Three faculty members based at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School have joined a new collaborative aimed at discovering permanent ladders of mobility for the poor.

Cecilia Rouse, Eldar Shafir and Marta Tienda are among the 24 experts, advocates and academics from across the country making up the U.S. Partnership on Mobility from Poverty.

Established through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the group will identify breakthrough solutions that can be put into action by philanthropy, practitioners and the public and private sectors.

The partnership will uncover the country’s most successful programs, collaborate with outside innovative organizations to test promising new models and identify new approaches to improving social mobility in America. It will be chaired by well-known poverty and social policy scholar David Ellwood, the Scott M. Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, who also served as Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government from 2004 to 2015.

The partnership will meet for the first time later this spring. Drawing from research and evidence, the group will define a set of priority issues and questions to guide its work. Through 2016 and 2017, members will learn from communities and families living in poverty, from the nation’s leading service providers and advocates for the poor, from a wide network of experts, and from the latest research

The partnership will operate independently of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed $3.7 million toward the effort. It also will be independent of any other potential private or public funders. The partnership will be staffed and supported by the Urban Institute, but it will engage other institutions and experts.

Rouse is the dean of the Wilson School and Lawrence and Shirley Katzman and Lewis and Anna Ernst Professor in the Economics of Education and professor of economics and public affairs. She researches labor economics with a focus on the economics of education.

Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs, director of Princeton’s Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy and scientific director at ideas42, a private behavioral science lab.

Tienda researches ethno-racial differences in social inequality as the Maurice P. During ’22 Professor of Demographic Studies and a professor of sociology and public affairs.

For more information and the full listing of experts involved with the partnership, click here.