Published April 29, 2025
Helping people achieve long-term social mobility and economic prosperity is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Stagnating rates of economic mobility in recent decades have cast doubt on the promise that talent and hard work lead to advancement. Research shows that adults with the lowest incomes are unlikely to rise to the middle of the income distribution, much less to the top. And significant racial disparities persist in rates of intergenerational economic mobility, particularly between Black and white Americans.
If you are driven to increase upward mobility from poverty in your community but wondering where to start, this toolkit is for you. Bringing about the systemic changes necessary to boost upward mobility and advance racial equity is no simple task, and large-scale change will require concerted action from a coalition of stakeholders across the public, private, and community sectors.
Building on Boosting Upward Mobility: A Planning Guide for Local Action, this toolkit walks through multiple pathways that local actors—whether leaders of community-based organizations, members of local government, or concerned citizens—can pursue to begin catalyzing change. Read the acknowledgments to learn more about how this toolkit was created.
How to Use This Toolkit
Because every community is unique and has different assets and needs, this toolkit offers seven chapters that can guide you as you begin—or deepen—your journey toward boosting upward mobility and advancing racial equity in your community:
- Embarking on an Upward Mobility Planning Process
- Building a Cross-Sector Mobility Coalition
- Engaging Community Members in Planning and Decisionmaking
- Using Data to Gain a Shared Understanding of Local Mobility Conditions
- Identifying Strategic Actions for Systems Change
- Measuring Your Coalition’s Impact
- Sustaining Upward Mobility Initiatives
You are free to start with the chapter that’s most appropriate for where you are in your work, but keep in mind that the seven chapters intersect and are mutually reinforcing. Reading through most, if not all, of the chapters will position you to craft a more comprehensive approach to increasing upward mobility in your community.
Throughout this toolkit, you’ll find two types of boxes that offer additional information. The blue “Learn More” boxes offer supplemental resources as well as tips and examples of how to undertake actions recommended in the toolkit. The yellow “Case Study” boxes describe how communities we've worked with have implemented recommended practices.
How We Define Upward Mobility
Before you dive in, it’s important to understand how we define “upward mobility.” This toolkit relies on the Upward Mobility Initiative’s three-part definition in the Upward Mobility Framework, which goes beyond economic success and requires that people have power and autonomy over their circumstances and decisions that affect their lives and also feel dignity and belonging in their communities (figure I-1). The three dimensions of this definition are inseparable. Work that serves only to promote new economic opportunities but does not consider ways to increase power, autonomy, and belonging for residents with low incomes may not sufficiently boost mobility from poverty or advance racial equity. Similarly, work that seeks to engage residents in decisionmaking but doesn’t consider whether they can financially afford to participate or are positioned to benefit from the outcomes also may not effectively boost mobility from poverty or advance racial equity.
FIGURE I-1: The Upward Mobility Framework
In addition to this holistic definition of upward mobility, the framework includes a focus on racial equity and five interconnected pillars of support that people need from their communities to achieve mobility. It identifies 24 predictors that measure the strength of these pillars in a community (figure I-1). Taken together, the Upward Mobility Framework provides an evidence-based foundation for efforts to advance upward mobility and racial equity for all people and communities.
Upward Mobility Principles
From 2016 to 2018, 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. After a year of gathering insights from research, practice, and people who have experienced poverty, the Partnership developed a holistic definition of upward mobility.
Building on this definition, in 2020, Urban published the Upward Mobility Framework in collaboration with a working group of distinguished academics from diverse disciplines. The framework offers local leaders the three-part definition of upward mobility and identifies factors they can influence to increase mobility for all people, especially those historically excluded from prosperity.
Since 2020, Urban’s Upward Mobility Initiative has been working to provide local leaders with data and tools to assess and improve community conditions that advance upward mobility and racial equity, including by providing technical assistance to cities, counties, and networks across the country. Read the initiative’s story and key terms to learn more about the Initiative’s approach to upward mobility.
The Upward Mobility Initiative’s approach to boosting upward mobility is anchored in the following six principles, which are based on our research; our experience working with actors trying to achieve structural change at the local, state, and federal levels; and our learnings from people with first-hand experience of poverty and structural racism. These principles should be the foundation of any effort to increase upward mobility for all people and communities. The seven chapters in this toolkit discuss each of these principles in further detail.
Equity and Racial Justice
A focus on equity and racial justice is fundamental to upward mobility work. Racial prejudice, discrimination, and segregation are built into many public policies, institutions, and processes. As a result, people of color face especially stubborn barriers to mobility from poverty, as reflected by persistent racial disparities in rates of intergenerational economic mobility. This means that achieving upward mobility for all people and communities—especially those historically excluded from prosperity—requires confronting and eliminating racial and other inequities that prevent people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and members of other marginalized groups from attaining economic success, power and autonomy, and dignity and belonging.
Upward mobility work must embed equity and racial justice—in both processes and outcomes—to ensure it serves those who have been most harmed. We discuss how efforts to boost upward mobility can and should center racial equity in all seven chapters of this toolkit.
Systems Change
For most people experiencing poverty in the US today, opportunities to achieve greater economic success, power and autonomy, and dignity and belonging are blocked by long-standing structural barriers, not by a lack of individual effort. Increasing upward mobility and advancing racial equity therefore requires dismantling the systemic barriers that keep people in poverty and confronting the policies and practices that create and maintain these barriers. This calls for reexamining the underlying values, norms, and narratives that shape the processes, relationships, and power structures in your community. In other words, it calls for pursuing systems change. Read chapter 1 and chapter 5 to learn more about systems change.
Cross-Sector Collaboration
Upward mobility initiatives require collaboration across a wide range of actors in multiple policy areas working together to achieve systems change. Actors that can contribute to upward mobility efforts include governments, nonprofits and community-based organizations, advocacy groups, community members, philanthropies, research organizations, anchor institutions, and private-sector entities. Read chapter 2 and chapter 7 to learn how to build and sustain a cross-sector coalition.
Community Engagement and Ownership
Deep and meaningful community engagement is one way to build community power, and it is rooted in the fight for racial justice and the right of communities to have agency over decisionmaking that affects their lives. (See the Urban Institute’s Community-Engaged Methods Model for more information about the importance of community engagement.) To redistribute power and change systems, upward mobility initiatives must share decisionmaking power with people experiencing poverty and, in particular, communities impacted by systemic oppression. Read chapter 3 and chapter 7 to learn how to conduct sustained and meaningful community engagement.
Data-Informed Decisionmaking
Successful upward mobility initiatives use data to identify areas to prioritize efforts, highlight interconnections across policy domains, set targets for improvement, and monitor progress over time. The data that inform such decisionmaking can be both quantitative (e.g., local administrative data or national US Census data) and qualitative (e.g., insights derived from focus groups, surveys, or storytelling). Read chapter 4 and chapter 6 to learn how to collect and analyze data that can be used for decisionmaking.
Continuous Learning
To ensure your upward mobility initiative is capable of advancing your racial equity goals and achieving lasting systems change, you should establish continuous learning efforts that can help you assess and reflect on your progress, improve your coalition’s practices and services, and drive better long-term outcomes for people in your community. It is important that you engage in continuous learning as a cross-sector coalition to achieve collective (rather than individual) impact. Read chapter 6 to learn how to establish continuous learning processes and measure your impact.
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