The Oregon Department of Human Services recently evaluated the first phase of a pilot program that gives $1,000 a month to youth experiencing homelessness. So far, the direct cash transfer program is producing promising results, including significant reductions in youth homelessness and improved mental health outcomes for participants. Now, early into its second phase, the program is riding the tailwinds of the first.
Matt Rasmussen is the program manager for the Youth Experiencing Homelessness Program at the ODHS. He joins us to talk about the successes and challenges of the first pilot phase and aspirations for the second. Gabi Huffman, a youth consultant and former recipient of direct cash transfers, also joins us to share her experience with the program.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Starting in February of 2023, 120 homeless young people in Multnomah, Clackamas, and Deschutes counties were given $1,000 a month.These direct payments, money that recipients could spend on anything, went on for two years. It’s the first phase of a pilot program created by the Oregon Department of Human Services. The results from this phase are now in, and they’re promising. The vast majority of participants were in stable housing at the end of two years. Matt Rasmussen manages the state’s Youth Experiencing Homelessness Program, which oversaw the pilot. He joins us now along with Gabi Huffman.She is a former recipient of these direct cash transfers, who is now a youth consultant. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Matt Rasmussen: Hi Dave, thanks for having me.
Miller: Matt, to start with you, can you explain the basics of how this program worked?
Rasmussen: Direct cash transfers was something that we had been thinking about for quite a while, actually. Our core work has historically, and continues to be, working with community partners who provide support to young people in the community who are experiencing homelessness. So they provide, via grants through us, different sorts of services such as street outreach, drop-in centers, shelters, transitional living programs, host homes, etc.
Through some planning that we did a few years back, as part of a statewide assessment, a young lady stood up and was talking about, really, this is all necessary and important to be talking about resources that are available, but that really what we should potentially be considering are something as simple as maybe some cash access which would be able to allow her and others like her to exit homelessness without having to go through a long and drawn out system.
It really got us thinking about it, and when the time was available and we had some funding available to do it, we reached out to a national provider called Point Source Youth who has really led the charge of youth direct cash transfers nationwide, and piggybacked and picked their brain as to what they were doing. We became the second location in the country to do youth-specific direct cash transfers where we gave youth $1,000 a month for 24 months. We provided them with that cash as well as support services through some of our community-based organizations to assist youth with what they may be needing, that comes with having access to cash, and kind of seeing where that went.
Miller: How did you select participants?
Rasmussen: There was a variety of different ways that youth were prioritized. Right off the bat, the first component was they had to be experiencing homelessness, and they had to have a desire to become housed. That was kind of our first tier. And then beyond that, we had some very basic demographic components.
They had to be over the age of 18, so between 18 and 24, and then we also prioritized certain subpopulations which were historically over-represented in homelessness counts. One of our community-based organizations was the Native American Youth Association, and historically, Native youth are over-represented. So there were a few demographics that we wanted to make sure were prioritized and could see how these funds would affect them.
Miller: Gabi, can you give us a sense for what your life was like before you started getting these direct cash payments?
Gabi Huffman: My life was super inconsistent. I was either couch-surfing or I had put myself in a homeless shelter, and I was constantly around or in unsafe situations around unsafe people, feeling like I had to rely on that in order to get through the day-to-day. It was a very stressful time.
Miller: What went through your mind when you found out that you’d be getting $1,000 a month unrestricted for two years?
Huffman: It gave me so much hope, and when I got that call that said that I’d be a part of that program, like, I literally jumped up and down like a little girl and cried happy tears, and I looked down at my daughter and I told her we’re gonna make this life something to be proud of.
Miller: How different is it to get unrestricted money as opposed to other forms of help, including other forms of financial help?
Huffman: I guess I was just given that free will and that freedom, and I didn’t have so many things or places to check in with. I just could focus solely on myself and what I needed to do in order to meet my needs and meet my goals, and so it really made changing my life and picking up my pieces and continuing to walk a lot easier and more accessible.
Miller: What kinds of things did you spend that money on?
Huffman: I spent it on my gas, on our everyday needs, like toilet paper and toiletries. I was able to buy simple things like Wi-Fi and Netflix just so that at home we have a place to just relax and bond. I spent that money on tires and insurance for my car. I had been driving around without registration or insurance on my car for over three years, and just chancing my luck every day, and since then, I’ve had consistent consecutive car insurance. And I spent it on my needs so that I could get into therapy and counseling, and I started going to school and that would help me cover costs that would arise before financial aid would come in…
Rasmussen: I was going to say, Dave, that Gabi’s story and the way that she kind of described that, I think there’s a misconception out there a lot of times, that when people, especially young people, are given choice when it comes to their future planning or needs, that it will go towards things that maybe they themselves as young people took on themselves, maybe wouldn’t spend it appropriately.
