High-poverty neighborhoods are characterized by inferior housing, higher levels of pollution, underfunded schools, inadequate public infrastructure, and few employment opportunities—realities that carry significant consequences. A growing body of research shows that concentrated poverty undermines the long-term success of children and even lowers life expectancy. What’s more, despite the fact that most low-income people in the United States are white, people of color are much more likely to live in impoverished areas due to the enduring effects of segregation and ongoing discriminatory housing practices.

Historically, federal programs have prescribed a one-size-fits-all approach to address concentrated poverty, with a focus on housing. But it has become increasingly apparent that what’s needed is a more comprehensive approach—one that addresses the interrelated challenges faced by low-income people in high-poverty neighborhoods, alongside efforts to move some residents out of concentrated poverty. A Harvard study found that if a person moves to a low-poverty area as a child, he or she will be more likely to go to college and will see an increase in total lifetime earnings of roughly $302,000. While policies that enable low-income people to live in more prosperous communities, such as housing vouchers, are critical, leaders must address the challenges facing the many people who remain in underserved communities.

President Obama has taken note. When he took office in 2009, his administration set out to ensure that the federal government was supporting local innovation rather than dictating community development strategies, and established programs to help local leaders address modern realities such as changes in technology, aging infrastructure, and jobs moving to the suburbs and abroad. These efforts culminated in the announcement of the Promise Zones initiative in 2014, in which Obama declared, “A child’s course in life should be determined not by the zip code she’s born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams.”

Today, the Obama Administration announced the third and final round of Promise Zone designees, which include communities in Nashville, southern Los Angeles, Atlanta, Evansville, Indiana, San Diego, eastern Puerto Rico and southwest Florida. In addition, the Spokane Indian Reservation and the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians also received the Promise Zone designation.

Designees will receive priority access to existing federal resources to help them implement their comprehensive plans to support job creation, increase economic security, expand educational opportunities, increase access to affordable housing, and improve public safety. In addition, new zones will receive AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers to help build capacity on the ground.

Over the course of just two years, the Promise Zone designation has proven to be an effective strategy for bringing local stakeholders together around shared goals, and for streamlining the relationship between local and federal leaders. For example, the designation has allowed the Los Angeles Promise Zone, one of the first cities selected, to leverage millions of dollars in grants across 14 agencies to support its work.

The Los Angeles Zone, which includes parts of Hollywood, is one of the densest and most diverse parts of the city, but is also one of the poorest. As a result of the initiative, the zone is utilizing federal support to transform its 45 different schools into “community schools”—providing full-time nonprofit staff to work with parents, coordinate resources, and provide workshops and wellness classes for students and parents alike. In addition, the school district is placing its own staff in job training centers, youth centers, and family centers to ensure coordination of resources throughout the zone. According to Dixon Slingerland, Executive Director of the Youth Policy Institute and a leader in the zone, “We believe anywhere a family goes in the zone should be a one stop shop. It shouldn’t be that we need to send them to all these different agencies. Wherever they go, we’re going to make sure we have all the pieces in place to support them.”

To be sure, in a world of limited resources, targeting funding to high-poverty communities means fewer resources will be directed to less disadvantaged communities that still face many of the same challenges. However, the goal of the initiative is not only to transform the selected zones—it’s also to change how the federal government works with local communities overall, while demonstrating effective and efficient strategies that other communities can adapt.

Such values should appeal to leaders across the political spectrum. After Eastern Kentucky was selected as a Promise Zone during the first round, Congressman Hal Rogers (R-KY) released a press release praising the initiative stating, “This program shows promise for recruiting private industry in several of our hard-hit counties.”

But with a new presidency on the horizon, the Promise Zones initiative could end with this administration. The progress that has been made in just two years through this initiative must be built upon to ensure such efficiency and effectiveness becomes business as usual for how the federal government works with local communities. To be sure, the Promise Zones initiative is not a substitute for a comprehensive plan to address poverty, which would require paid sick leave legislation, raising the minimum wage, protecting unemployment insurance, among other proven strategies. But when it comes to addressing the unique challenges of high poverty communities, the next president should take the lessons from the Obama administration and include this initiative in their governing agenda. Unprecedented levels of concentrated poverty require long-term strategies that cannot end in just a few months.

Fortunately, we’ve had some new thinking on this front during the last eight years and I am guardedly optimistic that we are moving towards solutions.

Building on the work of social entrepreneur Geoffrey Canada, President Obama succeeded in funding the Promise Neighborhoods program centered on children in schools and, by extension, on their families. The initiative aims to improve educational and development outcomes for students living in urban and rural communities by providing cradle-to-career educational programs and family supports.  Beyond the importance of the initiative itself is the fact that it opened the door to new approaches to fighting poverty. If a neighborhood revitalization initiative could be anchored in schools instead of the traditional focus on housing and community development, other hubs could serve the same purpose—including community health centers, or early childhood or mental health facilities, or a variety of family services locations.

This past year I visited four places to look at some of the cutting-edge work focused on poverty and place.  The diversity of their theories of change is impressive, and all of them should be on our collective radar as we move into a new presidency.

Minneapolis, Northside Achievement Zone

I started in Minneapolis where I grew up.  The city is perplexing.  While it has a very low overall unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, the African-American poverty rate hovers over 44 percent and the  African-American unemployment rate is about 14 percent (compared to 8.8 percent nationwide).

I visited the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), a Promise Neighborhood composed of a 13-by-18 block segment of North Minneapolis that is 84 percent African-American, with poverty above 50 percent, unemployment concomitantly high, and extensive violence.

