The Urban Institute’s Boosting Upward Mobility project is building evidence while providing guidance to select communities as they work to create the conditions that lift residents out of poverty and on to a pathway that advances their economic success, power and autonomy, and sense of being valued in their community.

Boosting Upward Mobility is rooted in a framework that identifies key conditions within a community that have the power to propel people and families out of poverty and narrow racial inequities. Our framework also provides a set of interrelated, evidence-based metrics that local leaders can use to establish priorities, mobilize action, and assess their progress toward cultivating conditions that support greater mobility from poverty. A cohort of eight counties across the country are now applying these initial mobility metrics to develop their own plans to boost mobility from poverty in their communities.

Over the coming months, Urban will document what we learn from the counties and refine the metrics based on ongoing scholarship and on-the-ground testing. We will also chronicle participating counties’ experiences, spotlight key insights, and provide a wealth of evidence behind the mobility metrics, all of which will offer a window into what mobility from poverty looks like in practice.

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Our story

In 2017, the Urban Institute hosted the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, an initiative of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that sought to better understand what it would take to dramatically increase mobility from poverty in this country. After a year of gathering insights from research, practice, and people who have experienced poverty, the Partnership developed an expansive definition of mobility from poverty that goes beyond economic success. It argued that mobility from poverty also requires power and autonomy, or the ability of people to exercise control over their circumstances and influence the policies and practices that affect their lives, and it requires that people feel valued by and have a sense of belonging in their community.

Building on this holistic definition, the Partnership offered a series of interrelated strategies that could be pursued nationally and locally to significantly boost the ability of people experiencing poverty to shift the trajectory of their lives.

With those strategies in mind, what actions could policymakers, practitioners, and other community leaders take today to start achieving the long-term outcomes embedded in the Partnership’s definition? What specific factors contribute to or block upward mobility?

In 2019, Urban formed a working group of distinguished academics to help us explore the most current evidence on predictive factors that influence mobility from poverty for adults, families, and children. We rigorously vetted the best available metrics for their connection to long-term mobility and produced a set of evidence-based predictors and specific measures for them that local change agents can use to guide and assess their efforts to advance upward mobility in the short to medium term. 

With continued support from the Gates Foundation, Urban’s Boosting Upward Mobility project builds on the Partnership’s original work by applying and testing these metrics in eight counties, which were selected through a competitive process in 2020.