Preparedness to engage in cross-sector partnerships across policy domains. Standing together with a broad coalition of community leaders—including elected officials and members of local government, nonprofits and community organizations, advocacy groups, philanthropic organizations, members of the business community, and private-sector actors—shows the public you intend to have a coordinated strategy that impacts the actions of a wide swath of public-serving organizations. It’s also critical that your coalition reflects the diversity of your community and includes people with lived experience of poverty and structural racism. To forge strong partnerships, it’s important for you to understand how you can be a good partner to the members of your coalition—not just how they can be good partners to you. We discuss how you can prepare to engage in a cross-sector coalition in chapter 2.

A shared commitment to systems change and addressing structural racism. Racial prejudice, discrimination, and segregation have created especially stubborn barriers to upward mobility for people of color in the US. (See our report How Well Do US Communities Support Residents’ Upward Mobility? for a deeper discussion of structural inequities.) As a result, increasing upward mobility for all people requires a fundamental shift in practices, underlying values, or norms that can reshape policies, processes, relationships, and power structures—and ultimately address the root causes of racial and economic inequities in our communities. In other words, it requires systems change, which is one of our six upward mobility principles (see chapter 5 for more information). Without a shared commitment to changing systems and addressing structural racism, your coalition’s work is unlikely to result in upward mobility for all people in your community.

Sufficient capacity among coalition members to participate in both planning and implementation. Organizations and coalitions need sufficient capacity to take on large-scale systems change work. The Project Management Institute defines organizational capacity as the people, processes, technology and support resources, physical resources, and organizational systems available to support an initiative. Perhaps the most important capacity consideration for undertaking this type of work is determining whether there are people in your coalition who can dedicate significant time to managing the planning process on top of their existing work. It’s also important to consider whether those people have the relevant knowledge or experience to undertake the work you anticipate needing to do (e.g., gathering and analyzing data) and what additional training they might find helpful in building their knowledge. As highlighted in the Project Management Institute’s definition of capacity, it’s also important to consider the necessary systems and processes—including policies, procedures, and practices—that can support your mobility work and whether members of your coalition will be able to support the work beyond the planning stage into implementation.

Dedicated resources for meaningful community engagement. Achieving the dimensions of “power and autonomy” and “dignity and belonging” means creating opportunities for community members to make choices about their lives and contribute to efforts that shape their community. Engaging community members in a meaningful way—which entails going beyond merely consulting or informing them—is another of our upward mobility principles and requires adequate funds to cover staff time, plan and execute engagements, and compensate community members for their participation and expertise. Without these resources, your work may lose the support of the public and may not achieve the outcomes you desire.

There is no standard threshold for determining when each of the above conditions can be considered met. It is ultimately up to you and your partners to decide whether the appropriate readiness conditions are in place, where there may be gaps, and how to fill them. If you decide that you are ready to undertake an upward mobility planning process, you can work your way through chapters 2 to 7 in sequential order. They correspond to the upward mobility principles we previously introduced, though equity and racial justice considerations are integrated into each chapter.

While your work may take different forms, from an investment plan to a partnership strategy, one approach you could consider is creating a Mobility Action Plan (MAP). A MAP is a public document that details the strategies you and your partners will undertake to boost upward mobility and promote racial equity in your community. It can help formalize your coalition’s work by documenting the activities you undertook, including how you built a cross-sector Mobility Coalition, how you engaged community members in planning and decisionmaking, how your coalition used quantitative and qualitative data to gain a shared understanding of local mobility conditions, and how you identified strategic actions to change the systems underpinning those challenges.

You can reference the summaries of MAPs created by the Upward Mobility Cohort, a set of eight counties and cities that partnered with the Urban Institute from 2021 to 2022 to deploy and test the Upward Mobility Framework.

