might be appropriate partners. No one wants to be part of yet another project that duplicates efforts already underway. Rather than reinventing the wheel, talk to the people and organizations in your community about how you might work together to fill important gaps. There may be a collective impact initiative in your community that is already working on some of the policy issues you hope to tackle (see the Riverside County case study below). Engage relevant groups early to see how you might collaborate to advance your mutual goals, and be prepared to make the case for how working with you will benefit their cause.

To identify possible key stakeholder partners, create a stakeholder inventory by brainstorming a list of various local actors working on upward mobility in your community. Feel free to use our "Identifying Potential Coalition Members" worksheet to assist with your brainstorming. Be sure to consider actors from all the different groups highlighted above (see figure 2-1), actors serving marginalized groups (e.g., people of color, people with disabilities, or people with low incomes) in your community, and actors working on issues you believe are critical to upward mobility. 

If your list of partners is long, that’s okay. This is just the inventory step. From here, narrow the list by looking for “critical partners” without whom you would not be able to create a plan to boost upward mobility; successfully identify policy, practice, and programmatic gaps; or implement the ideas you will eventually develop.

To identify critical partners, ask the following questions about the potential individuals and organizations listed in your inventory:

• Aligned initiatives: What activities or initiatives does the organization undertake that might align with your coalition’s efforts to boost upward mobility and bring about racial equity? Does it currently have an internal- or external-facing racial equity initiative? Does it conduct deep and meaningful community engagement? Does its work focus on promoting power and autonomy and dignity and belonging among participants? Is it focused on bringing about systems change?
• Assets: What assets might this stakeholder bring to the partnership? Assets include research and analytic capability, staff, financial resources, political clout, key relationships, strong connections to community members, fundraising capacity, experience creating a narrative change campaign, convening power, expertise in data-informed decisionmaking, or a demonstrated commitment to racial equity.
• Partnership: How would the partnership be mutually beneficial?
• Motivations: What motivates the organization? Who or what is it accountable to and what drives it to action?
• Roles: Are there individuals working for this organization who have critical frontline or technical knowledge that may be key to transforming systems and responding to community members’ needs?

Once you’ve considered these questions regarding potential partners, some individuals or organizations will likely stand out as being the most critical to your Mobility Coalition. Because you will need to revisit this initial list of partners throughout your work, it’s fine to start with a slightly smaller group and add others over time. Eventually, you might break the key stakeholder partners into working groups centered around specific community priorities or activities.

Another thing to take into account is that some of the potential partners on the list might be good candidates for a “keep informed” category. Organizations in this category need not be formally engaged as part of the Mobility Coalition, at least not initially, but should be kept in the loop about the work being planned, as you may want to engage them when you begin implementing your strategies and priorities.

Joining a Mobility Coalition requires a substantial commitment of time, trust, and social capital. Thoughtfully framing the invitation to each potential partner or champion is key to starting the coalition off on the right foot. You should make a direct, personalized request that states a rationale for the invitation, describes what resources or support they will be given in exchange for their time and expertise, introduces them to the project manager, and proposes how the convening organization plans to share power during the work.

Invitations should also include a note about what makes this effort different from others. For example, many successful cross-sector initiatives began because local leaders observed some startling statistics about their community and decided to take action to address them. As you prepare to launch your Mobility Coalition, consider sharing some key data points about your community to illustrate why change is needed (see chapter 4). See our Sample Invite Letter to New Coalition Members for wording you might find helpful as you draft your invitation.

Once you’ve recruited all the necessary actors for your Mobility Coalition, the next step is to kick off the coalition’s work. In the first few months, it will be important to make time for a few launch activities (listed below in a recommended sequential order) that can help build a well-functioning and sustainable coalition. We provide some sample agendas to help you set up your first few meetings.

Get acquainted. People working closely together will need time to get to know one another and understand how each partner fits into the overall puzzle. You may want to set community norms that all coalition partners can commit to and build on as they work together. You may also want to create opportunities for partners to present their organization’s work, talk about their positionality, and why they care about boosting upward mobility and advancing racial equity, especially because some partners will be new to working together or will not have had opportunities to join similar coalitions in the past. Making space for team building and introductions will help ensure that new voices don’t get sidelined and that your coalition centers equity in both its process and outcomes.

Discuss expectations and roles. It is important to make space at the outset for partners to discuss their expectations and hopes for the Mobility Coalition. Specifically, your coalition should plan to agree on how frequently you will meet, what communication platforms you will use, what role each member will play, and how decisions will be made.

Determine how decisions will be made. Your coalition will need to determine how decisions will be made, who will get to provide input, and who will have the final say. There are many decisionmaking models your coalition can use, such as the following: 

• consensus model, where groups work together to reach a decision that everyone can support
• majority rules model, where the majority vote determines the decision
• unanimous support model, where all must vote in favor of a decision
• simple majority or plurality model, where whichever decision has the majority of votes wins

Develop common values and a shared understanding of structural racism. Tackling a complex problem without a shared understanding of its cause can lead to fragmented and/or inadequate solutions. To remove the barriers that systems have created and sustained, partners must develop common values and agree on a cohesive narrative about what has caused the community’s challenges. It’s likely that people in your coalition will have different understandings about how racial inequities came to be and varying levels of comfort in talking about privilege or experiences with racism. Shared analysis is a discussion approach through which participants can learn about the history of racism in their community, establish a common framework and language for discussing race and equity matters, develop strategies for talking about tough subjects in a respectful and honest way, and understand how to redefine leadership structures and roles to create racial equity–focused strategies.

