For generations, the promise of the American dream has been simple: all Americans, through hard work, should be able to climb the economic ladder. Yet over the last 50 years, the share of children who have gone on to financially surpass their parents has declined steadily by more than 40%, while the proportion of total wealth held by the bottom 50% of Americans has also remained minimal. The American dream has been eroding ever since.
This decline reflects deep disparities in how opportunity and resources are distributed — from education and healthcare to housing, work, and civic life. Economic opportunities have never been just about hard work; it is about providing equal access to the life experiences that make mobility possible.
Although extensive research examines the drivers of economic mobility, few efforts have identified which life experiences matter most. Fewer still have incorporated the beliefs and stated priorities of people across the country, nor the flow of resources supporting access to these life experiences.
With a multi-year grant from the Gates Foundation, Camber set out to understand how people across the country experience mobility and perceive opportunity. From there, we tracked how funding flows to those experiences and worked directly with community leaders to help expand access to them.
In 2023, Camber launched a national effort to understand how Americans experience economic mobility, especially those living with low incomes. To do this, we launched a survey completed by more than 4,000 Americans; reviewed over 200 research studies, and analyzed thousands of public and philanthropic funding records.
Through this research, we identified 28 unique “Mobility Experiences” categorized across 6 domains — key life experiences that strongly influence a person’s lifetime income, sense of agency, and connection to community. These experiences stretch across all life stages, from early childhood through adulthood, and help translate an abstract concept like “economic mobility” into specific, actionable moments in people’s lives.
By linking mobility experiences to federal budgets, philanthropic grants, and other financial data, the team revealed a set of high-impact opportunities that both grow individual income and serve the public interest yet remain severely underfunded.
The findings were documented in a three-part Mobility Experiences research series. The series examines the life experiences that shape mobility, Americans’ perspectives on opportunity, and the flow of federal and philanthropic funding. Together, these insights paint a clearer picture of where investment can expand opportunity.
Since its development, the Mobility Experiences (ME) framework has garnered strong interest from state and local leaders. We have built a public-facing data dashboard that tracks funding flows to different mobility experiences. Advocates and funders can now see exactly where the gaps are, and where dollars need to go, to help Americans access what matters most for their economic future.
That visibility has led to implementation of the ME framework. In 2025, more than 150 applications came from place-based institutions seeking to put the framework to work in their own communities. To date, more than a hundred organizations and communities have adapted the framework to their local context — supporting strategy development, capital mobilization, and improvements to programs and services. The results have influenced over $500M in investments and impacted the lives countless Americans.
With momentum building around economic mobility, Camber Collective is actively positioned to deploy the Mobility Experiences framework across policy, philanthropic, and community spheres. By connecting everyday experiences, funding decisions, and long-term outcomes, the framework offers transformative potential for the field and for American families.
We work with changemakers across the social sector—from local non-profits to global multilaterals—to drive measurable impact.
