Three ways funders can use metrics to amplify the impact of their anti-poverty investments
Our country’s anti-poverty strategy focuses almost entirely on helping people get jobs. We assume that if someone can just get a good job, they will be on their way to sustained prosperity.
This approach isn’t working. Seventy percent of people born into the bottom two income groups in the US won’t make it to the middle class in their lifetime, and despite trillions of dollars spent on job training and placement programs, this fact has remained largely unchanged in the last 50 years.
Because of our belief in the power of jobs, anti-poverty programs have focused on employment as our key (and often only) metric. This has not only perpetually overstated the true impact of our programs and investments on poverty, but in doing so also short-changes the people who receive services from these programs.
After leaning on the same strategies for decades, the anti-poverty field is due for a fundamental shift in how we approach and think about the work. We’re beyond nudges at this point; we need a shove.
Funders of anti-poverty programs have the power to spark this shift by using metrics in new ways to incentivize the programs they support to move beyond just jobs.
Here are three ideas for where to start:
1. Reward depth, not frequency.
Evaluating anti-poverty programs solely by the number of people they can place in a job each year (or even how long a person keeps a job), artificially inflates the impact of the programs by suggesting a job alone will get and keep someone out of poverty. It also masks the reality that many of the people who a program or funder considers a “success story” by those short-term standards will be back at that same organization (or a different one) in the near future seeking the same help they sought previously. A job just isn’t enough.
And because most funders evaluate the scale of a program’s impact by the number of “new” people a program serves every year, programs and services are almost always designed to serve people for no more than a year. That way, when someone returns the following year for more services because they lost their job or housing, they can be considered a “new” participant, and they start the program over from the beginning.
The result of funders expecting programs to help people living in poverty get on a path to prosperity in a year or less, and programs doing their best to oblige, program participants can become stuck in an endless cycle of unemployment, job readiness services, brief periods of employment, then unemployment again. What these individuals don’t receive are the tools and support to leverage income from a job to achieve some stability and begin building a foundation for long term success.
A focus on evaluating longer term outcomes would incentivize programs to provide tools and support to the people they serve for multiple years. If the metrics were set up to measure achievement of more long-term, more meaningful outcomes, like asset building, credit score improvement, wealth accumulation, educational attainment, housing stability, and mental and physical wellness, programs would be rewarded for either building internal capacity, or partnering with other organizations, to provide services that accomplish these goals.
These services would be additive (not duplicative, as they are when a person participates in the same or similar one year program repeatedly), building on participants’ successes and evolving to continue to meet participant needs and goals as they transition from unemployed to employed, homeless to housed, until they have not only increased their income, but have built the financial and social safety net they will need to weather unexpected challenges down the road.
Measuring outcomes over a longer term would also provide incredibly valuable insight into what it takes for people to get, and stay out, of poverty. What set them up for long term success? What supports and tools did they access to get there? What role did existing or new social connections play in preventing them from sliding back into poverty? That is the information we need to dramatically increase the effectiveness of our anti-poverty programs.
Tracking outcomes over a longer period is not a new conversation. Some funders and programs see the inherent flaw in trying to solve multi-generational problems in 12 months. But those conversations tend to end with reluctant agreement that it is either too hard to stay in touch with people (especially those who are unable to secure and retain stable housing, as is often the case with people who are living in poverty), or too expensive to continue to work with or track program participants for more than a year.
It’s true that it is difficult to keep up with people who are trying to balance a new job with all of life’s other demands, especially if the goal is to just track job retention. But this barrier could be eliminated by actually providing services that evolve to meet people’s changing needs as they shift from job seeking, to trying to achieve financial stability, to ultimately accomplishing sustained prosperity. If the services add real value to people’s lives, they will seek them out.
In terms of expense, if programs are expected to enroll the same number of new participants every year (or more), in addition to continuing to work with participants from prior years, there is no question additional resources will be required.
But the belief that it is too expensive, rather than seeing it as a resource-intensive, but critical, component of a successful anti-poverty program, is a matter of perception. It is a byproduct of the low and rapid return expectations set by funders and fulfilled by programs.
