Boston Area Youth-Cash Assistance for Stable Housing (BAY-CASH) launched in 2021. It is the result of over six years of collaboration with data scientists and learnings from the field that consistently show positive outcomes for Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) participants.

BAY-CASH Chair, Matt Aronson, partnered with Chapin Hall in 2017 on the development of a YA homelessness centered DCT model to address critical gaps in our YA homelessness response systems. At the same time, Matt co-led the development of the City of Boston's plan to prevent and end YA homelessness. Among the many action steps in the plan, the community included a DCT program, championed by the YA working on it

Matt began conversations with Y2Y as a core partner in 2019 and with future co-Chair Sam Zito from the United Way of Mass Bay and Merrimack Valley in 2020. That same year, Matt was a formal advisor to our sister project in NYC, The Trust Youth Initiative, which published a peer-reviewed operational framework for YA homelessness-focused DCT models. With that framework, early funding, and a growing number of interested partners, Matt and Sam formally launched BAY-CASH in spring 2021.

Over the past two years, we completed a readiness phase to build out our core-partner team, right-size the framework for Greater Boston, engage potential allies, develop a sustainability strategy, and fundraise. We published our Readiness Report in October 2022.

We are now in our Pre-Implementation Phase, continuing to fundraise, refine our implementation strategy, and build partnerships. We have raised ~$1 Million, hired our Project Director, Shayla Fonfield, in July 2023, and our Core Partner Group is now 21 members strong!