In Forsyth County, North Carolina, marginalized populations face significant barriers to escaping generational poverty because of a lack of access to high-quality jobs, housing, transportation, and other variables. 

The Forsyth County Mobility Action Team (MAT), which includes representatives from Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina, Asset Building Coalition of Forsyth County, Forsyth Technical Community College, and the Forsyth County Department of Social Services, engaged in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network to increase economic mobility in the county by addressing systemic barriers to prosperity. The team focused on breaking cycles of generational poverty, particularly by tackling policy constraints like the benefits cliff, which can trap people in low-wage jobs without pathways to advancement. 

Through the Mobility Action Learning Network, Forsyth County strengthened its ability to use data and storytelling for advocacy and policy change. Building on an initial needs assessment and collecting key data about the low-income families it serves, the MAT worked to raise awareness about the issue of the benefits cliff, identified stories of how its work was improving people’s lives, and developed a plan for action. This coalition also developed a collaborative approach for sharing data, aligning around shared goals, and defining organizational roles, ensuring each partner’s strengths contributed to a shared strategy. 

One of the most significant outcomes of the MAT’s work was a strengthened commitment to policy advocacy among MAT members. The team recognized the need to engage new legislators, communicate the impact of systemic barriers, and use data-driven narratives to push for policy solutions. Moving forward, the Forsyth County MAT plans to build stronger relationships with state policymakers, showcase the MAT’s findings, and advocate for legislative changes that address the benefits cliff and increase economic mobility and racial equity. 

In Kansas City’s Third District, a historically Black neighborhood home to notable American institutions like the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum, local leaders are working hard to ensure all residents have an opportunity to thrive. Nevertheless, compared with other neighborhoods around Kansas City, a disproportionate number of people do not have a high-school diploma and a disproportionate number of aging residents are on fixed incomes.

In response to these issues, the Kansas City Mobility Action Team (MAT), which comprises representatives from the city council, the Metropolitan Community College of Kansas City, and the Health Forward Foundation, sought to better understand the experiences of Third District residents across four priority areas: jobs, transportation, housing, and education.

The MAT began by reviewing Mobility Metrics for Kansas City and found that across a few key predictors—opportunities for income, school economic diversity, housing stability, and financial security—the city lagged behind peer communities. Third District residents in particular were experiencing hardship finding living-wage jobs, affordable housing, and reliable transportation, and the MAT wanted to capture qualitative data on these issues to inform solutions. It developed a community survey that would help it build a richer picture of residents’ experiences and distributed it in the Third District and surrounding communities.

Armed with the survey results, the MAT sought additional context about residents’ experiences. With support from Urban staff, it hosted a data interactive at the Third District’s neighborhood convention in October 2024. Residents offered insights that challenged initial interpretations, highlighting gaps in the data and pushing the team to rethink how the data reflect conditions in the Third District. Two dozen people attended the interactive, and their insights informed a proposal submitted to the City to invest $500,000 over the next two years to support programs that boost residents’ upward mobility.

Read the full case study about Kansas City.

In Ramsey County, Minnesota, American Indian residents do not have access to the same economic opportunities as other racial and ethnic groups: just 23 percent of American Indian residents 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 51 percent of white residents; more than half of American Indian residents receive SNAP benefits, compared with 7 percent of white residents.

As part of the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Initiative, the Ramsey County Mobility Action Team (MAT) got to work addressing these disparities. It did this work in partnership with the Economic Mobility Hub for American Indians (the Hub), a collaborative effort of two Native-led nonprofits that helps American Indian families increase their stability and economic mobility by increasing their access to nonprofit and government services, resources, and programs. The Hub also provides culturally based family coaching, goal setting, and action planning for families using a tool called the 7 Generations Family Plan. 

First, the Ramsey MAT reviewed existing Ramsey County plans to identify investments and programs already in motion to support American Indian residents, including the Ramsey County Upward Mobility Action Plan and the county’s Economic Competitiveness and Inclusion Plan. It then catalogued data on access to benefits and identified gaps where more data on American Indian residents were needed. In a presentation to the Ramsey County Board of Commissioners, the MAT emphasized this lack of data and underscored how the data were critical for understanding disparities for American Indian residents and understanding the impacts of the County’s efforts to reduce those disparities.

Thanks to the MAT’s work, elected officials in Ramsey County are more aware of these gaps and have committed to supporting the MAT through better data collection and a comprehensive data-sharing agreement with the Hub. The Hub and the Ramsey MAT have also been tasked with identifying strategies to fill those data gaps and recommending ways the County can address systemic issues that negatively affect American Indian families’ stability and economic mobility (such as the benefits cliff, the sudden and often unexpected decrease in public benefits that occurs with small increases in earnings). Ramsey County also continues to support the Hub and other culturally specific providers in the community to provide family coaching. The Hub and Ramsey County (as well as the City of Saint Paul’s Office of Financial Empowerment and HealthPartners) are collaborating to ensure Hub staff can help the families they serve navigate complex programs and benefits. The Ramsey MAT hopes this work will result in systems improvements that will benefit not just Hub participants but all families in Ramsey County.

