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| Economic & Community Development
Newsletters
| Economic & Community Development, Housing, Transit & Infrastructure
- Newsletters
- | Economic & Community Development, Housing, Transit & Infrastructure
Accelerator for America recently concluded a three-month Insights into Action cohort with partners at Opportunity Insights, and we found that impactful learning doesn’t always require a long-haul commitment; even a focused “learning sprint” can help communities accelerate progress toward their economic mobility goals.
The cohort brought together five cities at different stages of their economic mobility work – Allentown/Lehigh Valley, PA; Birmingham, AL; Montgomery, AL; Tampa, FL; and Tulsa, OK – to leverage research and data tools to strengthen local initiatives focused on increasing economic mobility in underserved communities. Each participating community entered the cohort with a priority initiative and a cross-sector partnership already established or in progress. Opportunity Insights is a non-partisan, not-for-profit research and policy institute at Harvard University. During the cohort, the communities were given free access to Opportunity Insights tools, such as the Opportunity Atlas, which provides neighborhood-level economic mobility patterns, to validate and refine their strategies, strengthen coalitions, align diverse stakeholders, and accelerate their work. Collectively, we gained insights about how places approach economic mobility initiatives, the conditions that make it possible, and the obstacles that get in the way.
The local team used Opportunity Insights’ data to compare household income trajectories for children from low-income families in Allentown versus the broader Lehigh Valley region, and it quickly revealed a stark geographic disparity. While the region overall showed signs of economic prosperity, Allentown residents were being left behind, with future income projections for children falling well below regional averages. This validated their core understanding that facilitating local employment is essential to closing the gap and ensuring Allentown residents also benefit from the region’s growth.
“Accelerator for America and Opportunity Insights helped us along the way with the development of key KPIs and evaluation tools to make sure that we are responding to the grant and to make sure that what we say we're going to do, we do. Having that additional technical assistance and the additional brains in the room to help us think through how we're going to build outcomes that are responsive has been the biggest part,” said Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk.
Allentown/Lehigh Valley took the research tools further, using data to help inform their strategies around increasing access to childcare, a key component of workforce access. “We used the tool to complement our childcare gap analysis, and this is allowing us to make better decisions on how we are allocating these funds for childcare strategies,” shared Recompete Program Coordinator Manuela Guevara from Allentown Economic Development Corporation (AEDC). The team also integrated new research from the Brookings Institution, highlighted through AFA’s Economic Opportunity Accelerators programming, on the relationship between public safety and economic opportunity into their violence prevention strategy, recognizing that safety is foundational to residents’ ability to access opportunities and build stronger community connections.
The City of Tampa applied to join the Insights into Action cohort as their work on the City’s Sulphur Springs Neighborhood Action Plan was getting underway, and the timing aligned perfectly to provide data tools and frameworks to further sharpen their approach. The community had already identified concerns around high poverty, limited job access, food insecurity, and lower homeownership, but city leaders needed tools to help substantiate these concerns and pinpoint what targeted interventions would have the most impact.
Using the Opportunity Atlas, they identified key census tracts within Sulphur Springs where children face persistent barriers to economic mobility. The data affirmed community feedback while providing additional insights, including how many residents are traveling outside of the area for work. This pointed the City and their partners towards specific priorities – food access, youth programs, entrepreneurship, and workforce development initiatives – and specific places such as the Main Street corridor. The discrete geographic data allows the City to align future investments to the areas within Tampa’s Sulphur Springs neighborhood where children face the most persistent barriers to economic mobility. “It helped that we were using a tool that could provide us with enough ammunition to say we understand what the needs are,” shared Javier Marin, Tampa’s Director of Economic Opportunity.
With leadership from the Tulsa Community Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, Tulsa’s philanthropic and nonprofit sectors are organized around a shared goal: reversing the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Their current question wasn’t whether to focus on economic mobility; it was how to expand that focus beyond nonprofits to include public agencies, how to give partners even stronger research-backed frameworks, how to best understand the role of social capital in driving upward mobility, and how to identify potential areas for intervention.
The Insights into Action cohort offered Tulsa an opportunity to deepen their data-driven approach and to position economic mobility research as a tool for both internal strategy development and external stakeholder engagement. Organizations like Experience Tulsa underwent what their team called “fundamental realignment of their goals,” now centering social capital development as an explicit economic development priority, and they are developing dashboards inspired by LOO’s Opportunity Compass to help program leaders and policymakers understand leading indicators of upward mobility.
“Participating in this cohort allowed us to tap into transformative research from Opportunity Insights and uncover the key forces shaping mobility in Tulsa today,” shared Jake Cronin, Director of Research and Analysis at Tulsa for You and Me. “The data pointed us toward critical priorities, from building stronger neighborhoods that nurture children and families to recognizing how social capital shapes opportunity across our city. This partnership has provided clarity, direction, and momentum as Tulsa works to create a future where every resident has the chance to thrive.”
The City of Montgomery joined the Insights into Action cohort with a goal of using data to challenge long-held assumptions about their community and to analyze how public and private investments can be better targeted for more equitable community development. Ultimately, Montgomery also wants to increase transparency with its residents by providing real-time and accurate community-level data. Participation in the cohort gave Montgomery leaders the opportunity to learn from peer communities and national models that are addressing similar challenges.
