Located on the US-Mexico border, Pima County, Arizona, is a racially and ethnically diverse community with vibrant cultural and natural resources and a strong Native American presence. But, like in many parts of the US, not everyone in the county has equal access to opportunity.
People living in lower-opportunity neighborhoods tend to have fewer options for accumulating sufficient assets to weather economic shocks or unanticipated events that require larger sums of money to resolve. This has generational impacts, both because wealth is transferred from parents to their children and because of the long-term effects of exposure to childhood poverty on adult health and educational outcomes.
To address these generational challenges resulting from a lack of wealth, in 2023, Pima County and the City of Tucson adopted the Prosperity Initiative, “a regional partnership working to reduce generational poverty with a vision that every child in every community of Pima County reach adulthood with the skills, tools, and resources for economic stability.”
The initiative’s 13 evidence-based policies focus on improving the economic mobility of families with children, spanning topics such as housing stability, workforce development and job quality, and quality early child care and education. These topics reflect pressing challenges in the region and domains where there are opportunities to reduce inequities. For instance, preschool enrollment is one important predictor for these upward mobility outcomes. In 2021, 39 percent of all 3- and 4-year-olds in Pima County were enrolled in nursery school or preschool, but enrollment differed by race and ethnicity. While 56 percent of White 3- and 4-year-olds were enrolled—above the national median of 44 percent—35.3 percent and 30 percent of Black and Hispanic children, respectively, were enrolled.
The Prosperity Initiative sets population-level goals for addressing intergenerational poverty, but progress toward broad long-term policy goals can be challenging to measure. To help with this, a cross-sector team was formed, including staff of Pima County, the City of Tucson, nonprofit organizations (the Primavera Foundation, Social Venture Partners Tucson, and the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona), and researchers from the University of Arizona. The team’s task was to identify a set of measures that could reliably capture progress on these big-picture efforts while also tracking shorter-term, programmatic-level impacts that could contribute to larger goals.
To advance this work, Pima County participated in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, a 12-month training and technical assistance program which provided coaching, peer learning opportunities, and data and planning tools to participating localities across the country to support their upward mobility and racial equity initiatives.
This case study documents the Pima County Mobility Action Team’s experience developing measurement strategies to assess the outcomes of the Prosperity Initiative. It holds promising insights for local leaders looking to develop approaches for evaluating the success of their upward mobility plans.
The Goal
The Pima County team wanted to identify a strategy and framework for monitoring progress toward the long-term goals of the Prosperity Initiative. The team aimed to select high-quality metrics and align on a collaborative process for prioritizing measures and revisiting metrics over time.
How They Did It
Conducting a data scan. The team first reviewed the Prosperity Initiative policies and, drawing upon the Mobility Metrics and other data sources, identified relevant metrics that could potentially serve as “headline indicators” to monitor and communicate progress on the policy priorities. The data were from both national and local sources and represented the expertise of the team members.
Selecting headline indicators. Having completed an initial scan of potential measures, the team then evaluated metrics against eight criteria to assess their quality and applicability for each of the initiative’s policy domains. The criteria spanned a rubric (see table 1 in the PDF) of four parameters adapted from the Urban Institute’s Results-Based Accountability framework: data power, proxy power, communication power, and equity. The criteria also included additional considerations, such as the cost-effectiveness of gathering the data relative to the information they provide.
The team assigned working groups of subject matter experts in each policy area, who used this prioritization process to identify one to two headline indicators. The working groups selected 20 total indicators. They summarized each policy with a corresponding indicator and desired direction of change. For example, the team selected the Economic Inclusion Mobility Metric of “percentage of people experiencing poverty who live in high-poverty neighborhoods” as one headline indicator for the “housing supply and opportunity” policy (see box 1 in the PDF).
Continuous evaluation. Working groups will review the full suite of indicators annually to determine whether they continue to meaningfully describe the impact of policy change, and when needed, the team will consider alternative data sources or new indicators. For instance, in the initial scan of metrics, the team was unable to find local data on nonwage job benefits associated with job quality, such as access to paid family leave or retirement benefits. Indicators were selected that can address employment and workforce needs while acknowledging where data gaps exist and may be addressed differently in the future.
To ensure its measures are responsive to community policy goals, the team will also continually review metrics alongside other relevant policy documents, such as housing needs assessments or master plans, to inform the selection of new indicators or changes to its criteria for selecting them. Monitoring these outcomes can bolster the county’s evidence base for which investments and policies are and are not substantively moving the needle on poverty and upward mobility, allowing for more-tailored interventions.
What They Learned
Draw on a range of data sources. For both long-term, systems-focused initiatives and interim upward mobility programs, communities need measures that succinctly communicate important information about impact. Pima County’s process for selecting headline indicators reflects the importance of drawing upon a wide range of reliable data sources, identifying data gaps or limitations, convening subject matter experts across a range of domains to provide input on priority metrics, and establishing processes to review and adjust metrics. In particular, comparing indicators by population group can help local leaders assess whether inequities are narrowing. Identifying localized benchmarks for shorter-term, programmatic measures alongside larger-scale metrics can help assess interim progress.
Decisionmaking can be spread across experts and organizations with the right structure and support. Other local governments seeking to measure and communicate the impact of their upward mobility efforts can draw upon Pima County’s working group structure to engage a range of stakeholders in developing robust selection criteria and choosing high-quality metrics.
Create guidance and documentation. To ensure information is preserved, the team will produce a guide for managing metrics and indicators data that will describe details of data processing and interpretation, a data monitoring plan, and baseline numbers for each indicator and the direction of change desired. The guide will also explain the degree of change that would be seen as meaningful. For upward mobility coalitions, the practice of developing a data management guide ensures that even if the initiative’s leadership or other staff change, quality data practices can be maintained and, if changed, documented in a central place.
Engage the community. Following the first phase of work to convene working groups and identify indicators, Prosperity Initiative partners now convene through the Community Coalition for Prosperity. Recognizing the importance of centering families with low incomes in its programming and impact tracking, the coalition will explore ways to integrate community feedback into ongoing measurement work. In March 2025, the Pima County Board of Supervisors accepted a $5,000 grant (PDF) to “provide support for involving community members in the work of the Prosperity Initiative implementation,” offering an opportunity for sustained public engagement.
