Our goal is to conduct an effective pilot that lives up to our values, produces robust evidence, and builds committed partnerships. This will lead to state policy funding our direct cash transfer plus model for every young person experiencing homelessness in the Commonwealth. Our evidence, experience, and advocacy will change the way people think about ending youth homelessness and supporting a broad range of populations, including foster youth, young people in the juvenile system, and other disconnected youth. BAY-CASH will also contribute to the national evidence base and the movement to make our direct cash transfer plus model available to all young people experiencing homelessness in America.

BAY-CASH is an initiative pilot and not another non-profit or program. Our role is to prove that the model works, build momentum among critical stakeholders and community members, and ensure a statewide framework for access to the model for young adults around the Commonwealth. We believe that there is sufficient programmatic capacity in each region of MA to operate BAY-CASH, including the cash transfers and supportive services.

A DCT is typically defined as “a direct transfer payment of money to an eligible person” (O’Sullivan & Sheffrin, 2003). This definition encompasses a wide range of interventions, such as stipends, financial assistance, direct payments, money transfers, financial transfers, and they can be grouped into three main categories (Innovations for Poverty Action, 2018):

1. Unconditional cash transfers, which are cash transfers made without any conditions required for the recipient;

2. Conditional cash transfers, which are made on the condition that the recipient meets specified criteria such as school attendance or receiving vaccinations; and

3. Labeled cash transfers, in which funds are indicated, or ’labeled,’ for a specific purpose, but the conditions are not enforced.

Additionally, there are two broad types of cash transfers within the UCT and LCT categories:

• one-off transfers or grants, which are often intended for those in an immediate, nonrecurring crisis (e.g., eviction prevention, or an emergency payment to households affected by a natural disaster);

• ongoing transfers, which are paid repeatedly over a period, providing an ongoing safety net.

Increasingly, these programs also involve “Cash Plus” models, linking DCTs to other voluntary supports and services that address people’s non-monetary constraints to getting out of poverty. Sometimes DCTs are offered unconditionally with a high enough amount and enough regularity to constitute a guaranteed basic income (sometimes called a universal basic income [UBI] if extended to all citizens in a population). A basic income is usually intended to provide sufficient financial assistance to guarantee that all citizens can meet their basic needs.

BAY-CASH has adopted the broad definition of young adult homelessness used by the Commonwealth of MA:

“Unaccompanied Homeless Youth” shall mean: a person 24 years of age or younger who is not in the physical custody of a parent or legal guardian, and who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. “Fixed” refers to a residence that is stationary, permanent, and not subject to change. “Regular” means a dwelling at which a person resides on a regular basis (i.e., nightly). “Adequate” means that the dwelling provides safe shelter, meeting both physical and psychological needs of the youth. All three components of this definition—age, connection to a parent or guardian, and housing status—must be met in order for a person to be considered an unaccompanied homeless youth.

While the conversations around eligibility offered nuanced and contrasting opinions, including some YA concerns about participants’ readiness for such an opportunity, we identified broad support among stakeholders for an inclusive definition and little insight or evidence into how we might further target eligibility to meet the few concerns that participants surfaced.

BAY-CASH will employ a participant recruitment strategy designed during our Readiness Phase. Three related concepts are critical to this strategy:

1. Partner Values: Every aspect of BAY-CASH must reflect the values and choices established during our Readiness phase. For recruitment, that means using the state’s broad definition of homelessness, identifying locations where we might encounter young people with crisis housing needs, focusing on housing as a primary outcome, and working closely with young adults during the final design and implementation stages of recruitment.

2. Study Integrity: The recruitment strategy must support the design of the program and allow us to measure our outcomes as clearly as possible. Because our primary outcome is housing, we need a recruitment design that allows us to assess changes in housing status to the greatest extent possible. We also need to ensure that the young people we encounter are likely to be eligibility and that we can complete a randomized selection that effectively limits bias in our data.

3. Ethics: We take “do no harm” very seriously. For recruitment, that means only offering participation in the cash transfer pilot to young people who are eligible and for whom we have a spot available. We do not want to tell young people that they have a chance to participate, and then disappoint them. Similarly, we want to be clear about what participation looks like and any known benefits affects up front.

With all of that in mind, our strategy will first recruit 120 young adults to participate in a study that requires bi-annual surveys and a small amount of compensation for working with the researchers. Initial screening and benefits counseling will happen at this stage. Only when we have signed up 120 eligible applicants for the study, will we then randomly select 60 young adults from the 120 to participate in our DCT Plus model. This sequence is critical so that we never offer false hope to potential participants and then disappoint them.

