A Canada charity gave $7,500 to homeless people, here’s what happened
A Canadian project studying the impact of giving cash directly to homeless people told the CBC on Thursday their findings were “beautifully surprising.”
The New Leaf Project, a program of Foundations for Social Change, a Vancouver-based charity, began in 2018, and awarded a group of Lower Mainland homeless people a cash payment of $7500 each. They then compared how this group of 50 spent it over a year to a control group of 65 homeless people who didn’t receive any payments.
The results, Foundations for Social Change CEO Claire Williams told the CBC, pushed back against assumptions that it’s bad to give money directly to homeless people because they can’t be trusted to use it well.
"It challenges stereotypes we have here in the West about how to help people living on the margins," she said.
According to their recently published findings, the group that got cash spent less days homeless than the others, moved into stable housing in an average of three months, and nearly 70 percent of them became food secure after a month.
The individuals who got the payments tended to spend them on the necessities: on average they spent 52 percent of the cash on food and rent, 15 percent on other items like bills and medicine, and 16 percent on clothes and transportation. Spending on alcohol, cigarettes and drugs went down an average 39 percent as well.
“This is not merely a gesture of help,” the foundation’s white paper on their results reads. “It is a signal that society believes in them.”
It is also, according to New Leaf, a way to potentially cut down on the costs of government services aiming to help the homeless. According to Williams, Canada spends an average of $55,000 per person on social services for homeless people. Direct cash transfers could save $8100 per person.
Ray, a participant in the program whose name was kept partially confidential, says the money helped him get back on his feet and take a computer training course that would help him get closer to his goal of being a substance abuse counselor to homeless individuals.
“The balance that New Leaf has given me basically gave me that stepping stone,” he said in a video release by the program. “I kinda want to give back where I’ve come from.”
In recent years, direct cash payments have gained traction as a potential way to combat growing inequality. Cities like Stockton, California, and Jackson, Mississippi, have pilot cash assistance programs of their own, with similar results. This form of intervention has also caught on in other parts of the world like Mexico, Syria, Kenya and Malawi.
Others worry the enthusiasm for programs like these, especially in Silicon Valley, might lead to replacing needed government services like housing and education.
