Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 112: Poverty Reduction Through Cash Transfers — with Claire Williams
Speakers: Alex Abahmed, Am Johal, Claire Williams
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Alex Abahmed 0:01
Hi, I'm Alex Abahmed with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Claire Williams, co-founder and CEO of Foundations for Social Change. Claire tells us about the New Leaf project and how direct cash transfers can impact the lives of people experiencing poverty and homelessness. I hope you enjoy.
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Am Johal 0:27
Hi, everyone, welcome to Below the Radar, really excited that we have Claire Williams with us from Foundations for Social Change and with a project called New Leaf. Welcome.
Claire Williams 0:44
Thank you so much Am. It's great to be here.
Am Johal 0:46
Yeah. I'm wondering if we can just start, maybe if you could just introduce yourself a little bit.
Claire Williams 0:50
Yeah. So as you said, I'm Claire Williams, and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Foundations for Social Change, which is a charitable organization based here in Vancouver that really wants to create shared prosperity and opportunity for all. We believe in a kind and inclusive world where no one is left behind. And as part of that work, social and economic mobility are really important to us. And so we pioneered our New Leaf project in 2016, to start testing some of those innovative ideas. And in this case, it was giving direct cash transfers to people who are experiencing homelessness.
Am Johal 1:26
So this can be very counterintuitive to government policies, which, you know, require the filing out of forums and certain conditions to access government services like social assistance and others, there's regulatory and punitive aspects to accessing government services. And certainly the way public policy has changed. Over time, our social safety net has been eroded in many ways. And I think direct cash transfers to people can be very counterintuitive for public policy makers. So I'm wondering if you can sort of talk about maybe the theoretical underpinnings for a project like this.
Claire Williams 2:03
Yeah. And I think it's counterintuitive to not only government but just to mainstream society in general. We have a hard time with the concept of giving out free money. But really where we drew our inspiration from was the global south. So direct cash transfers. So giving cash to people living in poverty, had an incredible impact in people's lives. So if you think about the traditional way that we've done charity, philanthropy, aid, ultimately it's built on mistrust. We don't believe that you're going to spend this money wisely. So we're going to build these massive intermediary organizations, which then translate the cost of let's say, agriculture, you know, one beam is instead of costing 10 cents, it's actually going to cost $100, because we had to build a whole organization to give you said beam, and that beam might not even be what you need. And so there's been some amazing work done where folks at Give Directly which is a nonprofit based in New York started handing out free cash transfers. And they had third party academics evaluate their work and time again, they were showing impact that people were spending the money wisely, and that they were using it to transform their lives. And so we were really, really inspired by that. Because you look here in North America, we see an increasing number of folks who are visibly homeless in our communities from coast to coast as well as down in the US. And we're just like, why don't we try direct cash transfers? Like, is there another way to empower people to move forward? And my co-founder and I came across a TED talk called free money for everyone by Rutger Bregman, who is a proponent of basic income. And he's a historian as well. And he cited something called the London Rough Sleepers project where they'd allocated a personalized budget of 3000 pounds to 13 men who are chronically homeless, and at the end of the project, and there's air quotes, because I know your viewers can't see us, they found that folks had moved into some form of stable housing, that they were back in the game of life, that they were reunited with family members, that they were retraining, which is remarkable for such a small investment as about 6000 Canadian dollars, that they were seeing such tremendous impact. And so taking inspiration from both the global south and from this London Rough Sleepers project, we said, we need to try this here in Vancouver. And so we did.
Am Johal 4:18
Okay, so you know, the work of John McKnight that talks about asset based community development, there's a number of people in the community here from Al Etmanski, who has worked in the disability sector to others, Anne Livingston that has had a strong connection to that work. And I think this would, you know, resonate quite strongly with a number of people. And I'm wondering if you can just talk about your own personal story coming into this because you've come out of the environmental movement before coming into this work. And if you could share a little bit of that as well.
