If your child were struggling with their grades, you’d likely ask their teacher for help. The teacher may suggest involving a guidance counselor and even the principal to develop a performance improvement plan.

Advancing upward mobility—or ensuring all residents, regardless of their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, have a chance to thrive—requires a similar approach. It involves engaging experts from across sectors to help achieve shared economic and social outcomes.

As part of the Boosting Upward Mobility project, from January 2021 to June 2022, the Urban Institute partnered with eight county and city governments to help them identify local conditions that enable or prevent mobility and equity. We found that by partnering with an established network of community organizations and the private sector, local governments could more effectively coordinate and sustain momentum toward their collective upward mobility goals.

Insights from two participating counties—Riverside County and Alameda County, California—offer lessons on how local governments can use cross-sector partnerships to promote economic and social well-being in their communities.

1. Build a cross-sector coalition. Both Alameda and Riverside Counties recognized that many stakeholders in their communities already had efforts underway to boost people out of poverty. Riverside County partnered with nonprofit organization Lift to Rise and its collaborative-action network of more than 60 regional stakeholders. This enabled the county to directly engage residents with lived experience and identify community priorities. Together, they were also able to locate issue-specific datasets and bring in external stakeholders with expertise around certain policy areas. Given their focus on supporting single mothers, the county brought in community members, representatives from the county’s largest employers, workers’ rights groups, and housing advocates to determine the most pressing barriers to upward mobility. Through cross-sector collaboration, Riverside and Lift to Rise were able to quickly identify potential solutions and develop a shared agenda.
2. Create an inventory of relevant municipal plans and identify opportunities for alignment. This process can help local leaders find other stakeholders already engaged in upward mobility work, overlapping strategic goals, and funding opportunities. Alameda County compiled an inventory of all recently published municipal plans with similar mobility objectives; these included the county’s COVID-19 Racial Disparities Task Force Report, the county’s Equitable Climate Action Plan, the San Francisco Foundation’s Aligned Bay Area Priority Report, the City of Oakland’s Economic Development Strategy, and the joint City of Oakland/Alameda County Community Action Partnership Strategic Plan. For each plan, they noted its priorities, the offices it involved, and how it measured outcomes. By preparing this inventory, Alameda’s upward mobility project team could easily identify existing efforts and key people and offices they could coordinate with on new or supplementary activities. As the Alameda team moved their upward mobility action plan through the approval process, they were able to draw on the combined expertise of those people they identified in their inventory—many of whom had experience creating 5- and 10-year municipal plans.
3. Engage residents and those with lived experience. In Riverside, Lift to Rise conducted four data walks and 10 community focus groups to enrich the county’s housing and economic mobility data with residents’ personal experiences. Residents, including renters with low incomes, mobile home park residents, food service and hospitality workers, undocumented immigrants, farm workers, people experiencing homelessness, and single parents, were invited to share their experiences finding housing and their feedback on what services the local government should provide. Participants received a $50 gift card as compensation for their time. After connecting with residents, local governments should ask: How are these insights relevant to our current initiatives and goals? What opportunities are there for additional resident engagement?
4. Sustain momentum. To maintain stakeholder enthusiasm, Riverside established regular meetings with its cross-sector coalition and reported on its progress to an even broader group. In Alameda, the team built sustainability into their work by identifying and recruiting a lead agency or nonprofit for each strategy included in their upward mobility action plan.

Like Alameda and Riverside Counties, each of the localities participating in the Boosting Upward Mobility project collaborated across sectors to align and sustain momentum for their upward mobility goals. Local leaders in other communities can begin to forge similar partnerships by considering past and ongoing work in their localities and by intentionally and equitably engaging residents.