But what if funders of anti-poverty programs were so intent on measuring their impact on poverty (not just jobs), that they demanded that the programs they fund report on long term outcomes, and focus their resources not just on helping people get jobs, but leveraging those jobs into sustained prosperity?
And while it’s true that you get what you measure, you also get what you pay for. What if funders took it to heart that we must dedicate resources to fighting poverty commensurate with the depth, breadth, and stubbornness of the problem?
What if anti-poverty programs and funders finally said out loud, that job placements may provide a band-aid solution for people in poverty, and make the work we do feel like progress, but they are not moving the needle on poverty?
2. Take on a “beginner’s mindset”.
Design thinking, or human centered design, is taking the tech and corporate worlds by storm. (Or maybe the storm has already passed? As is often the case, those of us in the nonprofit sector can sometimes be the last to hear about great new business strategy methods).
The core concepts of design thinking are a helpful lens to unpack what is right (and wrong) about much of our current anti-poverty programs and initiatives. Rather than assuming “experts” can sit in a room and design a solution for their target user group, design thinking elevates the expertise, values and perspective that users can bring to developing solutions that meet their needs and solve the challenges they themselves face.
This is easier said than done, as it requires designers to embrace what IDEO calls a “beginner’s mindset.” To have a beginner’s mindset means approaching your work with humility about what more can be learned about how people experience a challenge and how their needs can be met. It means approaching conversations with users and other stakeholders not trying to affirm your existing ideas, beliefs — and yes, biases — but instead trying to populate a blank canvas with new ideas and understanding that in many cases may contradict long held assumptions (or fly in the face of “common sense”).
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.― Shunryu Suzuki
Speaking from personal experience, this can be particularly challenging when tackling problems that have existed for many years, to which many solutions have been tried and have failed, and for which you are literally paid to have the answers to. [In a future post I will tell the story of how Rubicon Programs used IDEO.org’s human centered design toolkits to redesign our core program after 43 years of fighting poverty in Richmond, CA].
The beauty of the beginner’s mindset however, when it can be successfully employed, is that it opens up the space to reconsider long held assumptions, flawed “common sense” logic, and other foundational errors in strategy and philosophy that prevent the achievement of large scale innovations and improvements.
How does this concept apply to anti-poverty metrics?
The vast majority of anti-poverty programs are designed and funded by people who have not experienced living in poverty, without meaningful input from the people whose problems the “experts” are trying to solve. The ideas of experts are typically grounded in “common sense”, perhaps some social science research, and assumptions that the experts make about the needs of the population for whom they are designing the program.
That strategy could work, if the common sense and assumptions were accurate, the findings from the research could be effectively generalized, and if implicit bias wasn’t so formative in our perceptions of people from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Not sure about that last one? We all have implicit bias: take a test to understand your own.
Unfortunately, there are many assumptions and common sense beliefs about people living in poverty and the path to prosperity in our country (see #3 below) that have been used as the basis of trillions of dollars of anti-poverty investment in our country, without demonstrable results.
Programs and the funders who support them need to take on a beginner’s mindset about how to break poverty. We need to stop trying to solve problems for people, and start solving them with people. Or better yet, support people to solve problems themselves. And because you get what you measure, we can use metrics to do it. Here’s how:
Funders can evaluate the organizations they support based on how well they create meaningful ways for the people they serve to help design and evaluate the services they provide. There are many ways for programs to do this, including employing staff at all levels of the organization who themselves have experienced poverty, creating participant leadership councils, having people with have lived in poverty and/or former participants on the board of directors, and regularly and rigorously collecting feedback and ideas from participants regarding existing programs or new program concepts.
In addition to being incentivized to seek input and involvement from people who have lived in poverty, programs need the space to act on the insights they gain. This means evaluating programs based on the impact they produce, without prescribing how they must produce that impact.
As I have written previously, I have serious concerns about the Social Impact Bond concept. But one thing it does right is focusing the return on investment analysis not on how many people received a certain “evidence based” service, or even how many people achieve a short-term outcome like a job, but instead focusing on longer term, more sustainable life changes like improved health outcomes.
Prescribing how a program achieves its impact assumes that the funder knows what will work best for the unique needs and context of the people the program serves. One size rarely fits all, and it definitely doesn’t in anti-poverty work.