Chapin Hall will work closely with a team of young adults with lived experience to identify existing shelters, locations, and networks for recruitment. The goal is to identify young adults in the homelessness system who are not currently stably housed (e.g., are not currently housed in a transitional housing, rapid rehousing, or permanent supportive housing unit), but also who are disconnected from traditional homelessness resources (e.g., on the streets, in cars, other places not meant for sleeping, couch surfing, or doubled up, without knowing where they are going to consistently sleep in the future).

We expect BAY-CASH to serve approximately 60 young adult participants, ages 18-24, who will receive bi-monthly cash payments and plus services. An additional 60 young adults will only participate in bi-annual surveys for a small stipend and act as a control group. If necessary, we can launch BAY-CASH with 45 participants. If we launch with 45 participants instead of 60, we will continue to recruit participants once the appropriate amount of funding becomes available.

Participants will receive two payments of $600 per month and can draw down an additional one time payment of $3,000 at any time during the pilot to cover a significant expense.

Through the Readiness Phase, the BAY-CASH Team worked with young adults with lived experience, providers, and national experts, to identify the “Plus” services that fit within our program model, will likely help young people meet their needs, and are what young people actually want. To that end, BAY-CASH will include the following:

• Comprehensive navigation support from peers or near peers with lived experience designed to support housing search, independent living, systems navigation, and connections to community resources.

• Financial coaching based on national best practices for holistic lifelong financial health and well-being.

• Benefits counseling at program intake and as needed throughout the program so that young people can maintain their benefits during program participation and sign up for benefits they may not know they are eligible for.

• Case management to supervise and support the navigators and provide crisis mitigation and deeper supports for program participants as needed.

Plus services will be coordinated across staff and provided in a youth-driven, low-threshold, non-judgmental way. Navigators will follow the innovative Problem Solving Protocol developed by EOHHS and lead with the young persons strengths and resources rather than their challenges and deficits. They will be proactive and meet participants where they are while allowing them to opt out and take the engagements at their own pace.

BAY-CASH will sign participants up for all Plus services at intake. The services will then be available for 30 months, six months after the end of the cash transfers. This responds to a critical finding from our Readiness Report. Young adults do not want to lose their people (navigator, coach, counselor, case manager) when they stop receiving their cash and feel the most vulnerable. Providers also worried about the “cliff effect” and wanted to make sure that participants could maintain these supports beyond the end of the cash. The supports are further designed to prepare participants for the end of the subsidy from day one.

It will take approximately 3 months to begin serving young people once we have raised enough funds to feel confident that we can uphold our commitment to participants. Our goal is to begin serving young people in 2023.

The BAY-CASH pilot will last a minimum of three years, including two years of cash payments, two and a half years of plus services, and at least three years of information collection. Funding permitted, we will continue to collect data for up to five years.

It is really unconditional! The evidence and ethics support a truly unconditional model and there are no reasons why BAY-CASH will kick out a young person.

Our BAY-CASH Plus services were designed by young adults with lived experience for young adults with lived experience. We expect that participants will want to engage them, and preliminary evidence from our sister site in NYC suggests that we are right. Additionally, we will sign participants up automatically so that there are no extra barriers to participation.

With that said, we are committed to Trusting Youth and the “unconditional” nature of our model. If participants do not want to engage in one or more Plus services, that is their choice without consequences. They can pick and choose how and how much they engage and can come back to services they drop whenever they feel that they need to. Our navigators will proactively reach out and check in with all participants through the pilot and will work hard to build a supportive relationship with each young person.

Among the many programs currently described as “direct cash” in the Commonwealth, BAY-CASH shares the most in common with two innovative pilots. Chelsea Eats and Cambridge Rise both included a significant, unconditional, cash payment that repeated regularly for many months. They served relatively large populations, embedded a research methodology, and leveraged their success and community support to launch second rounds of their respective program models. BAY-CASH introduces significant and novel innovations over these successful programs and addresses critical service gaps for the commonwealth that will help us prevent and end young adult homelessness.

Unlike the other programs, BAY-CASH used a robust readiness phase to target a funding amount and frequency that meets the needs of young adults and specifically addresses a housing outcome. It offers a more significant payment ($1,200) and for much longer than the other two interventions (2 years of cash). It also incorporates 2.5 years of “plus” services based on robust international evidence and calibrated to the needs and wants of local young people and providers. The BAY-CASH evaluation model is more robust with a more tightly controlled RCT selection process, deeper investment in qualitative information collection, and a minimum of 3 years of participant engagement. It covers a larger geographic area and includes a broader range of partners to support its goal of statewide adoption following a successful pilot. Finally, BAY-CASH is part of a national cohort of cities that will combine data and analysis and lead the nation in changing the way we address young adult homelessness and other populations, such as those leaving the foster care system, exiting incarceration, and more.