Claire Williams 4:49
Yeah, you know, life happens while we're busy making other plans and this is a perfect example of that. And so, I was doing sustainable land use planning and then National Parks planning and Indigenous consultation, which I love. And that was during the time of Stephen Harper. And then he contracted the government. So I was injected into the private sector and did some really interesting corporate social responsibility work, and then the firm I was working with almost overnight shrunk their sustainability portfolio, got into oil, gas, fracking, and then put me on a massive redevelopment project that back in my 20s, when I was really active in the protest and protest movement, I would have protested. So I was like, hold on a second here, there's a complete misalignment in my values and the work that I'm doing now. And so whether it was spontaneous or impulsive, I wrote to a children's home in India that was looking for volunteers and said, I'd like to volunteer my time. That was a Tuesday on Thursday, the woman who was running the organization said, “Great, we'll see you in a couple of months.” It was like, “okay, I guess I'm moving to India to work at this children's home.” And so I did that for six months. And then when I came back to Vancouver, I just got reflecting on how do I continue making an impact on community? I mean, so often when we want to volunteer and do good, especially humanitarian work, we go overseas, but how can we do that great work here at home. And so I was inspired by this TED talk with my co-founder. And the rest, they say, is history.
Am Johal 6:15
And so as you were looking to build out a pilot project, how was the reception with the community partners that you worked with? Or how did you build those partnerships? Because I think even with nonprofit community organizations that are functioning within a governmental sector, this is also a novel idea that probably hasn't been tried for some time, or at least there's significant policy barriers in place like the earnings exemption, clawback, those types of things that you would need to kind of work around existing government policies or as a lot of community organizers do you call everything a pilot project and say, we're not trying to change everything at once and, and smuggle it through and then bring back the learnings from it to make broader policy change. But it'd be great to hear that part of the story. Because I think from the perspective of community organizers, I think that's really interesting in terms of how you would have framed it and who stepped forward to partner and work with you.
Claire Williams 7:09
So partnership is at the heart of everything that we do. And I think this is also where my background in Indigenous consultation on the land use planning, really informed. The way we approached this work. I wasn't an expert in the space of homelessness, nor am I an expert in the space of direct cash transfers. And too often, we come in with these bold new ideas. I'm going to solve this problem without actually talking to people on the ground. And for better or for worse, in Vancouver, we have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in the space of homelessness. So before we even put pencil to paper, I was out there consulting with people. So I met with 30 different organizations across the Lower Mainland, got feedback from them and told them that we wanted to experiment with direct cash transfers. Do you think this is a good idea? Do you think this is a bad idea? Do you just think we're plain nuts? And we had about 80% of folks said, “Yeah, we need something new in the toolbox, we need a new tool. And we don't have the mandate to experiment and innovate. So you guys should absolutely do that for us.” 10%, we're like “you are crazy but we're happy to sit back and watch and see what happens.” And then the other 10% were like, “this is the worst idea we've ever heard, you absolutely should not do this.” So we really wanted to be informed. And that was incredibly helpful in designing our approach. And then you spoke about government, we also engage with government. So because this is experimental work, no one in the world has worked with people experiencing homelessness and direct cash transfers. So there's no lessons learned, no best practices from which to draw upon. We wanted to make sure that we were setting people up for success. And so in terms of the government, we wanted to ensure that the money that we gave to folks, the direct cash transfer of $7,500 didn't impact people's existing benefits. Because what if this doesn't work? What if we give folks money, and in two weeks, all of the money's gone, and then they're actually off benefits as well. And they're worse off than when we met them. So the NDP had just come in and they were really receptive to the idea, especially because we're evidence based. Our project is run as a randomized control trial working in partnership with UBC. And it has important implications for social policy. And so they allowed folks who were on benefits, so income assistance, and at the time premium MSP who were in the crash group to receive the money as an asset under an asset development account. So it wasn't counted as income, which is incredibly generous, and just was really, really helpful and just gave us a sense of assurance that we were not going to create any harm.
Am Johal 9:32
And so as you rolled out the study, if you can just describe, you were working with about 50 people was it?
