A charity in New York City is trying an innovative approach to helping people below the poverty line. Modeled after a program in Mexico that pays poor people to do things like immunize their kids, send them to school and make healthy food, Groundwork brings a similar approach to New York’s poverty stricken communities. Here’s how the program works:
This modest community-based nonprofit is one of six neighborhood partners in the experimental Opportunity NYC program, which pays poor people — mostly single moms — for a broad range of health, education, and work-related activities, everything from taking their kids to the dentist to getting a new job to attending parent-teacher conferences.
Since its September 2007 launch, the New York initiative has paid $10 million to 2,400 families living at or beneath 130 percent of the poverty line — about $22,000 for a family of three. The typical participating family earned just under $3,000 during Opportunity NYC’s first year.
I’ve been interested in nudges, small behavioral changes that can create big changes in society, since I read Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. I love learning about these nudges, whether its ways to increase the tips that tour guides receive or ways to help students retain more information over summer vacation, so this program caught my attention. I think its an interesting experiment that could be very successful with enough testing. Currently, the program has spent over $25mm on 2,400 families, which doesn’t seem like that great of a return. I’d like to see the program focus on 2-3 of the most important tasks that people were being paid to do and expand the program to more people. If they could show that going to parent teacher conferences, taking your kid to the doctor for a checkup and cooking a healthy home cooked meal once per week had the most impact, the program could invest in the tasks that had the highest benefit with the lowest cost, all the while helping more people.
Some anti-poverty workers are not a fan of the this program. One worker said thinks the program is almost offensive:
Opportunity NYC borders on offensive — the idea that a person can be bribed into doing better in school or being a better parent,” says Mark Winston Griffith, executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy in New York City. “It sort of suggests that poverty is a lifestyle choice, that somehow if we’re just given a nudge, that we can choose not to be in this condition, or choose for our children to do better in school, or choose as parents to provide better child care. It comes out of the idea that poor people are almost sort of culturally and inherently dysfunctional. Not because of structural circumstances but because of their own personal failings.”
David Jones, the President of the Community Service Society in NYC, is not a fan because he thinks the project it too small to combat the huge problem that is poverty in NYC.
“In New York City, almost 50 percent of African American men are not currently employed. We have nearly 200,000 young people who are neither working nor in school,” he says. “Those numbers can’t be addressed with incremental incentive programs. Not because the ideas are bad but because the scale of the problems is huge.”
While I understand where both of these critics are coming from, I can’t agree with their thinking. We know that the current anti-poverty programs are not working very well, so we might as well try something new. Just because a problem is huge does not mean that a small solution can’t be successful. In the startup world, many small solutions have solved huge problems, even when the founders were simply trying to change a small part of the big problem. If the program doesn’t work, then end the program, but if it does work to make people’s lives better, then by all means continue it. I’d love to see more innovation and entrepreneurial thinking in the charity space. I think there is probably room for a great deal of innovation and improvement.