Advancing Economic Mobility for Students in Lansing, MI

The Challenge

The City of Lansing aimed to equip Lansing School District students with the potential for economic mobility, i.e. the ability to advance their economic status relative to their parents. Many of the district’s students (75 percent children of color and over 40 percent experiencing child poverty) come from historically marginalized communities and face structural barriers to economic mobility, making it particularly important to prioritize their academic success. To help address these challenges, the City of Lansing was compelled by research which showed that if low-to-moderate income students had any amount (even just $5) earmarked in a college savings account, they were three times more likely to enroll in and four times more likely to complete post- secondary education. The City had always intended to incubate Lansing SAVE and set it up for success, before stepping back. However, for years City staff had served as day-to-day program administrators, which was a time-consuming and resource intensive process.

The Innovation

With help from the GPL, the City of Lansing transitioned the Lansing SAVE program to two community partners, equipping the program with the resources and innovation potential to more effectively serve Lansing School District students through a results-driven RFP process. The RFP’s proposal scoring and evaluation process helped the City to identify and assess the most important components of each application in order to select the optimal combination of contractors to achieve desired program outcomes.

The Results

After the transition of Lansing SAVE to the community-based organizations, the City saw promising results. In the first fiscal year of the new contract for Lansing SAVE, project partners saw a 239 percent increase in the amount fundraised compared to the previous year. By transitioning the administration and management of Lansing SAVE, the City has established a new model of collaboratively leveraging strengths of community-based organizations to improve program performance. In addition, the success of the Lansing SAVE RFP and the associated management structure has led to the creation of a new city-wide RFP template. Lansing City staff can use these new strategies and resources to apply results-driven approaches to future procurements.

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