Economic Assets Resources
2-Generation Administrative Data Brief, Issue 1 - Income variability of families on cash assistance in Minnesota | Minnesota Department of Human Services
This report explores the considerable income instability for all new families enrolling in the Minnesota Family Investment Program from 2013 to 2016. It makes clear that families’ incomes, without the program’s cash grants, vary to the degree that it would be almost impossible for a family to know from one month to the next if they had the income to cover expenses.
State strategies to strengthen economic opportunity | Minnesota Department of Human Services and BUILD Initiative
This brief provides insight into designing guaranteed income programs to ensure they are implemented effectively and efficiently with employment and other social support services to provide families with economic security and social mobility. In the first of two sections, the challenge and policy options are discussed. In the second, a table describes key income supports and strategies for states and local leaders to ensure guaranteed income can be complementary and additive to have the greatest impact on families’ financial well-being.
2-Generation Administrative Data Brief, Issue 2 - The effect of child support disregard on MFIP grant | Minnesota Department of Human Services
This report uses data to examine the effect of the child support disregard on Minnesota Family Investment Program grant amounts and child support payments. The department found that the disregard significantly positively affects the Minnesota Family Investment Program grant and is associated with higher child support payments for children.
Deep Poverty Report | Minnesota Department of Human Services
This report investigates how living in deep poverty can lead to poor health. It also looks at opportunities to address deep poverty and improve health outcomes. It recognizes the State of Minnesota’s existing programs as a foundation and looks at how it could help move people out of deep poverty more effectively.
No Strings Attached: The Behavioral Effects of U.S. Unconditional Cash Transfer Programs | Roosevelt Institute
In this evidence review, the Roosevelt Institute explores how unconditional cash transfers affected recipients’ behavior in three major natural experiments. While the amounts dispersed and time periods were distinct in each experiment, each provided money without set conditions or a means test. The institute synthesized data for the following outcomes: consumption; labor force participation (employment, hours worked and earnings); education; health; and other social outcomes, such as marriage or fertility choices. Each program shares different components of a universal basic income, a cash transfer everyone within a geographic or political territory regularly receives with no long-term conditions. By understanding the effects of these programs, the institute can generate answers to how an unconditional cash transfer program might affect recipients in the future.
A Systematic Review of Innovative Cash Transfer Programs in the United States | Future Services Institute Report
This report reviews and compares several significant cash transfer programs in the United States. All programs under review have been piloted or scaled, helping to provide insights into the implementation and impact of these programs.
Bridge to Benefits | Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota
Bridge to Benefits is a Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota project to improve the well-being of families and individuals by linking them to public work support programs and tax credits.
The Family Resource Simulator | National Center for Children in Poverty
Since 2003, the National Center for Children in Poverty has managed and continued to expand the Family Resource Simulator, a policy simulation tool and benefit calculator that provides tailored data about benefit cliffs and gaps in economic supports faced by families and individuals with low and middle incomes. A corollary tool, the Basic Needs Budget Calculator, estimates how much earnings families need to make to cover basic expenses in each county the simulator covers.
The Family Resource Simulator: Two Decades of Impact | National Center for Children in Poverty
This report highlights key state policy successes achieved due to Family Resource Center analyses from 2004- 2017.
Twenty-eight million working families and individuals rely on public benefits, such as childcare subsidies, Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, SNAP, free school lunch, EITC , or free pre-K to make ends meet. However, public benefit programs sometimes penalize families as they earn more. Program administrators and policymakers have the power to improve and streamline program rules. Still, they need up-to-date, comprehensive data tools that show how benefits packages impact working families' budgets. The Family Resource Simulator, a publicly available online data tool, puts power in the hands of working families with low incomes, advocates and program administrators. The first of its kind when it was launched in 2003, the simulator allows users to assess the impact of the eligibility rules and support levels provided by comprehensive benefits packages on family budgets tailored to specific situations and geographic locations.
Digital Literacy Pilot overview | Intercultural Mutual Assistance Association
This brochure gives an overview of the Intercultural Mutual Assistance Association prototype focused on providing digital literacy and access to first-generation immigrants and refugees.
People’s Prosperity podcast | Bright Futures
The Bright Futures Audio Postcards project is a visual and audio representation of Saint Paul’s People’s Prosperity Guaranteed Income Pilot Program. The Bright Futures physical postcards have a QR code with a link to a produced audio story of one of the current participants in the People’s Prosperity Pilot, describing why the program worked for their family.
Protecting benefits in guaranteed income pilots: lessons learned from the abundant birth project | San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment
This brief offers lessons learned about how to protect recipient benefits, particularly in California, through the lens of the Abundant Birth Project, a pilot program aimed at reducing birth health disparities and improving birth outcomes for Black and Pacific Islander pregnant women in San Francisco by providing $1,000 per month for six months during pregnancy and six months post-partum.
This brief focuses on strategies to attain waivers that will exempt guaranteed income cash transfers from income eligibility determinations in various public benefits.
Twin Cities at forefront of guaranteed basic income experiment | MPR News
Minneapolis and St. Paul are at the forefront of a national experiment in what happens when people are given a few hundred extra dollars a month.
U.S. cities try new way to help the poor: give them money | Reuters
Spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, dozens of U.S. cities are deploying a new tool in their war on poverty: cash. At least 16 cities and counties are handing out no-strings-attached payments to some low-income residents, a Reuters tally found. At least 31 other local governments plan to do so in the months ahead.