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Innovating for Upward Mobility

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When Price City Mayor Mike Kourianos looks around his community, he doesn’t see signs of the financial prosperity that has made Utah a nationally recognized economic star over the past decade.

Price is the largest city in Carbon County, Utah, which for decades thrived on a coal-based economy. Not anymore.

While job growth across the state has increased 17 percent since 2008, employment in Carbon and neighboring Emery County has declined 16 percent. The unemployment rate in the two counties is double that of the entire state.

As reliance on coal continues to decline, these two hard-hit counties, like counterparts across the country, are in desperate need of a strategy to revitalize their communities.

“This is about our future, keeping our children and grandchildren in our community,” Kourianos said.

And that is why Kourianos has embraced a plan put forward by the Utah Coal Country Strike Team through the University of Utah’s American Dream Ideas Challenge. The Strike Team is a coalition of state and local governments, education and business entities.

Its multi-pronged proposal includes educational training, building a tourism infrastructure, revitalizing housing stock and leveraging opportunity zones to boost economic development.

“This complements my vision for Price, and all of Utah coal country, to diversify the economy, invest in infrastructure and give us a path to future,” Kourianos said. 

The Utah Coal Country Strike Team’s proposal is now in the running for up to $1 million in funding from Schmidt Futures, which in April 2018 selected the University of Utah as one of four anchor institutions in the Alliance for the American Dream. Other alliance members are Arizona State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and The Ohio State University.

Each institution was challenged to come up with technology and policy innovations aimed at raising net income for 10,000 middle-class families in their communities by 10 percent by the end of 2020.

Schmidt Future’s Alliance for the American Dream initiative is based on a well-established fact: Over the past 50 years, America’s middle class has eroded significantly.

Today, many individuals and families struggle to cover the basics. Homeownership is out of reach and even covering rent is a challenge. Stuck in a paycheck-to-paycheck existence, many people are just one unexpected expense—a health crisis, home repair, car trouble—away from financial disaster. The Federal Reserve recently reported that many adults would have difficulty coming up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense.

Schmidt Futures is among numerous thought leaders, nonprofit organizations and foundations worried about the shrinking middle class and the ability of young people today to achieve the comfortable, secure standard of living their parents enjoyed.

Among those concerned about the middle class is the Ivory Foundation, which last year launched the Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability to generate innovative and scalable design, financing and policy solutions aimed at addressing housing affordability.

The inaugural award went to four innovators: Factory OS and Landed, both located in San Francisco; Home Partners of America in Chicago; and The Alley Flat Initiative in Austin. Each winner received a cash prize of up to $50,000, introductions to hundreds of impact investors and publicity from HanleyWood, one of the leading business-to-business media companies in the United States.

Housing affordability is among the most pressing challenges facing the nation, said Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes and chairman of the Ivory Foundation.

“Through the Ivory Prize process, we have learned that a key part of the prescription is innovation, one step at a time,” Ivory said. “Our winners show true potential to fundamentally reshape the housing industry, whether that is lowering costs from modular building, to increasing income with accessory dwelling units, or discovering new approaches to break down financial barriers to homeownership.”

The Utah Coal Country Strike Team’s innovative partnership has already garnered funding from the Utah Legislature and local government entities, highlighting how philanthropic investments can be leveraged for public good. And other foundations are expressing interest in the project because of its high potential to transform lives, not only in the near term, but over generations.

“We’ve all benefited from coal, but we face an economic, environmental and moral imperative to combat global climate change,” said Natalie Gochnour, one of the Strike Team’s co-chairs and director of the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. “The benefits of reducing our dependence on coal are widespread, but the costs of doing that are not. Nowhere is this more evident than in Utah’s coal country and other coal dependent regions in the U.S.”

Ideas under consideration from other alliance members also met the criteria of addressing a pressing social problem, with the potential to serve as a model in other states. Arizona State’s team crafted a plan to improve access to federal student financial aid. The Ohio State group has a proposal to aid first-time homebuyers. The University of Wisconsin-Madison has two great ideas—one for a legal intervention program and the other focused on improving child care services.

“I think I can speak for my fellow presidents when I say we appreciate Schmidt Futures’ vision in bringing us together to strengthen the middle class in our respective states,” said Ruth V. Watkins, president of the University of Utah. “Already our partnership is having dividends beyond this project, generating ideas for collaborations on critical issues in higher education.”

By Brooke Adams, senior news writer, University of Utah Communications

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Brooke Adams
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