Entrepreneurship | June 26, 2017

Five avenues for economic mobility in America’s cities

ImpactAlpha
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ImpactAlpha

More than 100 million people, or about a third of the U.S. population, live at or below 200% of the federal poverty line of about $28,000 for a family of four.

Executives from Mastercard, the digital payments giant, and Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, met with civic and business leaders in U.S. cities last year to find ways to remove barriers to opportunity and growth in the U.S.

The takeaways: support local entrepreneurs, skill up the workforce, unlock data for impact, increase urban mobility, and stabilize workers in the gig economy.

Mastercard is taking action with three initial grants: to Accion, to test the resiliency of small businesses to financial shocks; to PolicyLink, to profile workforce trends impacting America’s poor; and to the Urban Institute, to create new indicators of inclusive growth.

Mastercard has also struck two other partnerships that are noted in the report: with Grameen America, to scale U.S. microfinance and with DataKind, to build the data analytics capacity of nonprofit organizations.