About


The Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Framework 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.

The Upward Mobility Framework 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.

Our Story

In 2017, the Urban Institute hosted the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, which sought to better understand what it would take to dramatically increase mobility from poverty in this country, and completed its work in spring 2018. 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.

In 2021–22, a cohort of eight counties across the country applied these initial mobility metrics to develop their own plans to increase upward mobility and racial equity in their communities. Urban has documented what we learned from the localities and we used those insights to refine the metrics based on ongoing scholarship and on-the-ground testing. We have chronicled participants’ experiences and spotlighted key insights, and we 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.

In 2022, using the feedback and lessons learned from the Upward Mobility Cohort, further expertise from our Mobility Metrics Working Group, and insights from other ongoing conversations and research, our team updated the Upward Mobility Framework. The updated Framework increased emphasis on racial equity and shifted from three drivers to five interconnected pillars that support the dimensions of mobility (economic success, being valued in community, and power and autonomy). Several metrics and predictors have been added or updated in the framework to better reflect both research and the priorities of communities working on upward mobility in their communities.

Contact Us

Email [email protected] to reach a member of the team.
 



An initiative of the Urban Institute, the Upward Mobility Framework project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts. Further information on the Urban Institute’s funding principles is available at urban.org/fundingprinciples.