As a field we have to acknowledge that we haven’t figured out how to break poverty, and we never will until we start involving the very people we are trying to support in developing solutions.
3. Independence isn’t the answer.
Our country’s misconception that jobs are the answer to poverty is in part due to a more foundational belief that has framed our anti-poverty narrative for generations: that “independence” is what people in poverty should strive for in their quest for prosperity.
Instead of increasing economic mobility in our country, our mistaken focus on independence has actually stunted the progress of people living in poverty and the programs who serve them.
Independence: freedom from the control, influence, support, aid, or the like, of others. (dictionary.com)
Independence as a value is hard wired into the American psyche. And insofar as it refers to self determination and freedom from external control, it’s hard to argue that independence isn’t something we all desire.
But independence, in the context of anti-poverty programs and policies, typically refers not to self determination, but to self reliance. In other words, you are not successful unless and until you can stand on your own, with no help from those around you.
This notion is pure fiction.
There is not a person in our country who has achieved financial stability or wealth without the benefit of social connections. Whether in the form of family ties, mentors, schoolmates, neighbors, or professional networks, everyone who has “made it” in America has had someone to help them out when they were in a bind, and/or been there to offer an opportunity when they were ready to take a step forward.
The ability of any of us to make a living, get married, save money, get a job, keep a job, buy a house, or start Ponzi schemes entails some personal choice; but the choices available to us are dependent on other people and are determined by complicated policies, cultural norms and interpersonal interactions. — Molly Clark, “3 Reasons We Should Ban the Term “Self-Sufficiency”
Some people are born into families with strong social and professional connections, and others have to work hard to get them. But in all cases, the fundamental truth holds: you can’t achieve prosperity on your own.
Who bailed you out when things got bad, or helped you access opportunity that let you thrive?
American culture proclaims that prosperity comes from an individual’s strength, skills and character. This individualistic, “bootstraps” narrative has dominated anti-poverty policies and programs in America for generations, as evidenced by the persistently singular focus of our country’s anti-poverty programs and initiatives on jobs.
Yet despite the seemingly level playing field suggested by the endless number of job board websites, no clever cover letter or well-organized resume can come close to offering the advantage a job seeker gains by having a personal or professional connection at a prospective employer. When competing with other job seekers with comparable skills and character, (often even compared with others who are more qualified), the most valuable asset is not experience or competency (which are of course important), but rather, a relationship.
And while there may have been a time when, for some, a good paying job was enough to achieve sustained prosperity, that is not the reality today. We’re now a credit-based economy, which means that people need to have not just income, but a positive banking and borrowing history to build assets. It also means that we tend to spend more money than we have, which amplifies the likelihood that someone will slide back into poverty when an unexpected life event occurs, like a lost job or a health issue. Unless they have social connections they can call on to help buffer their fall.
So if independence is a false metric of prosperity, what should we be measuring?
If we want to assess whether someone has not just achieved short term success, but whether their success will be sustainable across generations, we need to expand our lens to see not just that person, but his/her network of social and professional connections.
Assessing a person’s “connectedness” could gauge how sustainable that person’s success will be, and also provide some insight into the “ripple effect” of services on the participant’s family and community. And by measuring connectedness, we incentivize programs to focus on not just strengthening an individual, but on helping that individual bolster existing relationships and build new ones, especially those that can open up new opportunities.
So let’s acknowledge that it is interconnectedness, not independence, that leads to prosperity in this country, so we can start designing and investing in strategies that actually move the needle on poverty.
We have an opportunity to usher in a new era of anti-poverty work where far more people can leave poverty behind for a life of sustained prosperity. To ignite this transformation we need to think differently about the way we approach our work: stop just helping people get jobs, and start actually equipping them to get, and stay, out of poverty.
Do you work for an anti-poverty program or funder who is using metrics to change the narrative around what is possible? Have you experienced success in getting your staff, colleagues, or benefactors to set higher expectations for what we, as a field, should be accomplishing? Or have you just thought about this and have some ideas for advancing the field? I would love to hear about it! Leave a comment and share your successes or ideas.