Claire Williams 9:41
Yeah, 50 people received the cash transfer, and then there were 65 people in the control group. So we randomly, as we screened people at the front end. So I think that's important to mention is this wasn't just everybody, we did screen for eligibility. And again, that's because there's no existing best practice on giving direct cash transfers to folks who are homeless. And we also do not want to create risk of harm. So like any new product that you're prototyping, you start small. And then with each subsequent iteration, you incorporate those lessons learned and you start relaxing your parameters. So we were not working with folks who had significant mental health, substance use, or alcohol use problems, or challenges. So that's not to say that people were sober or that they were completely abstinent, we just used some scientifically validated measurement tools to establish a threshold. And folks that were below that threshold, were successfully screened into the project. And then they were randomly assigned to either the cash or the non cash group. And so we gave folks $7,500, which is the equivalent of a year of income assistance in BC in 2016. And that was intentional, because we do think that this work has important public policy implications. You know, our dream mantra is pilot to policy, we don't want to be in the business of direct cash transfers, we want to create a robust evidence base to say, "Hey, this is a better way to support people here, give it to the government, now you guys do the work." To me, that's the quickest way to scale and amplify impact. And so we followed folks over the course of the year, we collected data from them, at 3,6,9, and 12 months, and then sat back, analyzed the data and saw wow, this is making a difference in people's lives. As much as I hoped it was going to be, it was a randomized control trial. So the evidence could show something contrary to that. But it actually shows that this money made a difference in people's lives.
Am Johal 11:30
So now that you have done the trial, on the back end of it, what was the learning from it? And also, what do you perceive as the policy implications of it?
Claire Williams 11:42
So in terms of learnings, I would say that one of the biggest learnings for us was centered around something called a darling of our data set, which was we saw a 39% reduction in spending on drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. And why I say that's the darling of our data set is it fundamentally challenges everything we believe about people experiencing homelessness and I think we can extrapolate to people living in poverty. That they are going to waste the money on these goods and our evidence shows that that's just not the case. And we see that kind of evidence coming up in the developing cells. You know, even in the studies where they gave men who were incredibly high risk gang members, direct cash transfers, they still use that money to move their lives forward. And this is important, because when it fundamentally challenges the mainstream narrative about folks living in poverty or homelessness, and there's no blame there, you see those stereotypes and prejudices deeply embedded in our culture, in the social narrative, in film, in books and we see it embedded in public policy as well. And so you spoke about, you know, people have to fill out tons of forms in order to qualify for benefits. And we make the burden of proof so high for people, we criminalize people for living in poverty because we inherently believe that they're up to no good or they're going to waste this money that they're layabouts and they, they just want to spend it all on drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. And actually, that's not true. People want that money or need that money and will use that money to move their lives forward. So we saw that people very quickly moved into housing, ultimately spending fewer days homeless. In total, the cash groups spent 12 years less time homeless than the noncash group. That is a significant amount of time. I think I can speak confidently that neither you nor I have experienced homelessness, I can't imagine what an hour in homelessness is like, nevermind 12 years in total. So that is really, really remarkable. We also saw that people achieved greater food security across the cash group. And that even after 12 months, they had $1,000, more than when we met them at baseline, which again, speaks to people's amazing ability to make that dollar stretch really, really far. So I just think it can shift the whole conversation around how we work to empower people to move beyond poverty and homelessness. We actually don't need to build a ton of infrastructure, and for some people, that we can just give them cash, because ultimately, that's what they need to move their lives forward.
Am Johal 14:08
I mean, there's a long history in the Downtown Eastside community and others who do the work where the term "Nothing about us, without us." And I'm wondering if, on the back end of the study, as people went through it, what was the feedback from participants in terms of what you would change about the study going forward into the future? Because of course, this was done with 50 or so people in the group, but I imagine you have plans to do a larger study with greater funding in place to learn new outcomes. How would you change the study going into the future to come up with, I guess, new learnings or greater impact?
