Municipal leaders play a pivotal role in shaping the economic futures of their communities. Given the changing economic landscape, local leaders need to take a proactive approach to improving economic mobility for their residents. To address the multi-faceted lives of residents, local economic mobility leaders are taking a broader outcome-based approach to identify connections within programs and strategies to increase impact. Results for America’s Economic Mobility Catalog offers a powerful tool for local leaders focused on economic mobility work. Within the Catalog, users can browse strategies that are consolidated within a series of specific economic mobility outcomes. In this blog, NLC will be highlighting three specific strategies and associated municipal examples within the “High Quality Employment” outcome category. Each of the strategies and municipal highlights not only showcase a great and tangible example of municipal leadership, but also the breadth of economic mobility work nationwide.
Early Childhood Workforce Supports
For this strategy, municipalities can focus on recruiting, training and retaining a qualified early childhood workforce. Some emerging recruitment models — like apprenticeship and pipeline partnerships between school districts, colleges, community organizations and transit data analysis on key community partners — draw in a multitude of potential early childhood educators with low- or no-cost training, hands-on mentorship and formal coursework. Additionally, municipalities can support their early childhood workforce through training new employees to receive their specialized credentials to work with specific subgroups like children with disabilities or English language learners.
Municipal Example: Little Rock, AR
As a participating city in NLC’s City Inclusive Entrepreneurship program, the City of Little Rock, AR (pop.202,591) launched a strategy focused on supporting early childhood educators through a targeted professional development initiative. This professional development cohort identified program administration as an area that required specialized training and attention. By addressing the foundational business administration needs, the early childhood workforce gained best practices and practical tools to run their businesses more efficiently, ensuring long-term success for this workforce.
Summer Youth Employment Programs
The Summer Youth Employment Program strategy outlines how summer youth employment programs not only connect youth and young adults to paid jobs, but also provide exposure to professional work environments and valuable mentorship opportunities. Beyond employment, youth engaged in these programs should receive a standard paycheck with market-appropriate wages that match the adult employment experience. Municipalities can also build programming that connects the participating youth to other programs and services such as financial literacy courses (PDF), workforce readiness courses or public benefits.
Municipal Example: Miami, FL
In 2014, the City of Miami, FL (pop. 442,241) created the “Summer Jobs Connect Miami” program that combines employment and financial management education. The participants, between 16 and 19 years old, can work for the City of Miami for 29 hours per week over a nine-week period. As part of their employment, the participants are required to open a savings account (if they don’t already have one), meet with a counselor biweekly to discuss their financial goals and outline a budget to reach those goals. Over the last 12 summers, Summer Jobs Connect Miami has hired more than 1,800 youth and paid them more than $4 million in wages with participants setting aside roughly $1 million in their savings accounts.
Community-Led Violence Prevention
The Community-led violence protection strategy aims to curb gun violence by building trust and connection between residents and individuals at high risk of involvement in violence. These programs identify those most likely to engage or be targeted by violence using a mix of local relationships, criminal justice data and community outreach. Once engaged, participants work with violence interrupters with strong ties to the community embedded in social service agencies to detect and de-escalate conflicts before they turn violent.
Municipal Example: Davenport, IA
In 2022, the City of Davenport, IA (pop. 101,724) launched the Group Violence Intervention (GVI) as a partnership that tied law enforcement, credible and integrated community members and social service organizations together to identify and reduce violence. More than 40 community members receive and contribute to “custom notifications” that help them identify and intervene with at-risk individuals and provide mentoring or other types of support within the community. Through this program, violence metrics decreased on a city-wide scale such as a 40% drop in number of non-fatal shootings.
Economic Mobility Catalog
These strategies represent a small sample of evidence-based strategies within the Economic Mobility Catalog. NLC is focusing on just one of the outcome areas: High Quality Employment. To learn more about the Catalog and this strategy in general, please visit the full outcome area page.
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