FIGURE 1-1: Contents of a Mobility Action Plan

Determine the Content and Format of Your Mobility Action Plan

If you decide to write a MAP (figure 1-1), we suggest you include at least the following sections:

• Your coalition’s work: This section should describe how you formed your Mobility Coalition, including why you decided to pursue the work, who you engaged, and what steps you took to learn about mobility conditions and challenges in your community. Chapter 2 can lead you through the process of building a cross-sector coalition.
  • You may wish to include a list of your coalition members and their roles within the coalition.
  • You should include your plan for ongoing community engagement. Chapter 3 can guide you through this process.
• Summary of local mobility conditions: This section should include a summary of key findings from your data collection work. It should describe current mobility conditions in your community and interweave quantitative and qualitative data to tell a story about how current conditions (both good and bad) were created, who they impact most, what outcomes they produce, and how they are being maintained.
• Community vision, theory of change, and the specific strategies you’ve identified to advance upward mobility and racial equity in your community: Your community vision should be a forward-looking statement describing what you want your community to look or be like when your work is done.  A logic model links your vision to specific strategies you will undertake to achieve your desired outcomes, while a theory of change statement articulates how you believe your selected strategies will lead to your vision for your community. Chapter 5 guides you through the process of co-creating a vision and identifying strategic actions with your coalition.
  • If you decide to conduct an inventory of existing interventions or an assessment of existing programs, you should include them here.
• Sustainability and measurement plan: This section should describe how you plan to steward and sustain the strategies you identified in the previous section, including responsible actors and resources needed, as well as how you will measure the success of your efforts. You may also wish to include a continuous learning and improvement plan.

After you’ve written your MAP, consider working with a designer to help you present it in an accessible way. Also consider whether to produce two different products: one that is more technical for policymakers and practitioners and one for a general audience.

Develop Engaging and Effective Messaging

In your MAP, it is important to use language that communicates your community’s needs and assets appropriately. Framing challenges in a “deficit model” preemptively assigns blame and responsibility to individuals (or specific groups), rather than to the failures or limitations of the socioeconomic systems within which they live and operate. To avoid this type of framing, you should ensure that your MAP—and any communications about it—emphasizes the structural context informing the mobility challenges your community faces.

In addition to the language used in your MAP, it is important to craft a communications strategy that can ensure your plan will gain traction. Following are some resources to help you craft an engaging and effective message:

• Spitfire’s Smart Chart 4.0: Make Smart Communication Choices
• Spitfire’s Mindful Messaging
• The Urban Institute’s Do No Harm series, including a report on using data to craft more equitable narratives
• The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation’s Tips on Equitable Communication Practices in a Policy Context
• Our worksheet for developing an impactful story for your upward mobility work
• The Urban Institute’s Framing Communications to Drive Social Change
• The Urban Institute’s Elevate the Debate: Worksheets can help plan and strategize your research communication efforts

Come Up with a Strategy for Releasing Your Plan Publicly

When you are ready to release your MAP publicly, consider the following:

• Authorship: Will members of your coalition be attributed as coauthors of the MAP, will they be signatories, or will they write letters of support that can be attached to the document?
• Branding: Which organization in your coalition should publish the plan? Should it be a nongovernmental partner to protect the work from political cycles or should it be the city or county?
• Key terms: Is there a list of key terms and definitions that should be included? This is especially helpful for terms such as “equity,” “inclusive,” and “systems change,” which are often used in different ways by different groups.
• Web page: Where will the MAP live? Are there other documents that should accompany the MAP when it is published, such as an FAQ, sample talking points, a list of partner organizations, or contact information for other groups that want to get involved? Will the web page host a dashboard or some other reporting mechanism to share updates on implementation progress and any changes in desired outcomes?
• Dissemination: Should your coalition host a press conference, write a press release, or conduct a social media campaign to share the MAP? What other communications platforms or strategies could be useful? Are there community members who have been engaged throughout the MAP’s development who could be “MAP ambassadors” and help share information about the plan with their networks?
• Adoption: Should the city or county adopt the MAP through legislative action? Is a related budgetary appropriation needed to implement the strategies in it?

Now that you understand what an upward mobility planning process involves and what capacities are needed to undertake such a process successfully, you are ready to make an informed decision on whether it is the right step for you and your partners. If you decide that it is, the remaining chapters of this toolkit will lead you through the necessary steps. 

If you decide you are not in a position to undertake a full planning process, you may still be able to engage in the activities described in some of the chapters independently (for example, chapters 2, 3, and 4). Alternatively, you might want to craft a preparedness plan to help you focus on building up the capacities you are missing and come back to this work when you’ve made progress.