In 2018, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research launched a major research initiative into place-based strategies for local prosperity. Place-based strategies are nothing new. For decades, cities, regions, and states have sought to increase the number of jobs available to residents, expand their tax base, and promote amenities and infrastructure development to improve the quality of life. While these are admirable goals, the Institute's place-based initiative aims for a more holistic focus to promote prosperity, targeting especially areas whose residents feel left behind. The authors contend that the best path for economically distressed communities is to ensure their residents are prepared for and connected to good jobs. This route yields both private and public benefits: investments needed to provide good jobs for residents not only improve the well-being of individuals and families, they also contribute to overall community prosperity. There are two broad avenues through which communities can help their residents get and keep good jobs. First, communities can invest in human capital by promoting affordable higher education and innovative workforce training. Second, communities can invest in strategies that directly nourish business growth; these include efforts to retain and attract employers, such as providing tax incentives or business startup and growth assistance. Although these two categories differ in targeting either individuals or businesses, our research initiative focuses on how they both contribute to the same goal: more and better jobs for residents, with benefits broadly shared across demographic and income groups. And while these two sets of policies are often considered separately, policymakers and researchers benefit from considering them together: (1) The goal of more and better jobs for residents can be best achieved by making high-quality investments in both local skills and business growth, not just one or the other; and (2) The design of programs in either category can be improved by keeping the other in mind. Skills investment programs are strengthened when they are sensitive to local business needs, and local business growth policies are more effective when they consider the local skill base. The initiative builds on long-established Upjohn Institute research in two areas. Institute staff have studied place-based scholarship programs for more than a decade, finding that such programs can enrich the human capital of a community's residents while making that community more desirable to employers and new residents. However, the design of these programs matters--the individual and community-level impacts achieved depend on decisions made up front about who benefits and how.