This toolkit was developed as part of the Upward Mobility Initiative at the Urban Institute. This toolkit and its previous edition were funded by the Gates Foundation. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission.

The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of Urban experts. Further information on the Urban Institute’s funding principles is available at urban.org/fundingprinciples.

How We Developed This Toolkit

The Upward Mobility Initiative and its resources, including this toolkit, are built on a foundation of research from the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, hosted by the Urban Institute with funding from the Gates Foundation. The Partnership gathered insights from research, practice, and people who have experienced poverty on what it would take to dramatically increase mobility from poverty in the US.

To validate and operationalize the initiative’s framework for boosting upward mobility and advancing racial equity, Urban has provided training and technical assistance to dozens of communities across the country since 2021. This toolkit is informed in large part by the many valuable lessons we’ve learned from those communities. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to partner with communities working persistently to find real solutions to increase upward mobility for residents as part of the Upward Mobility Cohort and the Mobility Action Learning Network.

Credits

This toolkit is an update to Boosting Upward Mobility: A Planning Guide for Local Action, written by Martha Fedorowicz, Tina Chelidze, and Kelly Walsh. It outlined a 10-step process for creating a Mobility Action Plan. This toolkit contains much of the same content as the original planning guide but has been updated based on new learnings and reorganized into seven thematic chapters. Both versions rely heavily on contributions—whether original content or repurposed technical assistance materials—from many other members of the Upward Mobility Initiative team past and present.

A full list of contributors can be found in the original planning guide. Those who helped create this second edition are listed below:

AUTHORS   Samantha Fu, Annie Heinrichs, Kiersten Vaughan, Emma Fernandez, Joe Schilling

CONTRIBUTORS   Kimberly Burrowes, Andrew Campbell, Lee Evans, Jesús Guzmán, Myriam Hernandez-Jennings, Karolina Ramos, Isabella Remor, and Alexis Weaver

DESIGN   Brittney Spinner, Alysheia Shaw-Dansby

EDITING   Debra Foulks, Rachel Kenney, Sujin Hong, Zachary VeShancey

PRODUCTION   Jerry Ta, Lydia Nguyen, Sam Cressman

PROJECT AND PRODUCT MANAGEMENT   Jordan Moeny, Sam Cressman

WEB DEVELOPMENT   Farnoosh Johnson

We are grateful to Kimberly Burrowes, Tina Chelidze, Lauren Farrell, Martha Fedorowicz, Keith Fudge, Myriam Hernandez-Jennings, Bill Pitkin, Joseph Schilling, and Kelly Walsh for their thoughtful feedback.