NAZ was founded in 2011 with a mission to improve educational outcomes for children, including through parental involvement and a commitment to good housing, employment, and community safety.  The heart of NAZ’s modus operandi is “connectors” and “navigators.” Connectors visit families in their homes and then connect them with the help they need.  The connector brings the issue that a NAZ family is struggling with to a navigator who is a specialist in the relevant area—whether it’s related to education, parenting, child care, housing, or some other challenge.

NAZ works with partners of all kinds – including neighborhood-based organizations, businesses, education groups, and philanthropic organizations.  In all, it has 43 ongoing partners and dozens more that it partners with when there is a specific need. It’s too early to draw any conclusions beyond the fact that NAZ’s work is promising, but if there is a second generation of Promise Neighborhoods—and I hope there is—we should keep an eye on NAZ and the work of connectors and navigators.

Chicago, Logan Square Neighborhood Association

The next stop for me was the Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) in Chicago, in business since 1962.  Originally, the LSNA served mostly Polish Americans, but today it primarily serves Latino families.  The LSNA engages its people in legislative advocacy and does a lot of community building as well.  Its long list of activities includes: affordable housing and foreclosure prevention, education programs for children and adults, investing in green development, and addressing immigration issues, among others.  There is no one place to find money for all of that work, so the LSNA stitches together its budget from dozens of sources—government at all levels, philanthropic, corporate, and individual.

I visited LSNA because of its parent mentor program, which operates in nine local public schools and directly impacts more than 3,800 students.  LSNA recruits parents (usually immigrants) of children in kindergarten to come to school as semi-volunteers—they receive a small stipend at the end of each semester.  The parents are nurtured into mentor roles, including by obtaining a GED.  Finally, they graduate to employment—at LSNA, the school where they volunteered, or elsewhere—or they further their education.  The women involved in the program successfully lobbied the state legislature for an appropriation.  That’s good stuff.  Put it on the agenda for national attention.

Los Angeles, Youth Policy Institute

The third stop was the Youth Policy Institute (YPI) in Los Angeles.  This one is special for me because its CEO, Dixon Slingerland, worked for Robert Kennedy’s dear friend (and mine), David Hackett.  Among other things, Hackett founded YPI and helped establish what we now know as AmeriCorps Vista.  When he retired in 1996, Hackett passed the mantle to Slingerland.  He died about 5 years ago, and I know he would be very proud of the work YPI is doing today.

You have to catch your breath at the size of what Slingerland and his colleagues have built.  YPI’s budget has grown to $57 million.  It has 1,600 staff serving more than 100,000 youth and adults at 125 program sites.  YPI is the lead agency for a Promise Neighborhood, a Byrne Criminal Justice grantee (to reduce neighborhood crime and increase safety), and a lead partner for a Promise Zone.  It operates five schools of its own and partners with 90 more, 83 public computer centers, and runs afterschool programs at 78 schools.

YPI is an example of what the nonprofit sector can do by marshaling public and private funding to help children and families at scale.  I visited two of YPI’s non-school sites and talked to many staff members and even more consumers of the products.  They serve children ranging from early Head Start, to older students in after school and gang prevention programs.  They also offer teen pregnancy prevention, job readiness, and job placement services.  YPI works with families on parenting skills, financial planning, and computer literacy.  They help day laborers and teach community agriculture.  Nonetheless, Dixon is very clear that for all the help YPI extends to individual children, youth, and families, the strategic point is to change things on a large scale as well.  I think the lesson here is that YPI and similar organizations must have public and private investment for what they do, and that their ultimate goal is to move the needle on poverty.

New Haven, MOMS Partnership

Finally, I visited New Haven and the New Haven Mental Health Outreach for Mothers (MOMS) Partnership, an innovative collaboration of city agencies and institutions that was spearheaded by Megan Smith, a faculty member of the Yale School of Medicine.  This is a relatively young endeavor but it has already received national attention and funding from the university, foundations, the state of Connecticut, and the federal government.

The exciting thing about the MOMS Partnership is its focus on mental health.  The entry point to get women involved is by addressing the extra stress that comes with living in poverty and near poverty.  With decentralized locations in the community, Smith’s staff—who are themselves mostly residents in low-income neighborhoods—do outreach to their neighbors and offer an 8-week stress management course to address chronic and toxic stress.  Participants also have the opportunity to take skill-building and job readiness classes.  The MOMS Partnership is currently branching out, and is especially expanding its effort to help participants find employment or job training.

These four diverse initiatives are representative of innovation that is occurring throughout the country.  Attacking the many issues that confront people who live in low-income neighborhoods is a longtime challenge.  It is vital that we support these and other efforts so we achieve a scale large enough to make a measureable difference in the fight against poverty in America.

As the federal government invests in nutrition, health, education, and job-training programs that keep families out of poverty, complementary investments to strengthen high-poverty communities across the country are also important. Fortunately, over the past several years, the Obama administration has invested in low-income urban, rural, and tribal communities, and it increasingly understands what it takes to drive and support local innovation. Still, many local leaders are faced with the challenge of addressing some of the United States’ most complex social problems with limited resources at their disposal.

There is no silver-bullet policy to address the many challenges facing high-poverty communities. These communities need a comprehensive set of strategies that equip youth and adult residents with the skills they need to prosper—and that ensure opportunities for success in their neighborhoods.

That’s why the Promise Zones initiative offers designees priority access to a range of revitalization resources through the U.S. Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Agriculture, to name a few. Applicants should have a strong vision and a well-integrated strategy to achieve it. The initiative was inspired in part by examples such as the East Lake Foundation’s work to transform the East Lake community in Atlanta, Georgia—a high-poverty neighborhood that suffered from blight and crime. Local leaders developed a strategy to tackle poverty by jointly addressing housing, education, workforce development, and health services. Today, violent crime is down by 95 percent, families receiving public assistance have seen their incomes quadruple, and the neighborhood’s school is the top-performing elementary school in the city.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox