Giving Compass' Take:

• Nonprofit Quarterly discusses how Charlotte, North Carolina, is a booming city development-wise, but ranks low when it comes to economic mobility for its citizens.

• The major philanthropic efforts in the Charlotte area attempt to address the needs of family and children, but changing the system of disparity will take a long time. What can other cities learn from this dilemma?

• Here are five more lessons for cities looking to sustain collaborative action.

Charlotte, North Carolina embodies a tale of two cities. It is a leader in economic development in the South and a hub for the financial services industry. But it is also a dead-end place for people seeking to escape poverty. Harvard economist Raj Chetty, in his 2014 study, The Equality of Opportunity, ranked the city dead last of the nation’s 50 largest cities in economic mobility. For a child living in Charlotte, the odds of rising from the bottom fifth to the top fifth income bracket are less than five percent — less than the average of any developed country studied.

This is the context in which two corporations, both headquartered in Charlotte, each recently announced a $10 million philanthropic gift to a list of 17 nonprofits, an average of about $1.2 million per organization over five years. Bank of America has long been known as an active philanthropic player in its hometown; the Albermarle Corporation, a global specialty chemicals company that was lured to Charlotte from Baton Rouge in 2015, is a new player on the scene. The 17 targeted nonprofits all focus on one of three areas: early childcare and education, college and career readiness, and family and child stability.

These are the three “highly interrelated determinants” singled out by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Opportunity Task Force, a group of 20 community leaders who convened after the Chetty study was released and spent 18 months figuring out how best to fight the county’s intergenerational poverty. Combined with the two powerful factors of segregation and social capital, these three determinants represent the community’s most potent entries to break down the barriers to economic mobility.

Read the full article about Charlotte's tale of corporate philanthropy by Debby Warren at nonprofitquarterly.org.