Beyond Jobs and Capital: Rethinking Economic Mobility, Health, and Wellbeing
Updated: 6 days ago
When we talk about economic development, we tend to measure what is easiest to count, jobs created, businesses launched, companies recruited, wages increased, and capital deployed.
These measures matter. But they don't tell us the whole story.
What changes when a woman can't return to work after caregiving, recover from an unexpected layoff, or grow a business with the right capital and support?
Greater economic agency can mean more than career advancement. It can create financial stability, resilience, and greater opportunity for entire families.
These economic outcomes also shape the conditions in which people and families live. At StitchCrew, this has led us to a broader question:
What if economic development were designed and evaluated not only around economic outputs, but also around individual, family, and community wellbeing?
Economic mobility is never a straight line
For nearly a decade, StitchCrew has worked to address systemic barriers that prevent women and minority entrepreneurs from starting, growing, and scaling businesses. Our work with women entrepreneurs revealed that for many, entrepreneurship wasn’t simply a career choice. It was a response to inflexible workplaces or difficulty reentering the workforce after caregiving. Yet once they turned to entrepreneurship, many faced another set of barriers, limited networks, resources, and access to the capital needed to build sustainable businesses.
That realization expanded our work beyond entrepreneurship to support women navigating career advancement, workforce reentry, caregiving-related interruptions, and transitions between employment and entrepreneurship.
Again and again, we have seen that women’s economic lives don’t fit neatly into the categories our systems create for them. A woman may step away from a career to provide care, struggle to return, or turn to entrepreneurship out of necessity. She may build a business while caring for children or aging parents, or have a good job but lack the networks, flexibility, or opportunities needed to advance.
These transitions don’t just shape careers, they shape financial security, family stability, and long-term wellbeing.
The connection between economic stability and wellbeing
We spend enormous amounts of public and philanthropic resources addressing the downstream consequences of economic instability.
Yet the systems responsible for economic and workforce development are often evaluated primarily on economic outputs:
How many jobs were created? How many people were placed into employment? How many businesses launched? How much capital was invested?
Those questions are important. But we should also be asking:
Did people become more economically secure? Did they gain greater agency over their lives? Did families become more resilient? Did the conditions affecting their wellbeing improve?
This is especially important for women.
Career interruptions, caregiving responsibilities, wage disparities, limited access to leadership opportunities, inadequate professional networks, and unequal access to capital can compound over a lifetime. The consequences aren't confined to a résumé or a business's balance sheet. Economic instability can affect the choices available to individuals and families, from housing and childcare to food, healthcare, education, safety, and the ability to weather an unexpected crisis.
This doesn't mean workforce development organizations should become healthcare providers, or that entrepreneurship programs should become public health programs.
It means recognizing that economic conditions are part of the environment in which health and wellbeing are created.
Testing this idea in our own work
In Oklahoma, our partnership with the Oklahoma State Department of Health is exploring economic opportunity as an upstream approach to violence prevention, with StitchCrew contributing what we know best, entrepreneurship, workforce development, professional networks, and pathways to economic mobility.
Now, we are expanding VESTING Women into Arkansas at a particularly important moment. A weakening labor market, AI-driven workforce disruption, and persistent gaps in caregiving support are leaving many women more vulnerable to economic instability. VESTING Women helps women navigate these transitions, whether advancing or reentering the workforce, responding to a layoff, or pursuing entrepreneurship, with the networks, skills, and resources to build greater economic security.
Building a bridge between economic development and public health
We see an opportunity for economic development, workforce development, public health, philanthropy, researchers, and communities to work together, each bringing different expertise to better understand how economic conditions shape wellbeing.
This doesn't require creating new programs or another silo. Instead, we can ask how the systems and investments already designed to create economic opportunity might also contribute to stronger families and healthier communities.
What if we measured what ultimately matters?
What if entrepreneurship and workforce programs looked beyond businesses launched, capital raised, and jobs placed to also consider financial resilience, job quality, economic security, and the ability to withstand disruption?
And what if economic development investments considered community wellbeing alongside jobs created and capital deployed?
Public health and economic mobility organizations have an opportunity to work further upstream together, addressing the economic conditions that shape health and wellbeing long before people enter a healthcare system.
Because ultimately, a stronger and more equitable economy should produce more than economic activity. It should give more people the agency, stability, and opportunity to build healthy lives, strong families, and thriving communities.