In San José, California, persistent communication and data-sharing barriers between community-based organizations and city agencies were hindering efforts to coordinate transportation initiatives. These barriers were limiting progress on mobility solutions that are critical for improving access to opportunity and advancing economic mobility for low-income residents.

The San José Mobility Action Team (MAT), which consists of representatives from City agencies, work2future (Silicon Valley’s workforce development board), and the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza (a local community-based organization), responded to these barriers by engaging in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network to improve data sharing and decisionmaking for upward mobility citywide. The team sought to strengthen collaboration between government agencies and service providers, ensuring workforce and social services programs effectively reached those who needed them most. 

From the start, the MAT prioritized identifying “invisible numbers”—data gaps in areas like multifamily living arrangements and economic conditions of underserved populations—while also working to improve collection of data from events, outreach efforts, and city GIS systems. Through its participation in the Mobility Action Learning Network, it developed strategies for using data to tell a story about residents’ service needs, built a data dashboard to help residents navigate services, and created more targeted outreach and program support.

A major outcome of the MAT’s work was the development of real-time data-integration systems that improved coordinated case management between community-based organizations and government agencies, allowing for more efficient service coordination and resource allocation. Moving forward, the team will expand community-engagement efforts, using listening sessions and focus groups to ensure data-driven strategies reflect the priorities of diverse residents.

In San Mateo County, California, an “hourglass economy” of very high and very low incomes has contributed to inequities in housing, employment, and education, particularly for residents of color, single parents, and low-wage workers. To address these challenges, the Shared Prosperity Coordinating Council—a coalition of government agencies, nonprofits, and community leaders—joined the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network to learn more about how to integrate and adopt a national framework on upward mobility, learn about peers’ strategies, and access technical assistance that could strengthen its use of data for local mobility and racial equity efforts.

Through this partnership, the council developed the Economic Mobility Action Plan (EMAP) and a data dashboard. The EMAP outlines strategies in three key areas: career pathways to living-wage jobs, proportional representation in decisionmaking roles, and improved navigation of safety net services. Leveraging an assortment of rich data, the action plan integrates local population-level metrics, County administrative and programmatic services data, and qualitative insights from workshops and listening sessions, ensuring the plan’s goals remain both aspirational and actionable. The local economic mobility data dashboard, set to launch in the second half of 2025, will track economic mobility conditions and help drive data-informed policy decisions made by local leaders.

Building on extensive prior community engagement, these efforts shaped the Shared Prosperity Coordinating Council’s strategic direction and led to secured funding for a workforce pilot program, which will create career pathways to stable public-sector jobs with competitive wages, benefits, and advancement opportunities.

Read the full case study about San Mateo County.

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, generations of leadership, cultural wealth, and community advocacy have built a strong foundation for upward mobility. Yet many families in North Tulsa neighborhoods do not earn a living wage.

The Tulsa Mobility Action Team (MAT) had a simple yet ambitious goal when it joined the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network: “operationalize Upward Mobility across Tulsa.” Members of the Tulsa MAT, who included representatives from ImpactTulsa, the City of Tulsa, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, were committed to advancing the latter’s InvestNorth Initiative, which seeks to drive transformational opportunities for families and children in Hawthorne and Whitman, two historically Black neighborhoods in North Tulsa, by investing in four core areas: housing, youth development, community wellness, and wealth creation. ImpactTulsa, as the cradle-to-career backbone for place-based initiatives like InvestNorth, utilizes StriveTogether’s Cradle to Career Network to organize work, drive impact, and measure outcomes. ImpactTulsa and the Tulsa MAT supported the InvestNorth Initiative’s data collection and data analysis.

The Tulsa MAT recognized that the Upward Mobility Framework’s measurement and outcome-tracking capabilities offered a powerful complement to StriveTogether’s theory of action, colloquially known as the Cradle to Career Framework. To use parts of each framework effectively, the Tulsa MAT first aligned the mobility metrics with the Cradle to Career Framework to identify connections. It then identified and simplified data points it needed community partners to collect and put those data points into a theory of action those partners could easily understand and follow. ImpactTulsa is now applying a similar data framework in its collaboration with the Tulsa mayor’s office to scale outcomes for the entire city. The City of Tulsa created the Mayor’s Office of Children, Youth, and Families, which will be led by ImpactTulsa and will serve as a collaborative hub for improving outcomes for Tulsa’s children and families. The office will be responsible for implementing programs, policies, and other initiatives to achieve the goal of placing 15,000 additional young people on a path to economic mobility by 2030.

The high cost of living in Alexandria, Viriginia, a community in metropolitan Washington, DC, makes it difficult for essential workers, teachers, and city government employees to make ends meet and remain in the city. Twenty-seven percent of residents and 70 percent of single parents live below the income threshold necessary to afford basic needs. And Black and Hispanic or Latino household income is 57 percent lower than white household income.

Given these upward mobility challenges, the Alexandria Department of Community and Human Services and ACT for Alexandria, a local community foundation, co-led Alexandria’s engagement in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network with partners from two local nonprofits, ALIVE! and Neighborhood Health. Participating in the learning network enabled the City to build a collaborative approach, develop a shared understanding, and expand important conversations about improving conditions for economic mobility alongside the City’s successful guaranteed-income pilot, ARISE.

The Alexandria Mobility Action Team (MAT) sought to build a foundation for its work by engaging the community to define different positions along a “spectrum of financial stability,” from financial crisis to stability, in the city. The team convened three working groups to further build a foundation of understanding. The first mapped existing community resources along the spectrum of financial stability to create a landscape analysis and identify opportunities for improving mobility conditions. The second was a qualitative data group that reviewed local data mapped on Urban’s Upward Mobility Framework. The final working group focused on residents’ experiences with financial security and created a six-question conversation to understand how residents felt about their financial stability and what it meant to them.

The group also participated in a narrative-change learning cohort led by the Camber Collective and is currently participating in two external peer-learning cohorts with CFLeads and GARE. 

As a result of this work, Alexandria has solidified the structure for its emerging cross-sector Economic Stability Coalition, in which the Department of Community and Human Services and ACT for Alexandria are the backbone. The coalition plans to continue with the working group structure to identify more actions based on the initial understanding of economic mobility conditions to improve mobility for residents. The coalition plans to host the city’s first Mobility Forum in the fall of 2025.

In 2022, the City of Dallas adopted a racial equity plan (PDF) that set forth “Big Audacious Goals,” which collectively aim to make Dallas the most economically inclusive city. To achieve this vision, three Dallas stakeholders—the city’s Office of Community Care, Ascend Dallas, and the International Rescue Committee—formed the Dallas Mobility Action Team (MAT) to address inequities in access to credit and financial security for vulnerable and marginalized Dallas residents. When applying to participate in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, Dallas’s residents of color were experiencing significant disparities in a range of important financial health and security metrics, including median credit scores, access to $2,000 in savings, and median net worth, compared with white residents. The gaps observed in Dallas were also larger than both Texas and national averages.

The MAT started by identifying key local stakeholders, including financial institutions, community organizations, faith-based groups, health care providers, and government institutions and officials, that needed to work together to change credit conditions and opportunities in their community. Through this exercise, the team recognized that many of the stakeholders it needed to partner with were already convening through a network called the Financial Inclusion Roundtable, organized by the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas. The Dallas team tapped into this network, which was a natural home for launching the Dallas Credit Coalition and mobilizing key partners around the common goal of supporting equitable access to credit, which for families is a critical tool for weathering economic shocks and investing in their futures.

Green Bay, Wisconsin, faces health disparities driven by social and economic inequality. In 2024, as part of the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, Newcap, a community action agency, led the Green Bay Mobility Action Team (MAT), which comprised representatives from the Brown County Health & Human Services Department, Casa ALBA Melanie, We All Rise, Wello, Aurora Bay Care, and other key partners. Their goal was to address these disparities, prioritizing increasing health care access for marginalized communities using the community health worker (CHW) model. This effort built on each partner’s individual efforts to engage Hispanic, Indigenous, Black, and other underserved populations in Green Bay. While Newcap is a leader in providing training for and deploying community health workers to low-access communities, it recognized that a coalition of partners would lead to greater success in developing employment opportunities for CHWs.

As part of its participation in the learning network, the MAT completed a stakeholder inventory and visioning exercise to identify the strengths of its coalition’s members and partnership opportunities to fill in gaps. This led it to create a shared vision for advancing health access through a countywide CHW effort, including not only training CHWs but also engaging with institutions to develop an employment pipeline. To provide critical data to potential partners such as health care institutions, the team conducted two community needs assessments, one for community residents and another for organizations and stakeholders.

The MAT effort culminated in a communitywide upward mobility summit in November 2024 to share the results and engage representatives from community-based organizations, health care systems, managed care organizations, and public health agencies at the local and state levels. The event included a data interactive reviewing results of the community needs assessment and reinforced momentum toward forming the CHW Alliance Coalition, which will develop the strategies and action steps for a communitywide effort to increase opportunities for CHWs.

Hammond, Indiana, is forming a mobility coalition in collaboration with NWI Works, a regional workforce-development and job-training organization, that will improve and expand job and career preparation services and programming for the next generation of workforce development. The City of Hammond and NWI Works are exploring launching the Hammond Hub, which would provide the community with holistic, 360-degree workforce-development services through a combination of opportunity hubs and mobile training initiatives.

Through the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, the Hammond Mobility Action Team (MAT) made steady progress developing a common language, vision, and understanding around its workforce, education, and training challenges and the data needed to address them. It inventoried assets, organizations, and programs in its community, examined gaps, and identified who else should be involved with its coalition to advance workforce development for the next generation. As a result of its learning network engagement and conversations, Hammond has established the right framework, an emerging coalition, and an eventual program to improve its workforce-development and education systems and expand access for the city’s young people (ages 16 to 25). It is looking forward to launching the Hammond Hub for workforce development and training later in 2025.

New Haven, Connecticut, faces significant housing-stability challenges throughout its diverse community. Many residents lack access to affordable, safe, and healthy rental housing, and nonprofit and public housing agencies do not have sufficient housing to meet demand. In light of these challenges, Elm City Communities (New Haven’s housing authority), United Way of Greater New Haven (a local community action agency), the New Haven Community Services Administration, and Workforce Alliance (a local NGO) came together through the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network to build a more coordinated coalition that connects affordable housing with support services and workforce-development opportunities.

The New Haven Mobility Action Team’s (MAT) upward mobility vision was to promote and expand low-income families’ access to safe, affordable housing in the city and the region. It built its theory of change on the fundamental premise that affordable and safe housing could be the path to self-sufficiency for low-income families and address New Haven’s long underlying legacy of residential and economic segregation.

While participating in the Mobility Action Learning Network, the New Haven MAT made steady progress designing and developing its coalition. Elm City Communities emerged as the initial backbone organization as the team began outlining the process parameters of its coalition’s management and sustainability plans. Elm City Communities continues to advance the New Haven team’s goal of formally launching its affordable and safe housing coalition later in 2025.

Total Community Action, New Orleans’s local community action agency, has long worked to reduce poverty and provide services that help low-income residents achieve economic security and mobility. There are significant historical and present-day racial disparities in employment, income, and wealth in New Orleans, where recent analysis found that in 2018, the median income for Black households was $29,505 compared with $78,575 for White households. Total Community Action launched a Mobility Action Team (MAT) to build a coalition of partners committed to closing opportunity gaps and reducing the significant racial income disparities in New Orleans.

Amid shifting political dynamics and interests among social sector partners, Total Community Action needed to identify and mobilize new partners to support its vision of change. It began with ecosystem mapping and a stakeholder inventory to identify partners that were interested in collaborating as a part of the MAT and had the capacities and resources to do so. These activities culminated in successfully engaging and recruiting partners including Strive NOLA and the New Orleans Data Center (a product of Knowledge Works), and hosting the first NOLA Upward Mobility Summit on December 5, 2024. The MAT plans to build momentum in 2025 by inviting other organizations and agencies to participate in the mobility coalition, develop a collective theory of change, and launch collaborative initiatives to build pathways to quality jobs for residents of color.

In 2017, organizations from different sectors of the Palm Beach community came together to launch the “Securing Our Future Initiative” (SOFI), to coordinate a system of care for low-income families in Palm Beach and maximize their opportunities for economic mobility. In the years since, many families have faced barriers to economic mobility posed by the fiscal benefits cliff, which occurs when an increase in earnings results in a greater loss of supportive benefits, such as health care, housing, child care, or food assistance.

To meet the challenges posed by this fiscal benefits cliff and improve the conditions for economic mobility in Palm Beach, a core set of SOFI partners, anchored by the Palm Beach County Community Services Department and Community Partners of South Florida,
came together to form a Mobility Action Team (MAT) and participate in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network. The Palm Beach MAT received support from Urban to identify and recruit additional community partners committed to coordinating service delivery and filling gaps in the social safety net that prevent individuals and families from experiencing upward mobility. The new partner engagement and planning of the Palm Beach MAT culminated in the 2024 Economic Mobility Summit, where hundreds of local stakeholders convened and outlined a structure for facilitating and managing greater collaboration within eight mobility workgroups. Those workgroups focus on child care, education, employment, food security, health, housing, transportation, and safety.

The MAT plans to build momentum in 2025 by continuing to refine a management structure for collective action among partners committed to improving conditions for upward mobility in Palm Beach County.

Santa Barbara County, California, currently has the second highest percentage of its population living near, at, or below poverty out of the 58 counties in California. This is in direct contrast to its reputation as a “playground for the rich and famous” and the “American Riviera.” To address this challenge, partners from CommUnify, Santa Barbara City College, the Santa Barbara Foundation, the County of Santa Barbara Department of Social Services, and the Housing Authority of Santa Barbara formed a Mobility Action Coalition and joined the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network. The coalition’s early focus was affordable housing, but it eventually realized it needed to get upstream from housing and focused on the broader range of reasons people in Santa Barbara County were struggling.

