Students Experiencing Homelessness: A Conditional Cash Transfer Pilot
Having inadequate housing has been correlated in research with detrimental effects on a child’s ability to meet their full potential at school.
In partnership with the LANL Foundation (LANLF), Cuba Independent School District (CISD), and West Las Vegas School District (WLVSD), New Mexico Appleseed designed, implemented, and evaluated this intervention to provide educational and financial support to inadequately housed students.
Creating a ‘Compassionate Exception’—New Mexico Appleseed’s innovative concept—allowed for flexibility with the requirements when the reality of highly mobile and under-resourced students’ lives made meeting those requirements difficult. Learn more about this and other key findings of our pilot project in this report (June 2022).
FAMILY ECONOMIC STABILITY
A well-studied intervention in global development that is now catching on in the United States is the concept of providing cash transfers to support low-income families. The purpose of these cash transfers is to provide income for these families so that their children can go to school, their basic needs are met, and they have the opportunity to move beyond the cycle of poverty. Whether designed as basic minimum income for all or a stronger cash assistance-based safety net, this is a developing field and Appleseed is at the forefront in the United States and in New Mexico.
Basic needs cash transfer pilot
Building on our two summer pilots in Albuquerque and Las Cruces, Appleseed, through a generous grant from the Los Alamos National Lab Foundation, launched two more pilots for the duration of the 2020-2021 school year in West Las Vegas Public Schools and Cuba Independent Schools, two districts who experience high rates of poverty and have populations who have been historically underserved. The pilots ran from November 2020 to June 2021 and served 53 students and their families—this is what we learned:
High Retention Rate: Between both districts, the program experienced an over 80% retention rate with the fifty-three student participants.
Qualitative Data Collection Revealed Positive Outcomes: We conducted over 40 exit interviews with students, families, and staff, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with universal agreement that they would recommend the program. Students noted how helpful the tutoring was and some said they would not have passed their classes without the tutoring sessions. Students stated that the money helped motivate them to focus on school and meet their needs: buying clothes, shoes, school supplies or paying phone bills. Parents and families noted the money helped their monthly budget and directed it toward necessities including car payments, utilities, home repairs and weatherization, dental services, phone bills, and food.
From our participants
“[The pilot] made me focus more on school because it pushed me to do better.” -Student
“Knowing they can get this extra help in school makes them look forward to being more productive and proactive in class.” -Parent/Guardian
“The most important was the car payments. We were unsure how we were going to pay. I slipped into a depression. Having this help really did help me a lot.”
- Parent/Guardian
Supporting Early Childhood Success
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation awarded Appleseed $300,000 to design our “Supporting Early Childhood Success” pilot program. This innovative project will co-create a guaranteed income intervention with parents living in communities of color whose children were born drug-exposed. We will design the program in partnership with the targeted population and other community partners. Our goal is to develop a strength-based program that will help stabilize families and help children thrive while informing potential policy interventions. Programming will take place in Bernalillo and McKinley counties.