Economic Mobility Initiative

About this grant

This grant provides support to the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Economic Mobility Initiative, a seven year, $300 million, 11-site pilot program designed to enhance the organization’s successful cradle-to-career model by ensuring young people have the capital — financial as well as human and social — needed at critical stages to overcome poverty and launch successful lives. The initiative’s strategies — which include children’s savings accounts, youth opportunity funds and family allowances–have the potential to inform future directions for economic mobility and children’s policies in the United States. Launched in 2000, the Harlem Children’s Zone initiative works in a 97-block area of Central Harlem to break cycles of intergenerational poverty through research-driven, community-tested strategies.