Throughout its participation in the Mobility Action Learning Network, the team used the coalition-building strategies in the Toolkit for Upward Mobility to grow its Upward Mobility Coalition from 5 organizations to more than 15. This core group, the backbone of the coalition, planned an Upward Mobility Summit for Santa Barbara County in January 2025. The summit, hosted concurrently at two locations in the county that were connected digitally, brought together 350 people, including community members from public and private organizations, elected officials, and philanthropic leaders. The coalition held a data walk throughout the summit to share key data for Santa Barbara County.

At the summit, the Upward Mobility Coalition launched a two-year upward mobility effort consisting of five “mobility action planning” groups aligned with the pillars of the Upward Mobility Framework. These groups will develop recommendations to improve upward mobility in Santa Barbara County and will advocate for the County to adopt a master plan for upward mobility that has community buy-in and addresses systemic issues. To build and sustain interest in this work, the coalition created a PSA about upward mobility in Santa Barbara County.

Washington County, Pennsylvania, is a semirural, older industrial region facing rising housing instability and long-standing economic inequality. Considered part of Appalachia, Washington County is a geographically large county with varied access to services and resources. The average per capita income is $37,382 and the poverty rate stands at 16.15 percent. While in the aggregate there is greater access to affordable housing in Washington County than in the United States more broadly, the size of the county masks many of the barriers to access, particularly for renters, and does not account for the quality of the affordable housing that is available.

In 2024, Blueprints, a community action agency serving southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia, led a Mobility Action Team (MAT) of representatives from Summit Legal Aid, the Washington County Redevelopment Authority, Washington County Human Services, and Washington Financial Bank to address housing challenges in the county. Each of the MAT members has a focus on housing and housing services. As they came together as a team, they wanted to identify how to turn individual partnerships into a coalition to address rising eviction rates, a growing unhoused population, and limited quality affordable housing options near good jobs, paying particular attention to renters.

The MAT completed a visioning exercise for affordable, accessible, quality rental housing in Washington County. It then identified each member’s strengths and conducted a stakeholder inventory to identify other partners it could add. The team coordinated to conduct community surveys, focus groups, and a comprehensive community needs assessment across the county, including the areas of the city of Washington; the Mon Valley; Burgettstown and the county’s northwest; and Amwell, Marianna, and West Bethlehem. As a result of this effort, the MAT identified community priorities for addressing housing barriers, including how proximity to jobs and access to opportunity affected residents’ upward mobility and access to housing. The effort informed the team’s emerging vision and allowed it to engage additional partners in each community. The Washington County MAT will leverage these findings and inputs as it calibrates its upward mobility activities for future collaboration and community-driven strategies to improve housing stability and upward mobility in Washington County.

Although Dubuque, Iowa, has a significant number of nonprofit organizations for a city of 60,000 people, few are based in underserved communities, especially communities of color. And organizations that are launched out of underserved communities are often underresourced and vulnerable to shocks. This lack of power and capacity in underserved communities has affected nearly all policy areas in Dubuque in two ways: it has limited service providers’ ability to effectively connect to these communities, and it has prevented these communities from being involved in the development process for new initiatives, making those initiatives significantly weaker and less effective. To address these issues, the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque and the City of Dubuque’s Office of Shared Prosperity & Neighborhood Support joined the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network and formed the Dubuque Mobility Action Team (MAT), focusing on increasing the number of sustainable and well-resourced grassroots efforts based in underserved communities.

While participating in the network, the MAT focused on developing strategies to deepen relationships with community members, particularly in the Marshallese community in Dubuque. It also participated in a workshop facilitated by Urban on building coalitions and acquired resources for doing this work with community members. Other strategies discussed were immigration-friendly policies and workforce development, both of which the MAT has been engaged in and which were seen as key priorities for deeper knowledge and technical assistance.

To support local organizations, the Community Foundation created a capacity-building playbook designed to provide a structured approach to supporting grassroots organizations, and the City developed new community engagement trainings for City employees. The Dubuque team is now working closely with four grassroots organizations representing key underserved populations (Marshallese women, Guatemalan Mayans, Black families and entrepreneurs, and single mothers), and they are exploring launching engagements with other promising efforts. In the near term, the MAT is planning to work closely with its grassroots partners to understand the potential vulnerabilities caused by recent federal policies, including federal funding freezes, economic policies that may lead to a recession, and increased immigration enforcement, all of which have the potential to produce the kinds of shocks that make grassroots organizations in Dubuque vulnerable.