Click the “Resource” tab to see our detailed comparison chart.

Yes! Young people are serious about their own thriving and know better than anyone else what they need to do so. Despite the harsh consequences that homelessness and housing instability impose on young people, they exhibit tremendous resourcefulness, resilience, thrift, and thoughtfulness regarding their experience and that of their peers. This is far from the common frame of "juvenile delinquent" that we often associate with young people and those who have not succeeded.

Chapin Hall researchers found the following in their evidence review of Cash Transfer programs: "Despite common perceptions people living in poverty would use cash transfers irresponsibly, or that cash assistance would foster dependency or labor force inactivity, a large evidence base suggests otherwise. Evans and Popova (2017) reviewed 19 studies with evidence on the impact of cash transfers on “temptation goods” such as alcohol or tobacco. They found that, overall, cash transfers did not have a significant impact on these expenditures. These findings were confirmed by another review, which found that studies measuring the consumption of temptation goods indicated either no increase or an increase proportional to spending on other items (Danvers, 2010). A randomized trial of a government DCTP for youth in South Africa similarly found no effect, positive or negative, on alcohol or illicit drug use, but did demonstrate a reduction of youths’ engagement in selling illicit drugs associated with receiving cash transfers—likely due to offsetting the financial motivators behind selling drugs (Heinrich et al., 2017). In a scholarly paper titled, “Debunking the Stereotype of the Lazy Welfare Recipient,” Banerjee et al. (2017) reported results from re-analysis of data from seven randomized trials of government-run DCTPs in six developing countries. They found no systematic evidence that DCTPs discourage work.

While the evidence is still developing in the United States specifically for young adults experiencing homelessness, data from communities such as NYC, Manchester NH, and Atlanta GA suggest that young people seldom use cash transfers to buy "temptation goods." What's more, there is no evidence that young people use there resources any less responsibly than other groups in society, including wealthy and older populations.

It is also important to underscore the ethical implications of trusting young people. Homelessness among young people is failure of communities and systems, not a failure of individual young adults. Too much of their lives and traumas has been driven by the decisions of older people without their shared experience. BAY-CASH firmly believes in young adult choice and their ability to control their own lives in the face of unrelenting adversity. "Nothing about us without us" is critical to our pilot and the models success.

We believe that rigorous evidence (not just “data”) is key to sustaining BAY-CASH. A random control trial represents the gold-standard of evaluation methods and offers the highest level of confidence in our outcomes. This will allow us to withstand scrutiny beyond our current crisis when we have lost our sense of urgency and it is easy to distrust or blame our most vulnerable.

20 years of experience in the field of homelessness supports confidence in the power of evidence. National partners have successfully used data from the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress and Voices of Youth Count to consistently maintain, grow, and develop new funding streams when other social programs and other populations have lost support. Evidence combined with grass roots partnerships and champions in city government and the state legislature will ensure that our model spreads across the Commonwealth and endures.

Evidence is also critical for DCTs, which have a surprisingly long history in the United States. At times they seemed all but inevitable, with some economists at the turn of the 20th century assuming that a universal basic income was imminent due to the automation of the industrial revolution (sound familiar?). Richard Nixon advocated for and nearly signed a version of universal basic income for poor families into law in 1970 and again in 1971. Different forms of unconditional cash transfers have arisen during each economic recession and major economic upheaval since, including the financial crisis in 2008 and the current combined impact of COVID and AI.

Unfortunately, long standing biases against the poor, black and brown, and queer folks, young people, and people experiencing homelessness have prevented these ideas from sustaining. Once there is some distance from the crisis, the public succumbs to common tropes of “laziness,” “juvenile delinquency,” and “deservedness” and stops or defunds these efforts. Throughout this history, data has been a sticking point. Fabricated evidence from the 1830’s emboldened myths about the lazy poor and impacted policy-making for almost 100 years. Opponents used poor and misinterpreted data from the mid-20th century to help sink Nixon’s efforts and prevent similar policies from being thoughtfully debated for over 30 years. We plan to change this paradigm.

Our random control trial was built in from the beginning. We co-designed the model framework with Chapin Hall, the leading youth homelessness research institute in the country, and young people with lived experience, to ensure it is relevant and responsible to young adults in Greater Boston. By designing an evidence-building strategy in parallel with our program model, we will have a high level of control over our data and analysis. We will learn valuable lessons from the research that will improve future implementations, author our own narrative, and mitigate against cynical takes on the work.

