As the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Cohort of eight counties begin to draft their Mobility Action Plans (MAPs), we want to highlight the great work they’re doing to gather their plans’ necessary components. This month, we’re featuring the City of Philadelphia, which has been thoughtful about how data will feature prominently in its MAP’s recommendations.
Below, Portia Egan, a city housing program manager, and Sean Finnegan, an eviction and foreclosure prevention AmeriCorps VISTA member with Philadelphia’s housing team, explain some of the steps involved in their data collection efforts and how they hope the data will inform their MAP.
Walk us through some of your goals for Philadelphia’s data collection work.
We really wanted to ensure that any data collection work in addition to the mobility metrics would be relevant to and inform the work of city agencies and partners involved in the project. It was important to us to have an end goal in mind as far as how the data would be used and where the data could live, how it would be accessed, and by whom. Our plan is to create a dashboard to house the mobility metrics, as well as a select list of other metrics we proposed and had vetted by Urban that we find value in tracking here locally. Not only will the dashboard allow us to easily share stats and context around the needs and disparities here in Philly, we hope it will serve as a sort of engagement tool as well, one that will help elicit input from residents and stakeholders on what should be done policy- and program-wise to support mobility from poverty and how to do this in an equitable and sustainable way.
What was the process like of working with city leaders to select specific metrics?
We brought together folks from across the city and from external organizations to participate in the project, reflect on the metrics, and help us identify the domains that we could have the most impact on. We surveyed this group on its activities and priorities, and based on what we heard, narrowed in on the following domains: financial well-being, housing, neighborhoods, and work. One of the things we found striking was how the interconnectedness of these domains could be seen at the program-level in some cases. All in all, it was a very organic process, and the selection of additional metrics to add context to the core [metrics] followed a similar process, [for example], gathering feedback from participating groups on additional metrics that would inform their work and could inspire new programs in the future.
What steps do you plan to take to collect the data on the metrics you identified?
As mentioned above, in addition to Urban’s metrics, we wanted to include locally identified metrics as well that would give us a deeper, more well-rounded understanding of the barriers to upward mobility in our city. Many of the metrics identified draw on data from the American Community Survey and in some cases from data collected by the city. Again, we plan to work with a local data partner to compile the metrics and design an online dashboard that will be accessible to the public. Another piece of data collection we have not mentioned yet is our Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) survey work, which Urban has been providing technical assistance on and that will kick off this February. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to work with Urban to improve upon and expand our AFH Housing and Neighborhood Survey. Inspired by the mobility metrics, [we] ended up including social capital–related questions to the survey in hopes we can shed light on this aspect of upward mobility in Philadelphia.
How do you see the data collection piece informing your MAP? How do you hope your work informs the work being done across the city?
We see our data collection efforts—the successes and lessons learned, plans for the dashboard, and engagement around the metrics—informing the recommendations in the MAP. Though we are thinking a lot in terms of systems and operations-level changes that would bolster mobility from poverty, the city and its partners will be grappling with and reflecting on the metrics throughout this process and beyond, and we hope to see policy/programmatic changes and pilots in response to the data uplifted through this project.
Over the next several weeks, we will be featuring other counties’ work to prepare and unveil their Mobility Action Plans. We thank the City of Philadelphia’s Portia Egan and Sean Finnegan for sharing their thoughts with us and for the City’s ongoing work to boost upward mobility from poverty in its communities.