To advance their shared goal of improving outcomes for low-income families, Metropolitan Development Council (MDC), a community action agency dedicated to reducing poverty and promoting economic mobility in Tacoma, Washington, and the Pierce County Department of Human Services formed the Tacoma Mobility Action Team and participated in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network. These organizations had previously partnered to strengthen family supports through the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program, a state-funded preschool program with a multigenerational, whole-family approach.

As a result of their deepened partnership and commitment to data-informed decisionmaking, MDC and Pierce County Human Services launched a comprehensive community needs assessment that received input from more than 2,500 residents across Pierce County. The assessment identified key areas of community need, including affordable child care, behavioral health services, financial assistance, and housing, which are now guiding program priorities and investment strategies.

In addition to data collection, the team prioritized direct community engagement. They cohosted a successful diaper distribution event, reaching more than 200 families with essential resources and building trust between residents and local service providers. These efforts reflect a broader strategy to strengthen community ties, promote access to services, and support long-term upward mobility for families. Together, MDC and Pierce County Human Services are continuing to build on this momentum by developing shared strategies, exploring new collaborative opportunities (including joint work on the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and poverty awareness training), and seeking funding to expand the impact of their collective work.

Denver, the largest city in Colorado, is home to more than 715,000 residents, with nearly 3 million living in the city’s metro area. Rapid population growth has intensified existing challenges and introduced new ones, particularly around the city's core values of equity and inclusivity. Notably, Denver has become less racially and ethnically diverse over the past decade—marking a significant demographic shift for the first time in decades. At the same time, political engagement has declined, as seen in the low voter turnout during the 2023 municipal elections.

Though traditional political participation remains vital, the Denver People’s Budget emphasizes the importance of broader civic involvement. This participatory budgeting initiative enables residents to have a direct say in how public funds are spent, thereby deepening democratic participation and increasing transparency and trust in local government.

In its second cycle, the Denver People’s Budget allocated $1 million to community-selected projects. The process is guided by four community-led stages: design, idea collection, project development, and voting. As outlined in the Urban Institute’s Toolkit for Increasing Upward Mobility in Your Community, participatory budgeting not only encourages civic engagement but also supports a more equitable allocation of public resources and helps build stronger, more connected communities.

Through their participation in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network (MALN), Denver leaders took the opportunity to reflect on and enhance the People’s Budget initiative. They considered how to strategically align the program with broader goals of upward mobility and responsive governance, ultimately aiming to strengthen both formal and informal political participation across the city.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg region faces deep income and racial inequities, and at one point had the lowest rate of upward mobility of the largest 50 metropolitan areas in the country. To monitor progress on upward mobility in the region, policymakers and community members need reliable metrics.

Charlotte’s mobility Action Team brought together representatives from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools; the City of Charlotte; Leading on Opportunity, a civic initiative of the Foundation For The Carolinas; Mecklenburg County; Race Matters for Juvenile Justice; and United Way of Greater Charlotte. Together, these team members built on three complementary data tools that explore spatial, thematic, and neighborhood-level upward mobility dynamics in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg region: the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer, the Opportunity Compass, and a neighborhood-level survey for corridors of opportunity identified by the City of Charlotte. They explored ways to amplify these tools, learned about other community approaches to gathering granular, neighborhood-level data, and considered updates to their local metrics to reflect evidence bases of vetted upward mobility indicators and strategies.

In particular, the Charlotte MAT worked to identify measurements for social capital, which can be challenging to quantify and measure in a standardized way but which children and young people who participated in community sessions organized by Leading on Opportunity raised as a key priority. People with more social capital typically receive higher pay, are more often promoted at younger ages, and are more likely to obtain loans or capital for businesses, all of which affect economic success and upward mobility.

The team’s focus on social capital emerged from deep community engagement efforts, demonstrating a commitment to centering community members in decisions on upward mobility priorities and metrics for tracking progress. The team will continue to update the Quality of Life and Opportunity Compass dashboards through continued community engagement efforts and, as a result of collaboration with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools during the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, is exploring deeper partnerships with the school system to continually advance upward mobility work.

The Montgomery County Two-Generation (2Gen) Collaborative is a countywide economic mobility initiative with the mission to unify and strengthen the network of providers in Montgomery County that use a place-based and whole-family approach by maximizing resources and community investment to improve outcomes for children and families. Though the collaborative has existed in some form since 2003, evolving with consistent and new partners, it has not been able to reliably measure the impact of its work. Through its work in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, the team is now in a position to assess whether and how its work is truly benefiting the community and reveal any challenges that require it to adjust its approach.

