Back in 2014, Dwight C. Jones set a goal some believed would be impossible to achieve. The poverty rate in Richmond, Va., was twice the national average. Nearly 27 percent of Richmond residents lived below the poverty line. Jones, then the mayor, set a goal to cut the rate nearly in half, to 15 percent, by 2030.
Five years ahead of that deadline, Richmond is not just on track to hit that mark but ahead of schedule. The most recent American Community Survey put Richmond’s poverty rate at 17.1 percent. Richmond is on a better trendline than nearly every comparable city in the Southeast.
How did Richmond do it? That’s a story every city leader can learn from.
Jones got it going in 2011 by pulling together a commission of community leaders to study poverty in the city and develop recommendations for how to address it. That process then gave birth to the nation’s first municipal Office of Community Wealth Building. The new office consolidated existing anti-poverty programs into a more holistic approach focused on both youth and adults. It also created a flywheel for hatching and sustaining the necessary partnerships in and out of City Hall to get things done.
New structures like this often fail to survive mayoral transitions. However, when Levar Stoney became mayor in 2017, he not only kept the Office of Community Wealth Building intact but added new funding, staffing and energy. The organization has now touched more than 50,000 residents with job training, financial literacy and other services. “They started an idea to reduce the poverty rate in Richmond,” Stoney says of Jones, “and we were able to expand and add value to it.”
Workforce development is a core pillar of Richmond’s approach. The city offers hundreds of residents each year robust job training, partnering with companies who are ready to hire them. For its own workforce, Richmond bumped the minimum wage for city employees to $20 an hour, well above the state minimum of $12.
Another pillar is working with the schools, which sit outside the mayor’s control in Richmond. Stoney nevertheless worked with nonprofits and invested millions of city dollars to create new afterschool programming for elementary and middle schoolers.
At high schools, the city set up dedicated counseling spaces to help students learn how to nail their job interviews, while offering help in navigating applications and financial aid for those heading to college. Stoney also set up a program to pay the tuition of any Richmond Public Schools graduate to attend community college.
The pace of experimentation picked up during the pandemic. Stoney joined the ranks of mayors piloting programs that offered a guaranteed income of $500 a month to working residents who don’t earn a living wage. Local leaders made city buses free while adding new service into suburban job centers. Richmond is now one of the few cities where transit ridership is actually higher than pre-pandemic levels. The city invested the bulk of its federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act in its most neglected neighborhoods.
Office of Richmond Mayor
That idea of bringing resources to where people are infuses a lot of Richmond’s community wealth-building approach. Another example is a new partnership with the Bon Secours hospital network. Bon Secours has deployed a small team of community health workers, hired from high-poverty areas to serve their neighbors. The community health workers not only help residents manage chronic health needs but also navigate them to job training, help with paying utility bills and other services. Health and wealth are not separate things under this program’s approach, but deeply intertwined.
Not all of Richmond’s good news is a result of these programs. At least some of Richmond’s lower poverty rate results from a recent influx of affluent residents. Meanwhile, a tight overall labor market in the area means unemployment is low and wages are rising. Both of those trends offer reason for caution. Housing costs are a growing burden on residents with low incomes, and a hot economy can always turn cold.
But according to a forthcoming paper by Thad Williamson, a public policy professor at the University of Richmond, local policies and programs have made a “meaningful contribution” to the reduction in poverty. Williamson, who served as the Office of Community Wealth Building’s inaugural director from 2014 to 2016, says Richmond’s first lesson for other cities is to have a similar organization leading the effort. “It’s a group of people who are every day thinking about how to reduce poverty in Richmond and expand economic opportunity,” Williamson says. “Over time, it’s become a place to try out new ideas.”
Another lesson is the value of partnerships. While Stoney invested millions of dollars into Richmond’s wealth building strategies, collaboration with businesses, foundations, nonprofits and other actors powers most of the work. “We are not doing this all by ourselves,” Stoney says. “As chief executive, you’re the chief convener, calling up this business leader or civic leader, to get them around the table.”
There’s also a lesson in where Richmond’s effort started. When Jones set his audacious goal to reduce poverty, it wasn’t clear exactly how the city would get there. But it’s given a generation of civic leadership a shared reference point for collective action — and a yardstick for mayors to measure progress against.
That’s something Jones passed to Stoney, and Stoney has now passed to incoming Mayor Danny Avula. The new mayor has pledged to build on existing programs and expand Richmond’s efforts on job training and help for low-income residents with repairs that enable them to stay in their homes. “You want the next mayor to be able to take this baton and keep running,” Stoney says. “We’re ahead of schedule. We’ve got to keep it going.”
