The COVID-19 pandemic not only affected city, county, and state governments’ ability to function and deliver services, but it also had a devastating impact on their communities. Communities of color were especially hit hard and experienced disproportionate job loss, housing instability, and COVID-19 infection and death rates.

In response, Congress issued the American Rescue Plan Act, allocating $350 billion of State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to state, local, and tribal governments to help them respond to and recover from the pandemic. Counties across the country, including members of the Urban Institute’s Upward Mobility Cohort, received $65.1 billion(PDF) to improve their operations to better serve their residents. Recipients are required to use the funds to support activities that advance equitable outcomes for residents who faced economic hardship because of the pandemic. Counties with populations greater than 250,000 must outline how they are engaging with historically underserved communities to ensure programs supported by the federal dollars are equitable and focused on those who need them the most.

The essential services counties provide can influence and bolster key conditions in communities that advance upward mobility and narrow racial inequities. Today, many counties are using the historic and unprecedented recovery funds to seed projects that strengthen their communities’ response to the public health emergency and create programs that provide stability for residents and advance racial equity. Counties can use these initiatives to improve the conditions that help advance upward mobility.

And that’s exactly what Ramsey County, Minnesota, is doing. This member of the Upward Mobility Cohort is using its $108 million allocation (PDF) to build trust among residents, create more affordable housing, and develop career pathways for young adults disproportionately affected by COVID-19. Each effort aligns with key drivers of upward mobility outlined in Urban’s Boosting Upward Mobility Framework.

Other counties across the country can use Urban’s framework to center people in their program design and promote equitable outcomes from the COVID-19 crisis. Our framework can also help counties identify metrics and programs to effectively target recovery funds and tackle structural barriers that hinder upward mobility and perpetuate racial inequities.

Drivers of upward mobility

At the heart of Urban’s framework are three specific community conditions that propel people and families out of poverty over their lives: strong and healthy families, supportive communities, and opportunities to learn and earn. Together, these drivers contribute to a person’s economic success, power and autonomy, and sense of belonging in their community.

Highlighted below are Ramsey County’s recovery-funded projects that align with the three drivers of upward mobility.

• Strong and healthy families: Creating affordable housing provides a foundation for family stability and creates a pathway for longer-term educational and economic success. To ensure quality living environments for their residents and address its housing shortage, Ramsey County and the City of Saint Paul allocated $74 million of its recovery funds to build housing for residents earning 30 percent or less of the region’s area median income. This investment will help create 1,000 homes for people with low incomes in the region.
  
  Healthy individuals form the foundation of strong and healthy families. To support families’ safety and well-being during the pandemic, Ramsey County also created a trusted messengers program that disseminates critical health information and provides up-to-date culturally and linguistically appropriate information regarding COVID-19 prevention to residents.
• Supportive communities: Safe and inclusive communities play a central role in shaping outcomes for families’ well-being and their ability to prosper. In 2020, Ramsey County launched the COVID-19 Racial Equity and Community Engagement Response Team (RECERT). RECERT is responsible for collecting residents’ feedback on the pandemic’s effects on their lives so the county can mitigate these impacts and tailor its support to residents’ actual needs. Ramsey County is using its recovery funds to hire and train more dedicated staff to expand outreach to communities of color. Local governments that are attentive to the needs of historically marginalized residents and engage them in community-wide decisionmaking create the foundation to support upward mobility.
• Opportunities to learn and earn: Educational opportunities and workforce development are critical pathways to economic and social mobility. Work provides the most important means of economic security and advancement. Realizing this, Ramsey County used $2.1 million of its pandemic aid to create a career pathway internship, called Right Track Plus. This internship program offers young adults working in industries hit hardest during the pandemic access to new skills, mentorship, career counseling, and connections to higher-paying jobs. Steady work enables people to build skills and experience so they can advance to higher-paying jobs to build both income and wealth.

By creating programs that support the drivers of upward mobility, as Ramsey County has done, communities across the country can promote economic success for their residents, make them feel valued in their community, and grant them power and autonomy to make choices that influence their lives and larger policy actions.