Baltimore chosen as one of five communities for four-year, anti-poverty initiative

The city will be the beneficiary of several efforts to better understand poverty and help people in the targeted communities to move out of it

Dawn Onley

Feb 4, 2019

Baltimore was chosen as one of five communities to win a four-year, $25 million initiative to develop solutions to help families get out of poverty.

Under the initiative, which is spearheaded by the New York-based anti-poverty organization Robin Hood, teams dispatched to the five urban, rural and suburban communities will study local poverty data and work on finding economic solutions for families to achieve self-sufficiency.

Nisha Patel, a managing director at Robin Hood, told The Baltimore Sun that the end goal is to better understand the hardships of families living in poverty and to work on solutions to get them out of poverty.

“Baltimore is a place where we see both need and opportunity,” Patel told The Sun. “It is a city that, in many ways, is relatable to other cities.”

This spring, Patel said Robin Hood will work with a Baltimore partner to study trends and data in the city – looking for the places and times of life where people find themselves particularly vulnerable to poverty. After this, she said the teams will work with the larger community to brainstorm and roll out interventions.

“We don’t go in with a top-down idea,” Patel told The Sun.

In addition to Baltimore, the four other communities chosen for the initiative are New York, suburban Chicago, rural Northeast Pennsylvania and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The way the initiative works is that by the end of the four years, participants are able to identify short-term predictors that enable people to move out of poverty as well as identify ways to guide future anti-poverty efforts.

The initiative, officially called the Mobility Learning and Action Bets, or Mobility LABs, was announced Monday at Robin Hood’s conference, “No City Limits: Reimagining the Poverty Fight 2019.” Patel told the Sun that it will build on Robin Hood’s work to identify and invest in efforts in New York City.

The initiative partners with several nonprofits, including the Owings Mills-based Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, Tipping Point Community of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle. Robin Hood is led by Wes Moore, a best-selling Baltimore author and Rhode scholar.

“Mobility LABs will allow us to partner with impactful funders in diverse geographies across the country to work with communities to test and drive solutions lifting families from poverty,” Moore said in a statement, according to the Sun.