For far too many Americans, economic success is a function of gender, ability, location, race, and ethnicity. This injustice dates back to the nation’s founding and continues as institutional practices, policies, and norms that present structural barriers to economic mobility.

Organizations across an emerging field are calling for deeper coordination. Leaders advancing economic security and justice have voiced the need for a field-building initiative to address the disparate agendas, siloed knowledge bases, and insufficient resources that drive fragmentation in the field. They also demand that this effort builds trust, centers the priorities and perspectives of organizations working most closely with people and communities, and creates sustainable collaboration across domains and scales of impact.

It is within this context that the Gates Foundation invested in exploring, designing, and testing the concept of a new field-building initiative—a Mobility Alliance. This blueprint offers a vision and strategy for a catalytic intermediary that could broker relationships among organizations working across domains for impact, with the goal of advancing coordinated action toward economic justice.

The Mobility Alliance Build Phase

From mid-2023 through 2024, a diverse and dynamic community of field leaders convened to explore, design, and test this bold idea. The 18-month “build” phase was driven by a 16-member steering committee, managed by an executive director, and supported by an incubation hub composed of staff from the Urban Institute, Dalberg Advisors, and Common Future.

Through steering committee deliberations, engagement with organizations in the field, and targeted investments that tested hypotheses, the build phase generated five core propositions for field-building:

1. Address systemic challenges to produce population-level results
2. Convene diverse, dynamic groups to build power and drive innovation
3. Create opportunities for local and national efforts to amplify each other
4. Establish clear expectations and emergent processes to drive effective collaboration
5. Prioritize long-term coalition-building as the foundation for lasting systems change

These propositions informed the strategy for a Mobility Alliance that could amplify and accelerate the impact of organizations already working to improve people’s economic well-being, power, and dignity.

Defining a Field-Building Strategy

The build phase steering committee members aligned on a vision that describes the future they are working toward and an economic rights framework that outlines the conditions necessary for individuals and families to flourish. These are undergirded by four guiding principles that respond to the field’s demand for new ways of working, directly confronting the root causes of today’s fragmentation.

This Mobility Alliance would perform three mutually reinforcing roles:

1. As a partnership broker, it would convene organizational leaders who otherwise do not formally connect to learn more about each other’s work, identify common interests, and set shared goals.
2. As a mobilizing engine, it would provide capital and other resources to catalyze field partnerships, enabling them to pilot new strategies, advance common agendas, and drive systems change in the interests of the people they represent and serve.
3. As a learning laboratory, it would produce actionable tools and amplify promising innovations that would be disseminated widely through regional and national networks, helping strengthen current relationships and spur new ones.

By fostering alignment and investment in responsive field practices, a Mobility Alliance could support partners in deepening their collective capacity for impact. Over time, this approach could help develop responsive fieldwide policies, practices, and resource flows that would drive systems change and help realize the Alliance’s vision for an America that uplifts the economic well-being, power, and dignity of all its people, especially those historically excluded from prosperity.

No other entity currently performs these functions across the full swath of policy domains essential to economic mobility, in ways that foster two-way learning and collaboration between national and local initiatives.

Piloting the Strategy

To test and refine this strategy, the steering committee launched six “build & learn” pilot projects, each focused on a different domain of impact, geography, coordination challenge, and stage of development. These projects generated early evidence of shifting field practices in varied settings, affirming the strategy and illustrating how this work can produce broader systems change.

• Bringing Rural and Tribal Leaders Together to Advance Shared Economic Mobility Goals
• Building a State Coalition for Public Spending Based on Shared Mobility Goals
• Connecting Advocates across the US to Advance More Equitable Public Budgeting
• Engaging Refugee Workers in Workforce Coalitions
• Creating a Network of Young Tribal and Rural Leaders in Economic Mobility
• Empowering Tenant Leaders to Shape Housing Policies and the Future of Their Communities

Looking Ahead

This planning effort yielded a blueprint for a catalytic initiative that could be launched by a dedicated group of partners. Although resources have yet to be committed to create a Mobility Alliance, the build phase partners have generated an actionable plan that could be enacted with modest funding and staffing. With sufficient support in place, the Alliance could begin serving as a coordinating body, connecting organizational leaders invested in intersectional, cross-domain solutions for economic mobility.

To realize an America where economic prosperity is a reality for all, leaders in this nascent field must find bold new ways to work together. Grounded in this aspiration, the build phase experiment produced a set of insights and opportunities ripe for adoption and investment.