The City of Mobile: Racial Wealth Gap & Financial Empowerment
Understanding the lived experience of the racial wealth gap in Mobile and identifying barriers to wealth creation for Black residents.
The City of Mobile engaged Quire as part of the CityStart Initiative to support the future development of a Financial Empowerment Center.
The city wanted to learn more about the racial wealth gap in Mobile to better understand the systemic challenges they faced - and identify real opportunities to support financial equity.
The Brief
The challenge:
Wealth is unevenly distributed across racial lines in Mobile, a majority-Black city. Without centering community voices directly, well-intentioned solutions often miss the mark.
The Strategy
Quire designed a hyper-local, immersive research process that surfaced what residents were experiencing - and what solutions they envisioned.
The Research:
Our weeklong fieldwork included community conversations, in-depth interviews, on-site ethnographic observation, and qualitative coding and analysis. We employed qualitative analysis software to code and organize transcripts of the interviews and Community Engagement Conversations. We created code hierarchies to extrapolate patterns and trends in the datasets. Based on the assigned codes, we created visualizations of code relations across the dataset and organized all of our findings into actionable insights to be delivered to the City.
THE RESULTS:
We delivered a suite of insights, community-informed strategies, and a visual model of root causes that the city is now using as a blueprint.
The Impact:
The research is actively guiding Mobile’s plans for economic inclusion, shifting the conversation from deficit framing to opportunity-based design.
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