Opportunity Accelerator: Promoting Economic Mobility and Addressing Racial Inequities - fundsforNGOs

The Opportunity Accelerator (OA) is an initiative providing governments with support to build its capacity to advance economic mobility and reduce racial disparities in their communities.

Donor Name: Results for America

State: All States except California, Tennessee, and Texas

County: All Counties

Type of Grant: Accelerator

Deadline: 10/14/2022

Details:

The OA seeks to work with government to build its capacity to collaborate with community partners and directly with residents to identify barriers to economic mobility, co-design programs and solutions, and ensure those programs and solutions deliver on outcomes that ultimately increase community wellbeing. The initiative will help government gain a comprehensive understanding of and strategic planning towards an equitable population-level outcome, such as:

connecting young people who are not in school or employed to mentorship programs and apprenticeships to improve quality employment opportunities;
providing employment services, benefit access, or income support to recently housed homeless individuals and families to enable a path to self-sufficiency;
offering quality child care or after school programs to Black and Latino caregivers with young children to enable them to gain or maintain employment.

For government leaders, the initiative offers coaching and expertise for key stakeholders to support acceleration towards shared community-centered priorities. Through the initiative, participants will receive customized support and technical assistance to:

Comprehensively plan towards an equitable population-level outcome such as collecting, analyzing and sharing data, setting a shared vision and defining metrics, developing and implementing effective and equitable strategies, programs, and services that center the priorities of the community, shifting and allocating funding to “what works,” and establishing systems and policies that ensure sustainability;
Better understand and address structural racism and the ability to embed racial equity and wellbeing principles across government;
Build trusted relationships and establish structures to better collaborate with community partners and residents to further understand problems and identify solutions;
Collaborate with different levels of government and agencies within the same government to implement more effective solutions.

Participants Commitments

Government partners will be asked to commit to the following:

Promoting economic mobility, racial equity, and centering community voices.
Collecting, using, and sharing data that allows government to track and be transparent on programs progress, analyze impact indicators related to economic mobility, and evaluate changes to racial disparities.
Ensuring that the government departments or programs have the staff capacity and resources to receive OA’s coaching and technical assistance (i.e. engage in bi-weekly working meetings with the OA and set aside 1-2 hours over two weeks to work in this initiative. Those 1-2 hours can be spent designing resident-centered activities, reviewing materials, or participating in training and workshops).

Eligibility Criteria

To be considered for selection, local governments will:

Be located in any state except California, Tennessee and Texas (given that the OA has already started partnerships in those three states).
Not have elections and scheduled changes in chief executives before the end of 2024.
Local governments that meet the above requirements and have identified new or existing opportunities promoting economic mobility and reducing racial disparities, and are committed to collaborate with community partners, are highly encouraged to apply.

Selection criteria

The OA will assess the following components:

Opportunity for impact

Proposal related to economic mobility, racial equity, and/or the wellbeing of residents
Well-defined focus population
Clear population-level outcomes
Connection to OA offerings

Readiness to implement