We need better metrics, not magic, to break poverty

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 while much attention has been paid to the growing income gap in recent years, this distressing economic mobility indicator has been relatively stable since at least the 1970s.

In that same period, our society’s approach to helping people get out of poverty has remained largely unchanged: for decades, anti-poverty programs and initiatives have focused on jobs.

Creating jobs, improving jobs, preserving jobs. Preparing people to be ready for jobs, helping them get jobs, and supporting them to keep those jobs. In fact, every year we spend billions of dollars on job training and placement programs in this country. Almost 50 years later, we know that this one-dimensional strategy hasn’t improved the likelihood of people climbing the socio-economic ladder. So why do we keep doubling down on this ineffective strategy?

Don’t get me wrong — Jobs are important. Jobs, and entrepreneurship, can generate income, which is critical to achieve prosperity. The problem is that our country, and anti-poverty programs and funders in particular, have convinced ourselves that the solution to the extremely deep and complicated challenge of breaking poverty starts, and more importantly, ends, with jobs.

Given the massive investments we’ve made in jobs in this country, and how little the needle on economic mobility has moved as a result, it’s time to fundamentally rethink how we approach the persistent problem of poverty.

“And then some magic happens…”

So deeply held are our societal assumptions about the power of work, that anti-poverty programs, and the funders who support them, have long accepted a dotted line theory about how these programs will equip people to get, and stay, out of poverty. The theory goes something like this:

1. Unemployed person enrolls in a program.
2. Person learns some interpersonal skills, and maybe some vocational skills, to increase their likelihood of getting a job.
3. Person gets a job.
4. Person keeps that job for a period of time, hopefully for a year.
5. [some magic happens]
6. Person leaves, and stays out of, poverty.

This theory, that assumes a job is a reliable predictor of long term prosperity, drives performance assessment of anti-poverty organizations, and investment decisions of the funders of those programs.

And when jobs are all that are measured, the vast majority of resources go toward implementing, evaluating and improving steps 1–4 above. Workforce development professionals and funders spend immense time and money trying to improve the quality of job readiness, training, and placement services to achieve better job placement rates.

But if 70% of people born in the bottom two income groupings will never see the middle class in their lifetime, despite trillions of dollars spent in the last 50 years on job training and placement programs, does the answer really lie in raising job placement rates by 20%?

To be clear: my intent here is not to trivialize the value of job training programs. I’ve worked in and with best-in-class workforce development programs for 15 years. I’ve seen firsthand how people who receive job training benefit from learning new skills that increase their chances of success in the future. And undoubtedly, some of the people who get a job with help from a program do actually get out of poverty.

The thing is, we don’t know how many people make it, who makes it, and what support and tools they used to get there. We aren’t able to learn from their successes, to better understand what else was needed, in addition to income, to achieve prosperity, and how to best provide others access to those tools and support. It’s this more nuanced understanding that’s missing in our quest to break poverty.

We can’t afford to continue to double down on a strategy that isn’t getting the results we need. We can no longer focus on getting to step 4, and expect the rest to take care of itself. We need to stop relying on chance, and start being intentional about how we connect employment with a sustainable path to prosperity.

In other words, we need to unpack step 5, where “the magic happens”. And to do that, we need to change how we measure impact.

You get what you measure

“Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you’ll get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost” — H. Thomas Johnson

Those of us who work in and lead anti-poverty programs need to change the way we think about, and measure, our impact. We have to set our expectations higher for what people can accomplish with the support and tools our programs provide, and be able to measure those successes in terms of economic mobility, not just employment.

That’s easier said than done, of course. Our organizations overwhelmingly rely on external funding sources (public agencies, private foundations, individual donors), so we almost always need to spend the limited funding we have for impact measurement on tracking the metrics that our funders require.

And by and large, those metrics are: how many people (or what percentage of program participants) obtained employment, what was the average wage of those jobs, and did they keep the job for a year. Funders almost never ask programs to tell them how many of the people they placed in jobs actually make it out of poverty.

Funders who evaluate programs based on jobs alone are relying on the “magic happens” theory. This not only overstates the impact of their investments, but short-changes the people who receive services from the programs they fund.

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It’s time for a new strategy to break poverty. One that doesn’t oversimplify what it takes for someone to climb the socio-economic ladder, and doesn’t settle for celebrating jobs, instead of striving for sustained prosperity.

This must start with raising our expectations about what can be accomplished by people living in poverty, and with evaluating impact not just on short term outcomes like jobs, but on the multi-dimensional outcomes that truly predict whether a person will get, and stay, out of poverty.

To make this shift, we’ll need to think about, and do, our work differently. It will require self reflection by programs and funders to uncover internalized assumptions, and the courage to challenge the status quo and the systems that perpetuate it. It’ll require us to lift up the voices of the people we serve, to understand on a much deeper level their life experiences, resilience, and creativity. And most important, yet most daunting, it will require admitting that what we are doing now, while meaningful, isn’t enough.

In my next post, I’ll explore how we can broaden how we measure impact in anti-poverty programs to unpack the “magic” that enables people to go from a job to sustained prosperity.