Investigating structural racism and privilege is an ongoing process, but it is important to commit to building a shared understanding of structural racism as you begin your journey to advance upward mobility in your community. Following are some resources you can use to host meetings among stakeholders and undertake a shared analysis about race and racial inequity in your community:

• FrameWorks’s Communicating about Intergenerational Urban Poverty and Race in America: Challenges, Opportunities, and Emerging Recommendations
• Government Alliance on Race and Equity’s Advancing Racial Equity and Transforming Government: A Resource Guide to Put Ideas into Action
• Government Alliance on Race and Equity’s Racial Equity Action Plans: A How-to Manual
• The US Department of Commerce, Economic Development Administration’s Indigenous Economic Development Community of Practice
• Race Forward’s Creating Cultures & Practices for Racial Equity: A Toolbox for Advancing Racial Equity for Arts and Cultural Organizations
• Race Forward’s Building the We: Healing-Informed Governing for Racial Equity in Salinas
• Smithsonian Magazine’s 158 Resources to Understand Racism in America
• National Museum of African American History & Culture’s Talking About Race
• Washington Race Equity & Justice Initiative’s Organizational Race Equity Toolkit
• The State of Michigan, Department of Civil Rights’ Racial Equity Toolkit 

Form smaller working groups. Dividing your Mobility Coalition members into smaller working groups can provide greater focus and accountability. These groups can meet for as long and as often as deemed necessary by the members involved (within the constraints of your goals and timeline). They can also be reorganized as needed. When convening working groups, make sure to prioritize cross-sector partnerships. For example, instead of creating a “Housing Group,” which may only resonate with subject-matter experts in housing, consider expanding the scope to “Opportunity-Rich and Inclusive Neighborhoods,” which may include subject-matter experts not just in housing but also economic inclusion, transportation access, and social capital. If your language is inclusive of system-wide factors, you are more likely to encourage engagement across multiple policy domains and a wider range of actors, such as developers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations. Working with a diverse range of colleagues or stakeholders can help challenge assumptions, check biases, and illuminate opportunities for systems change that may not have surfaced otherwise. Also, don’t forget to facilitate peer-sharing sessions between representatives from different working groups, so that members of all groups can spend time identifying similar patterns and overlapping themes.

Although a lot of work may have gone into identifying and recruiting coalition members, forming and launching your Mobility Coalition is just the beginning of your journey. To meaningfully improve upward mobility and racial equity in your community, you will need to sustain the coalition and its work throughout the planning, implementation, and evaluation phases. Chapter 7 discusses how to do so in more detail, but below are some general best practices informed by the Collective Impact Forum, Community Tool Box, and John Kania and Mark Kramer’s work on collective impact.

Strive for mutually supportive and sustainable partnerships. Typically, people partner with organizations that offer something they need. For example, people may leverage networks or use some of the funding and resources of partner organizations to amplify their own goals. However, creating strong and resilient partnerships and sustaining work over several years requires partners to mutually reinforce one another’s work. To develop strong, mutually supportive relationships with your partners, assess your own resources, networks, and capacities to see what you can share and how you can support the work your partners are doing.

Ensure the common agenda is linked to all three dimensions of upward mobility. Achieving upward mobility for all people in your community—especially for people of color and other historically marginalized groups—entails creating the conditions not only for economic success but also for power and autonomy and dignity and belonging.

Commit to racial equity as both a process and a goal. It’s important to work not only toward creating more racially equitable outcomes in your community but also to embed racial equity considerations in how your Mobility Coalition members work with one another and with the community at large. It’s likely that people in your coalition will have very different opinions about and experiences with racial equity. To create an effective and cohesive coalition, you must seek to have a common understanding of what equity means to the group and how each member’s identity might contribute to the group’s understanding of equity, build trust among coalition members and with community leaders and members, invite individuals to the coalition who can share their lived experience in addition to their expertise, and commit to collecting disaggregated data and conducting deep and meaningful community engagement.

Acknowledge diversity among your members and among their ideas and beliefs. Members of your coalition may hold very different identities, and they may also occasionally disagree. Make sure to take everyone's strengths, opinions, and constraints into account and to use diversity as a starting point for discussion, rather than a source of division.

Focus on continuous learning and improvement. The systems that block racial equity and mobility are complex and dynamic. Actively learning whether organizational structures, relationships, or industry norms are hindering or helping you achieve your goals and then adapting your approaches as needed is critical to doing this work well. It requires taking time to reflect on how partnerships work and what could improve coordination.

Share power authentically. Although one organization or group may be the coordinating body of this work, you should include all coalition members at every stage, giving them real ownership and opportunities to inform and shape decisions. You should try to involve everyone in generating vision and mission statements, planning, and major decisions. The more people feel ownership of the coalition itself, the harder they'll work to achieve its goals and the less likely they'll be to allow turf issues or minor conflicts to get in the way of the coalition's progress.

Be patient. Forging sustainable partnerships cannot be done quickly. It’s important to take time to learn about your partners and their values, goals, and approaches to the work. Even after launching your Mobility Coalition, be patient with one another, because creating the conditions to boost upward mobility and advance equity will take years. Carefully forging your partnerships early on and devoting work to maintaining them will lead to more meaningful collaboration over time.

Build sustainable capacity. The success of the coalition will depend on procuring and allocating resources (staffing, funding, technical support, etc.) so the coalition can continue its activities over time, better prepare for potential changes in staffing and political shifts, and make sure resources are available for coalition priorities.

Celebrate success. Celebrating achievements will help your coalition thrive and will give you a much-needed opportunity to remember why you're doing all this work.

Now that you’ve built a Mobility Coalition united around the shared goal of advancing upward mobility and racial equity in your community, it’s time to think about what your coalition will do to achieve its goals. But before you start your work, you’ll need to develop a shared understanding of local mobility conditions and barriers to upward mobility, which involves listening to and learning from members of your community. The remaining chapters of this toolkit can guide you through that work.