With a recent reorganization of personnel across multiple city departments and a new economic development team, they were motivated by a clear need: to build capacity quickly while simultaneously advancing active projects. Despite being just weeks into new roles, the participating Montgomery team members were actively engaged, taking advantage of direct technical assistance, and connecting cohort insights to on-the-ground challenges. In particular, they focused on a desire to align overall economic growth with economic mobility, especially paying mind to historical legacies of racial segregation and disinvestment in neighborhoods.
The City of Birmingham joined the cohort with established partnerships and a clear strategic challenge: how to sustain momentum on economic mobility work in a shifting environment. Building upon the Racial Wealth Gap Symposium held in 2024, Birmingham looked to the cohort as an opportunity to strategize the next steps, enhance their data analysis, and continue to engage local partners and stakeholders around the importance of drilling down to the neighborhood and community level when assessing progress.
Birmingham needed to find specific data insights that could help build broader coalitions while maintaining their focus on equitable growth and neighborhood investments. For example, Birmingham will overlay Opportunity Atlas data with existing redlining maps to show the historical connections to current economic mobility patterns. The City, in partnership with Prosper Birmingham, a local nonprofit focused on inclusive economic growth, is now developing a comprehensive dashboard that will link quality of life indicators to economic mobility outcomes. This dashboard will serve as an accountability mechanism for local leaders and residents to “inspect what you expect” and keep leaders focused on shared outcomes.
Birmingham also recognizes cultural context, historical trauma, and community storytelling as essential complements to quantitative analysis. The team is planning for the public launch of the updated data dashboard in early 2026, as well as a series of virtual and in-person events that will bring together local leaders, community members, national funders and partners, and representatives from other peer cities. By creating space for this kind of exchange, Birmingham is contributing to a broader knowledge base about what works in practice, not just in theory.
Across the five cohort communities, several patterns emerged about why data matters in strengthening community-driven strategies:
Understanding local economic mobility data is an important piece of the puzzle; deep local knowledge and understanding of community priorities remains critically important. Our cohort communities were able to weave together data precision with community wisdom to create greater, lasting impact.
While it’s important to understand why economic mobility data matters, it’s also critical to understand the conditions that help communities move from analysis to action and the structures that enable them to sustain that momentum over time.
Access to research tools helps communities validate their intervention approach. The communities that got the most from the Opportunity Insights research tools already had strong intuitions about local challenges. Leveraging the data gave them precision and credibility to build upon their existing awareness. This suggests that effective research translation should start by asking communities what they already know and what additional information would help them act on that knowledge.
Momentum matters. Research tools are accelerants, not engines – they make existing momentum more effective but can’t always create momentum from scratch. We found that the cohort communities that saw the most progress incorporated the data and research along with existing initiatives, political will, and funding opportunities. For intermediaries like AFA, this means paying attention to critical inflection points and helping communities capitalize on them.
Money matters, too. All initiatives in this cohort had some form of financial backing, whether through federal grants, philanthropy, or local government operating support. Financial resources are a critical component to begin and implement the long-term work of driving economic mobility; community leaders must have a plan to both seed and sustain economic mobility efforts outside of one-time opportunities.
Peer learning is both imitation and inspiration. Participants consistently told us that learning from other cities was one of the most valuable aspects of the cohort. Not because they could copy what others were doing (contexts often differ too much for that) but because seeing how peers approached similar challenges sparked new ways of thinking.
Cross-sector coordination is strengthened by catalysts. Voluntary coordination is hard; coordination with external incentives or requirements is more common. The most effective coalitions had some external catalyst – whether federal funding, major philanthropic initiatives, and/or political mandates – that brought diverse partners to the table with shared urgency.
One size definitely does not fit all. Effective technical assistance must be responsive to organizational capacity, political context, and local readiness. Communities with newer or smaller teams may need different (and more frequent) support than places with established infrastructure. Successful intermediaries must be able to flex between intensive capacity-building and lighter-touch peer facilitation.
The Insights into Action cohort demonstrated that cities have tremendous capacity to translate research into locally relevant strategies when provided with the right tools, peer connections, and support. The work of accelerating economic mobility within communities is complex, long-term, and deeply contextual, but as these five cohort cities have shown, when research intersects with community knowledge and cross-sector partnerships, the potential for meaningful change is significant.
We extend our gratitude to our partners at Opportunity Insights for their collaboration throughout this pilot cohort, and for providing invaluable research tools, technical expertise, and ongoing support to all five participating communities. We are also grateful to Leading on Opportunity in Charlotte, whose Opportunity Compass served as a powerful example to our cohort of how economic mobility research can drive local action. Thank you for allowing AFA and Opportunity Insights to participate in your Economic Mobility Summit this fall, and for continuing to serve as a model of this work. We are also deeply grateful to Allentown/Lehigh Valley, Birmingham, Montgomery, Tampa, and Tulsa for their participation and partnership in this pilot cohort. Their experiences provide a helpful reference for how other research institutions, intermediaries, and communities can work together to turn insights into lasting impact.