But we saw in both the study itself and also from asking and talking directly with young people that really what was impactful was for young people to feel like they were able to become an adult, and feeling like they really wanted to take that and make something better for themselves. So I think it was a misconception upfront that we saw play out as, young people want to be adults. They want to utilize this to better themselves, and that’s really what we were happy to see.
Miller: Can I ask you, Matt, did you have that misconception as well?
Rasmussen: It’s hard for me to say. I know what I spent my money on when I was a young person growing up in a very middle-class upbringing. I don’t want to say I had that thought. I’ve been working in this field and with young people since I was 23 years old.
I’ve seen the effects of sitting down with young people in child welfare and non-system-involved young people over the last decade, and really, when young people are talking about what they want, it’s not about the things that I think a lot of people think that they want. Really, they want to feel valued, they want to feel productive, they want to feel a part of a community. I was surprised by a lot of things in the study, positively. I don’t know if that was one of them though. I expected that.
Miller: What were you surprised by in the results of the study?
Rasmussen: Along those lines, I know we expected this to be a very positive housing investment. The results that we got through our evaluation, which was the 63 participants who completed all of the long-form surveys, is that by the end of those two years, that 94% of those young people reported being safely and stably housed, which, that number in and of itself, we expected it to be high. I’m not sure we expected it to be 94% high.
We also did a separate survey outside of the evaluation that was shorter in nature, and we got feedback from 107 that, in asking about their housing status, 91% of those youth reported being housed. So those numbers in and of itself were unexpected, for sure.
Miller: You mean that that high of a percentage, about 9 in 10 of the folks who you were able to get in touch with, had permanent housing after being homeless at the start?
Rasmussen: Yeah, and I think, too, over the course of that, the numbers at the end were obviously impressive. We also noticed how quickly young people were able to be housed when they had money and support attached to that. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I know within the first few months, we would look at, and have communication with our community-based organizations, and talking about the number of youth who had received leases in the last quarter and were kind of stunned by, oh wow, we’re talking dozens of young people in the last month became housed with just $1000 a month. The speed with which that happened was also surprising.
Miller: Gabi, was there a learning curve for you in terms of financial literacy or independence?
Huffman: Most definitely. As someone that received some help, I wanted to give back as soon as I could. If I saw anybody struggling, I didn’t want them to feel that struggle, so I wanted to help, and I had to learn how to budget and navigate life as someone who would have had that support system growing up. And I learned how to start being successful and push through hard times without feeling like it was the end, the world is crashing down.
I started to feel comfortable and financially secure just with the little $1,000 a month, which really helped me to start moving up the ladder, like the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and things like that, like I was really able to start growing from that point on.
Miller: How would you describe your life today?
Huffman: My life is full of my peace of mind. It’s one of my biggest important things in life. I am independent. I go to school full-time. I’m working. I take care of my daughter full time. She’s going to an amazing school. She’s ahead of her studies. I am going to school to pursue my business degree to open up a nonprofit, plus do it as a transitional living shelter and a community center for homeless youth and single parents, and approaching that with a little holistic approach.
I’m always connecting with people in my community and talking about the things that we’re grateful for, and how people can just think of some things to create hope, to keep going. We live in a home in a beautiful community, surrounded by great community members, and we have lots of support now and lots of people that are very proud.
Miller: Matt, how do you think about the return on investment for this program? Maybe just to sharpen that question, given a limited amount of public money to help people who are struggling in a variety of ways, what role do you think these kinds of direct cash payments should play?
Rasmussen: I think when we talk about direct cash transfers, we make it pretty clear that the initiative in and of itself is not some magical silver bullet that will fix everything around homelessness in and of itself. We view it as something that complements but doesn’t replace crisis-based emergency services that young people need. But we do feel that it offers some sort of an option to what I would call right-sizing the system a little bit.
We have community-based organizations that we have grants with – 40 different providers, 26 communities. However, there is still not enough to meet the need. There’s still not enough services in any community to really meet the need, and so something like direct cash transfers, which can ideally – and has been shown in our first go around – to make it so that young people are not stuck in some of those emergency services or medium-term services longer than they need to be because, hey, they don’t have rental history or they don’t have a landlord who will rent to them, or they’re struggling with being able to get their life in a place where that makes sense.
Being able to have young people maybe avoid the system altogether or move out of that system more rapidly can in some effect right-size that, can make it so that young people who are in shelter can go into a transitional living program, because somebody from that transitional living program has been able to access direct cash transfers to move beyond that. It is not a complete fix in and of itself, but it’s an opportunity to really showcase what the system can and should be.
Miller: Matt Rasmussen and Gabi Huffman, thanks very much.
Rasmussen: Thank you.
Miller: Matt Rasmussen is a program manager for the Oregon Department of Human Services Youth Experiencing Homelessness Program. He and Gabi Huffman joined us to talk about the results from the first two years of this pilot project to give young people who were experiencing homelessness cash payments of $1,000 a month.
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