Hamilton Families reposted this
Year after year, homelessness continues to rise in the United States. Last year, over 650,000 people experienced homelessness on a given night, 28 percent of whom resided in California. Not surprisingly, homelessness is ballooning in and around San Francisco. These alarming trends highlight the urgent need for new, effective pathways to help low-income families maintain stable housing. Collaboration between researchers and practitioners — like in our recent basic income project, It All Adds Up — is key to identifying and scaling these pathways. It All Adds Up, also known as the Bay Area Thriving Families study, is an ambitious, Google.org-funded randomized evaluation (also known as an RCT) providing 450 families who recently experienced homelessness with either $50 or $1,000 in unrestricted cash assistance each month for one year. Currently underway in the Bay Area, the project is a collaboration between our teams at Compass Family Services, Hamilton Families and NYU Furman Center Housing Solutions Lab to study the impact of cash assistance on housing stability for families exiting housing services. Our partnership is a direct response to two trends we’ve observed in our work as homeless service providers and housing researchers. First, while research has shown that programs like rapid re-housing can successfully house families, we know that some families reenter the shelter system after their subsidies — which are often intended to be short-term — end. Second, a growing body of research suggests that direct cash transfers (sometimes known as “basic income”) can positively affect myriad outcomes for low-income families, ranging from child brain development to emergency room visits. Randomized evaluations and robust research partnerships like ours require a combination of technical research skills and a firm understanding of the practical, ethical and equity considerations essential to any policy intervention. Collaborations between providers and researchers therefore enable us to answer policy-relevant research questions using methods that are simultaneously rigorous, equitable and inclusive Read the op-ed that Martha M. Galvez, executive director of the NYU Furman Center’s Housing Solutions Lab co-wrote with Christopher Constantine and Kendra Froshman for Next City here: https://lnkd.in/gWce8nk2