Claire Williams 14:45
Yeah, great question. So at the front end of the pilot, we actually worked with somebody with lived experience. And so he helped ground through some of the ideas that we had. And then we got to a point where we were moving into implementation which would involve revealing people's identity so we wrapped up that conversation with that individual. And then on the back end, after we analyzed our data, then we surveyed our, we call them our project alumni, to say, you know, what worked for you and what didn't work? What would you like to see next time, if we were to do an expansion project, and one of the biggest learnings for us is what didn't work was coaching. So we had a number of coaches who were part of our community of champions, and who really wanted to give back. So we assigned 50 people within both the cash and non cash groups to work one on one with the coach, meeting three times a month for a period of six months, which is an incredibly generous offer. And something you know, we would love to receive as decision makers, only to find out actually, it's something we value as decision makers, but our participants didn't value that resource at that time. So a complete mismatch of needs. And, you know, it's a great example of failing forward, a well intentioned idea actually not landing well with the client population that you're trying to serve. So then when we did ask our alumni, you know, what would really be helpful for you? A couple of people said that actually, they would like to have some form of, I'm going to say mental accounting, so not traditional financial literacy training, because the research actually shows that that doesn't work for a lot people, but some form of money management training, to help them understand what the magnitude of $7,500 is, what you can actually do with that. So we will be incorporating that into our expansion project. And then we also heard that people would like to meet other folks that are in the cash group. So because of our pilot project, being the first in the world, and working with an incredibly risk averse ethics board, none of the people who received cash knew who else received cash. And so now that we have some experience under our belt, we really want to capitalize on that peer support. I really believe that it will amplify results and impact. People can hold each other mutually accountable, they can also help problem solve when they come up against obstacles. So that's something else we would love to include in the expansion. How we do it in a COVID world is up for conversation, we're not quite sure how we're going to go about that yet.
Am Johal 17:09
The sample size was quite small. But were there any learnings related to geographic, like if they were in a different region of Vancouver, if there was different outcomes, or let's say, age range or anything like that?
Claire Williams 17:23
Yeah, as you say, the sample size was quite small. So we did not parse it out any further than that 50. So 50 is the smallest number that we needed from a power analysis standpoint, in order to have statistical significance. So just teasing it out into kind of further demographics, it would just negate any of the impact. So we hope to be able to do that for our expansion project where we're just bursting 200 cash transfers.
Am Johal 17:49
I imagine this has huge implications, and in various areas beyond the group that you worked with, in terms of a youth aging out of care. I imagine if you spoke with Al Etmanski, around people with disabilities, this would have huge implications in terms of previous policy changes they've looked for from the federal and provincial government. So what is the next phase? What is the timing behind it and what you hope to learn?
Claire Williams 18:15
Yeah, and I just want to touch on I think there are important implications for other segments of the population. So I just want to be clear, because I haven't said this yet. But I am not saying and we are not saying as an organization, that direct cash transfers are a silver bullet for homelessness, or poverty. This is very experimental work. It's nascent, it's in its infancy, and it's expanding and growing. And so we're going to, you know, I say us, we based here in Canada are the only group that are doing direct cash transfers. And then down in the States, there are a number of organizations that are using direct cash transfers with other populations. So collectively, we're building that evidence base and our community of practice, which is really exciting. And I do think there are some interesting opportunities for youth aging out of care. So the province of BC has put a moratorium on folks aging out of care until March 2022, at which time there's going to be an influx of young people who need some support. And so we would love to see if direct cash transfers are the right answer for that group. And then in terms of around what's next, we are planning this expansion project. So we're fundraising for it to the tune of $3.2 million. It will involve a disbursement of another 200 cash transfers, we're increasing the amount of cash to $8,500, this time to reflect the increase in income assistance in British Columbia. And then we're also exploring some other partnership opportunities in Toronto, and Denver, Colorado, as well as Washington DC. So I think there's a growing appetite for this kind of work, especially because of the pandemic. You know, pre pandemic, I just don't think there would have been the same level of receptivity to handing out quote unquote free cash, but after you know, the pandemic and then here in Canada, the CERB payments I think it's really attuned people to how suddenly life can change, your circumstances can change, you can face job loss, and actually what you need to get used to this rough patch is a direct cash transfer.
Am Johal 20:10
This is such exciting research that you're doing it has real life effects and I look forward to hearing more. Is there anything you'd like to add?
Claire Williams 20:18
One thing that I would like to add is just you know, when you think about this, I find that this conversation and this work is really triggering for people. It triggers so many biases and stereotypes, and there's a long conversation to be had there as well. But ultimately put yourself in people's shoes. What if you were experiencing homelessness? What if you were living in poverty? How would you want to be treated? Would you want to have to jump through hoops and have to demonstrate how poor you are? Or would you prefer a more compassionate and dignified approach in the form of a cash transfer that would really help you move your life forward.
Am Johal 20:52
Claire, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Claire Williams 20:56
Thanks so much Am. It's been good to be here.
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Alex Abahmed 21:01
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Claire Williams. Head the links in the show notes to learn more about foundations for social change, and for the results and new directions for the New Leaf Project.
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