UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Richard King Mellon Foundation awarded a $228,000 grant to Penn State Extension to support young people’s economic mobility in Westmoreland County.
The project is informed by recent studies published in the journal Nature by Raj Chetty and colleagues that suggest an individual’s lifetime economic trajectory is influenced by the strength of their social network and community ties. Researchers found that the cross-class connections in a community, termed “economic connectedness,” was more predictive of economic mobility than educational outcomes, family structure or other forms of inequality.
The foundation asked for proposals to identify the factors that limit young people from making social connections across economic lines in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties and explore interventions that could increase these connections. The long-term goal, which extends beyond the grant period, is to boost the upward economic mobility for young people up to 24 years old living in low-income households in these counties.
The foundation elected to support Penn State Extension in identifying model programs that boost economic connectedness. The team, made up of collaborators from Extension’s family well-being and community vitality teams and the 4-H unit, as well as researchers associated with the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center, will work to develop a toolkit to help other youth-serving organizations in Westmoreland County facilitate economic connections and relationship-building among youth they serve.
“The idea behind the toolkit is to see if we can identify model programs that foster economic connectedness among youth and then offer resources and guideposts for other programs that might want to enhance their programs in this way,” said Maureen Ittig, extension educator with the food, families and communities program unit.
The toolkit’s content will depend on how the project unfolds, but it could include model programs, model programmatic approaches, or steps or checklists to guide programs seeking to enhance economic connectedness to increase the economic mobility of youth.
“We are not conducting an evaluation at this stage but rather hoping to identify models in Westmoreland County that hold promise,” Ittig said, noting that a program’s ability to successfully enable friendships between youth of different economic backgrounds is crucial. “It isn’t enough to have low-income youth and high-income youth in the same physical space, be that a neighborhood, school or program, but rather the strength of the economic connections in that place."
The foundation identifies economic mobility as an area of investment because, in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties, children in lower-income households have less access to opportunities that contribute to economic mobility in adulthood.