Taking the temperature on upward mobility
Leading on Opportunity's Sherri Chisolm on Charlotte's progress and challenges
The following article appeared in the June 9, 2023, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte. You can sign up for The Ledger’s newsletters here.
Q&A: Charlotte is making ‘incremental progress’ to improve economic mobility. But the effort is a ‘generations-long journey’
Sherri Chisholm is executive director of Leading On Opportunity (Skyline photo by Kevin Young/The 5 and 2 Project)
Charlotte has long had a vision of itself as a dynamic and growing “New South” city. But in 2014, a national economic mobility study revealed that not all parts of Charlotte are thriving.
The study, conducted by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, ranked Charlotte 50th out of the 50 largest metro areas in the United States in economic mobility. Essentially, a large number of Charlotte natives born into poverty were staying in poverty as adults.
The study was a wake-up call for Charlotte. The city formed a task force that included community members, foundations, nonprofits and companies that issued a report in 2017 with recommendations and strategies to improve Charlotte’s economic mobility. Leading On Opportunity, an initiative based at Foundation for the Carolinas that works with many community partners to improve economic mobility in the Charlotte region, is working to execute that report.
The Ledger’s Tony Mecia sat down with Leading On Opportunity’s executive director, Sherri Chisholm recently to check in on what’s been done so far to improve economic mobility in Charlotte, and what efforts exist to push it forward.
🎧 You can listen to the full conversation with Sherri Chisholm on The Charlotte Ledger Podcast:
This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: How is Charlotte doing in executing the task force’s recommendations and strategies to make progress on economic mobility?
I think first, as a community, we need to applaud ourselves on the community-wide effort. We’ve heard from the folks out of Raj Chetty’s group that Charlotte is leading the way in terms of taking action on the results of the Chetty study. We are the only community that has developed a dashboard that we've now branded as the Opportunity Compass that can measure our progress since the task force report was released.
One thing that is unfortunate, but we need to be aware of, is that Chetty will never release another study to tell us if we moved our ranking, so we need some data for ourselves to tell us if we’re making progress. At the end of last year, we released the Opportunity Compass, which measures economic mobility. Now, we can measure where we are in terms of our commitment to the community based on the things outlined in the task force report.
What the data is showing us, which is a combination of community voice as well as quantitative countywide data that we can access from a variety of public sources, is that we’ve made some incremental progress, which is what we would expect at this point if we are on a generations-long journey. We’ve built a tool that we don’t want to only be for curiosity’s sake, but we want the business community and funders to use that tool. Now we’re on the journey of helping folks utilize the tool in their investment decisions.
Q: What are the key determinants of economic mobility that are being measured by the Opportunity Compass?
The five key buckets of economic mobility, as defined by the task force, are early care in education, family and child stability, college and career readiness, and then the two cross-cutting factors of the impact of segregation and social capital: Who is in your network and can help you gain access to those resources. If you are impacted by segregation, it’s more difficult for you to achieve economic mobility, and the stronger your social-capital network, the easier it is for you to increase your economic mobility.
Q: There are intractable social circumstances that go back decades, from housing patterns to legacies of discrimination, to school assignments and family structures. How do you move the needle forward? What's the strategy for making progress in each of those areas?
I think first is acknowledging that we will be on this journey for a while. In a banking or finance town like Charlotte, we’re used to looking at results quarter over quarter. This is the type of work that happens quarter-century over quarter-century, and I know that may be uncomfortable for a lot of folks to settle into, but to first understand that this is not destination work, but journey work.
Knowing that there’s no silver bullet, how can we get smarter at the work that we’re doing? We’re now taking the compass and using it with a select group of corporations to help them evaluate their investments over the course of the past two to three years.
Q: A lot of times, when things get really hot, they get a lot of attention. Eight or 10 years ago, this was a really hot topic. Do you still feel as though that commitment is there from corporate leaders, from civic leaders, like it was years ago? Or does the attention fade as time goes on? How do you keep the focus?
A lot of communities get initiative fatigue. I was not here in 2017 when it was the big public launch of the task force report, and from what I understand, it was one of the biggest launches ever in terms of corporate and community focus in Charlotte. What I can say as someone who entered in 2020, is the community was still holding that same sense of urgency, curiosity and community will. What we were struggling with is the how.
I don’t think that there’s any less emphasis or interest in doing the work. People just want to do it well. We want to make sure our dollars are being invested, our time is being spent well and towards a particular outcome. Where we really focus is on creating the tools to help people do that work, and building coalitions among folks who are doing the work, so that we can work collaboratively and reduce that fragmentation and confusion that often exists when we're taking on big community issues like this.
Q: What are you helping the funders learn with the Compass? What are some of the takeaways that they're picking up?
There are two components of our project, which we’re calling “Dollars to Drivers” — How do you make sure your dollars are aligning with the drivers of economic mobility? One is an assessment of their portfolio. We’re helping them understand what that mix should look like based on the current state of economic mobility here in Charlotte. We’re meeting with nonprofit partners to help them further define their theory of action, what programming they are delivering, and then which of those five levers of economic mobility they are most directly impacting.
Then, we can go back to the funder and say, “If you're interested in investing in college and career readiness, early care in education, here are the types of organizations you should be investing in, and here's where the need is.”
➡️ Want to read more? Check out a recent Charlotte magazine article about Chisholm here.
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Staff writer: Lindsey Banks; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Contributing photographer/videographer: Kevin Young, The 5 and 2 Project