4 days ago
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By J.W. Carpenter, Prosper and Emily Jerkins Hall, CEcD
Five years ago, a group of Birmingham leaders looked at their region and didn’t like the trajectory. The economy was growing too slowly, starting too few companies and leaving too many people behind. They made a bet that Birmingham did not have to choose between growing its economy and including everyone in it, because the two depend on each other. Out of that bet came Prosper, an organization created to advance a vision of building the most inclusive and thriving economy in the Southeast.
J.W. Carpenter and Emily Jerkins Hall, CEcD They made that bet with one year’s kindergartners in mind, picturing a Birmingham where a young person’s prospects no longer depended on which neighborhood they came from. Those kindergartners head into middle school this fall, and some of what the leaders pictured has quietly become real.
The bus rapid transit line that didn’t exist when they started school runs through Birmingham today. The scholarship that was only a promise then has put $11 million toward tuition for more than 1,600 graduates. And the schools are climbing too, with their highest-ever state report card grade and failing schools cut from 15 to one in three years.
Five years is long enough to ask whether the bet has held up.
Birmingham has closed real ground. Brookings’ Metro Monitor, an annual read on how the nation’s metro regions perform, now ranks Birmingham No. 10 among its peers on inclusion and No. 7 on racial inclusion. More people are working, poverty is falling, and the region ranks No. 6 among its peers on how fast the racial poverty gap is closing.
But the ground we have gained is not as settled as a ranking makes it look. Some of that narrowing reflects white earnings flattening, not everyone rising together, and even as the racial gap closes, a new one is opening between what families earn and what it takes to be self-sufficient. As costs climb, more families clear the poverty line but remain below the self-sufficiency line.
A ranking can climb while a child goes to bed hungry. Two in five children in the city of Birmingham live below the federal poverty line, and what comes before opportunity – a stable place to sleep, enough to eat, a safe way to school – depends on a parent with work that pays enough. Too many here are working hard without a path to that kind of job. Lifting a child and lifting the adult raising that child are the same problem.
On prosperity and growth, Birmingham still ranks in the bottom half of its peers, No. 36 and No. 38, and lowest of all, No. 43, on job growth at its young firms, the firms that drive most of an economy’s new jobs.
The shortage was never capital or ideas. It was simply the experience to scale companies. Over the last five years, that dynamic has shifted as a support system takes root. Harmony Venture Labs builds local startups, while gener8tor Alabama accelerates health tech. The Alabama Venture Club connects founders to capital and Innovate Alabama fuels statewide growth with $125 million. This infrastructure is maturing, yet sustained investment is required to close the remaining gap.
Real change takes decades. But five years in, we’ve made progress. Roughly $20 million in federal Recompete funding and a $50 million HUD Choice Neighborhoods grant are flowing into North Birmingham, Northside, Pratt and Smithfield at once. That is what it looks like when a place decides to close the gap on purpose.
Sarah Granderson came up through it. She graduated from Ramsay High, made it through college debt-free on a Birmingham Promise scholarship, interned at EDPA and now serves Birmingham from inside government. She is what the bet looks like when it works.
This progress was never Prosper’s to claim. It belongs to the employers who hired broadly, the institutions that educated and trained talent, and everyone who refused the old story, the one where Birmingham always promises but struggles to deliver for the next generation. We still believe what we believed five years ago, that innate talent is distributed equally across the region while opportunity is not. In 2034, those children step out of high school into whatever we have built, and the years ahead decide whether the talent that has always been here, and the talent we draw, finally prosper together.
J.W. Carpenter is the inaugural president of Prosper, where he has led the initiative since 2021. Emily Jerkins Hall, CEcD is the founder and principal consultant of Bloom Economy Labs and one of only a handful of Certified Economic Developers in Alabama.