Through the learning network’s technical assistance and peer learning, the 2Gen Outcomes Committee focused on strengthening its outcomes framework and determining the critical population indicators that would demonstrate success. This has enabled the committee to create a neighborhood data dashboard that features four pillars—educational success, financial stability, thriving neighborhoods, and family health and wellness—measured by the selected population indicators. The dashboard shows economic, education, housing, and health data at the neighborhood level localized by census tract, allowing 2Gen providers to easily access data about the areas they serve. With an expected public launch in 2025, the dashboard is a foundational tool for program providers to clarify needs, set goals, identify service gaps, and procure additional funding.

Participating in the learning network laid the foundation for the Dayton team to better advocate for systemic changes that will benefit local communities. The team plans to draft a policy agenda aligned with its outcome framework’s four pillars. The framework and data dashboard empower the team to identify and prioritize issue areas by referencing local trends, the impact of 2Gen efforts, geographic disparities, and opportunities for larger investments.

Though many who live in Fairfax County consider it a great place to live, work, and play, not everyone enjoys the same opportunities, as nearly 30 percent of households do not earn enough to cover the cost of essentials. Fairfax County is committed to addressing these and other barriers to upward mobility and racial equity through its One Fairfax racial and social equity policy and Countywide Strategic Plan.

The Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network presented an opportunity for Fairfax County to build on its commitments by identifying and aligning on an approach to measuring existing and future interventions. Fairfax County’s Mobility Action Team (MAT), a cross-agency, cross-sector team of representatives from county government departments and nonprofit partner organizations, anchor institutions, and academic researchers, aimed to address this problem by planning for a holistic upward mobility approach that would incorporate existing and future interventions and evidence-based metrics.

During the Mobility Action Learning Network, the Fairfax County MAT made critical progress identifying key mobility challenges in the county by reviewing disaggregated data from county and public data tools, such as the county’s strategic plan data dashboards, its Vulnerability Index, and the Urban Institute’s Financial Health and Wealth Dashboard. The team mapped current upward mobility interventions in Fairfax County to identify gaps in its overall approach, identify metrics to inform local action, and identify strategies to better support residents in moving out of poverty.

The Fairfax County MAT also applied a racial equity lens to each of its action steps, acknowledging that people and places are situated differently and do not benefit from a “one-size-fits-all” approach. The team focused on root causes by asking what the core drivers of pressing issues in the county were and what systemic conditions were standing in the way of progress, and centered data disaggregated by geographies and populations in the county.

Despite having similar numbers of Black and white heads of households, Memphis and Shelby County face stark disparities in economic opportunity and wealth. To address these inequities, a team of representatives from the Shelby County government, cradle-to-career partner Seeding Success, and the nonprofit Innovate Memphis joined the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network to deepen and champion Memphis’s More for Memphis plan.

The More for Memphis plan outlines a multisector strategy to improve quality of life across Shelby County, and through the Mobility Action Learning Network, the Memphis and Shelby County Mobility Action Team (MAT) integrated research-backed practices from the Upward Mobility Framework into proposed interventions. One meaningful area of progress has been the County’s adoption of a results-based accountability framework, which it is using to build local capacity for data-informed decisionmaking and shift toward a culture of greater transparency and impact. This work has fostered new cross-sector collaboration between government and nonprofit partners, aligning stakeholders around shared metrics and driving systems-level change.

Looking ahead, the Memphis and Shelby County MAT will prioritize addressing data interoperability to improve data sharing across agencies. A key milestone on the horizon is the launch of Data Midsouth, a civic data infrastructure that will support More for Memphis and improve outcomes related to economic mobility. With a strong foundation and aligned partnerships, Memphis is well positioned to deliver more equitable and sustainable opportunities for all residents.

In December 2023, Pima County adopted the Prosperity Initiative, a set of 13 strategic priorities for the County, the City of Tucson, and community partners to reduce generational poverty and improve community wealth. The COVID-19 pandemic amplified long-standing inequities in Pima County, and data surfaced showing that a disproportionately large number of children in the county were living in very-low-income neighborhoods compared with other localities. To address these challenges, the Prosperity Initiative’s priority areas span topics including housing stability, quality early child care and education, and workforce development and job quality. To ensure the initiative was accountable to its commitments and could monitor sustained efforts, its leadership team wanted to develop a system for measuring the outcomes of the strategic priorities and policies identified.

Pima County’s Mobility Action Team (MAT) first reviewed the initiative’s 13 policies and, drawing on the Mobility Metrics and other measures, identified relevant metrics—“headline indicators”—to monitor progress for each. In addition to representatives of Pima County, this team comprised representatives from the City of Tucson, the University of Arizona, and nonprofit organizations including the Primavera Foundation, Social Venture Partners (SVP) Tucson, and United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona. They selected metrics based on a set of criteria adapted by the Urban Institute, and then, through local working groups, identified one to two headline indicators that best reflected progress on each policy. The working groups’ recommendations yielded 20 indicators across the 13 policy areas, with a description of each indicator, its relevance to respective policy goals, and the criteria used for selection.

The next step for the team is to document its plans for data collection and interpretation in a data management guide on these impact indicators. Alongside a community coalition mobilized by Social Venture Partners (SVP) Tucson, the team strives to integrate the feedback and priorities of low-income families in potential programming and future work championed by Pima County.

Limited access to quality employment and job training opportunities severely hinders upward mobility for Central Providence residents. Specifically, unaffordable child care and insufficient transportation consistently prevent community members from maintaining employment, accessing new opportunities, and obtaining workforce credentials.

A Mobility Action Team (MAT) composed of representatives from One Neighborhood Builders, the Genesis Center, Building Futures, the City of Providence, and the Providence Housing Authority joined the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network to address these challenges. All these entities are engaged in Central Providence Opportunities: A Health Equity Zone, a community-driven collective impact initiative in select zip codes in Rhode Island. Their goals in participating in the network were to measure progress in communities through the Central Providence Roadmap, focusing on increasing data knowledge and capacity and aligning local workforce strategies.

While part of the network, the Providence MAT updated this roadmap to more clearly focus on racial equity and systems change and incorporate meaningful population-level indicators of change. The Upward Mobility Framework also inspired it to merge the roadmap's employment and business north stars to form the “quality work north star.” The team is now revising the roadmap for a rerelease in spring 2025.

The Providence MAT also facilitated a comprehensive community-driven decisionmaking process to identify 15 social determinants of health metrics that will serve as indicators of success for the updated roadmap. This drafting process spanned six months and required intense collaboration between working groups, the resident advisory council for the health equity zone, nonprofit partners, city and state officials, and local business and community leaders from Central Providence. In addition to being included in the updated roadmap, these indicators will be displayed as a data dashboard on the new health equity zone website (to be released this spring).

With housing costs rising sharply (over five years, the median home price increased 64 percent to $355,000) and rental prices outpacing income growth, many working families in Richmond struggle to afford stable housing. In addition, roughly 20 percent of the region’s workforce commutes from areas beyond the reach of public transit, reinforcing economic barriers.

Richmond’s Mobility Action Team (MAT), which included representatives from United Way of Greater Richmond & Petersburg, Community Foundation for a greater Richmond, Plan RVA, ChamberRVA, and the Partnership for Housing Affordability, used the Upward Mobility Framework as a foundation for identifying and sharing impact metrics for Richmond’s regional housing plan under the “Opportunity-Rich and Inclusive Neighborhoods” pillar.

By developing a process for prioritizing metrics in one policy domain and for governance of different streams of work, the Richmond MAT laid the foundation for future measurement work in different policy focus areas. These metrics will be part of a forthcoming regional data dashboard. Looking ahead, the team is prioritizing sustainability with a phased 18-to-24-month approach to implementing each pillar of the Upward Mobility Framework. Planning and programs under the “Rewarding Work" pillar will move forward with ChamberRVA as the backbone leader.

As a result of its participation in the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, the Richmond MAT’s efforts coalesced into the RVA Rising plan. This plan expands the region’s data focus to enable stronger alignment with Richmond’s engagement in state and national initiatives while creating a replicable model for future upward mobility efforts in the region. To sustain these efforts, the team is securing financial resources, attracting pillar champions, and continuing to share lessons learned with peer cities from the Mobility Action Learning Network to drive best practices.

Rochester faces persistent challenges addressing poverty, ranking 241st out of 274 cities on economic inclusion in a 2016 study. The Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI) is a collective impact organization dedicated to addressing these challenges through its Unity Agenda, a roadmap for upward mobility in the region. RMAPI is committed to assessing and reporting on outcomes across the agenda’s six pillars—including the five Upward Mobility Framework pillars—tracking 39 different metrics related to antipoverty efforts. Though a broad set of metrics offers a comprehensive view of progress, decline, or stagnation on poverty goals, it can also present challenges for concisely communicating impact to the public.

To streamline its impact measurement and public communications, through engagement with the Urban Institute’s Mobility Action Learning Network, RMAPI and its partners aligned their collective metrics with the Upward Mobility Predictors and Mobility Metrics. Using a set of criteria introduced in the learning network, the RMAPI Steering Committee and its Shared Measurement and Impact Working Group identified 11 headline indicators to measure systems change in each of its six pillars. While maintaining its full set of metrics, RMAPI will prioritize tracking and public communications related to its headline indicators. RMAPI hosts multiple working groups, each of which will be responsible for monitoring a relevant subset of indicators and reporting on impact and organizational progress. The headline indicators also serve as a helpful north star for aligning and prioritizing its coalition’s strategic actions.

As RMAPI concluded its engagement in the learning network, it published a data dashboard capturing its headline metrics to help its partners and the broader community better understand various upward mobility challenges in the region and gauge progress.