Random control trials are hard work. They are expensive and time-consuming. But we confidently believe that our history and experience support the need for rigorous evidence to meet our sustainability goals. What’s more, we plan to combine our evidence with evidence from a national cohort of partner communities to ensure countrywide impact.

At BAY-CASH, we believe that research should drive decision-making and actively contribute to the community. That means frequently sharing our learning with the community so that partners can respond in real-time to what we learn. While the research will include at least three years of data collection, with a final report published approximately a year later, we will work closely with our evaluation partners to produce regular action reports during the pilot phase. We expect to know how it’s going within the first year of the pilot.

Authentically engaging young people in BAY-CASH is a core principle. This means not only including them as decision-makers, experts, and advisors, but also supporting them to participate meaningfully and compensating them well for their time. With that in mind, the BAY-CASH team built young adult partnership into every aspect of the model's design.

1. Idea Validation: From the beginning, team members regularly presented our theory of change to the Boston Youth Action Board for concept validation and feedback. We made a commitment to only move forward with the approval of the YAB.

2. Leadership and Decision-making: We recruited YAB members to participate as voting members of our decision-making body, the Core Partners Group. We also hired a young person with lived experience as our Project Associate to lead the day to day implementation of our "Readiness" phase research together with our Project Manager and two Core Partner Group Co-chairs. She had a decision-making role in all project management team actions and decisions. She co-designed our research methods and co-led the implementation of the information collection and co-interpretive activities.

3. Information Collection: We held 4 focus groups with 32 young people with lived experience at 4 different organizations to ensure we were reaching different populations with a broad range of views. We collected data verbally and in written form to maximize their ability to contribute. YYA were paid in cash for their time.

4. Analysis: 14 young people participating in a co-interpretative workshop designed specifically for YYA to reflect on our team's preliminary recommendation and improve our analysis. Three additional YAB members participated in all three co-interpretative workshops and in special debriefing meetings to help us understand the feedback we received and arrive at recommendations to present to the core partner group.

Massachusetts has a unique mechanism for both funding and supporting community responses to youth and young adult homelessness. The BAY-CASH model is designed to take advantage of that structure so that each of the ten YYA regions in the commonwealth can implement a DCT Plus program with the right support from the state legislature.

The State's “Unaccompanied Homeless Youth Services” budget line item (4000-0007) has grown from $2 million in FY 2016 to $11 million in FY 2024. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services grants most of that funding to each of the ten regions, and it is among the country’s most flexible public funding sources for homelessness. The regions frequently use it for barrier buster-type purchases similar to one-time cash transfers, and we believe that with updated language and a significant increase in funding they could use it to pay for their local BAY-CASH model. The consistent annual nature of this funding suggests that this may be a sustainable way to approach funding across the Commonwealth. We are also considering an independent budget line item that communities will use in tandem with the existing homeless youth budget line item.

The Executive Office of Health and Human Services and its Director of Youth Homelessness use the remainder of 4000-0007 to support a team of expert YYA consultants and young people with lived experience. They provide technical assistance, facilitate meetings, and lead regular learning opportunities for regional YYA homelessness leads and staff. They regularly support the implementation of new, promising, and best demonstrated practices, and are well suited to support the implementation of the BAY-CASH model with the initial support of the BAY-CASH Project Team.

The BAY-CASH team is working closely with private individuals, foundations, and public entities to raise the $6 million we need to launch and run BAY-CASH. So far we have raised $1.1 million and have committed partners at the city and state levels working to ensure that we will have enough financial commitment to launch in 2023/24. If you or someone you know has the capacity to make significant donation to BAY-CASH (>$50,000), please reach out to BAY-CASH Chair Matt Aronson (aronson.matthew@gmail.com) and Project Director Shayla Fonfield (baycashteam@gmail.com). We are grateful for your support!

BAY-CASH is operating in Greater Boston for four important reasons:

1) Aligned with Boston's plan to end youth and young adult homelessness. In 2019, the city published "Rising to the Challenge" a coordinated community plan to prevent and end youth homelessness that was co-developed by young people with lived experience and a range of stakeholders from across the city and state. An action step under Strategy 4, Objective 6, directs the community to, "Pilot an Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) program that dramatically reduces the barriers to acquiring basic needs resources." The plan represents more than a year of work engaging hundred of community members and the signed commitment of both the YAB and the leading public and private members of our community working on this issue. This provides BAY-CASH with important legitimacy in the region and a moral imperative to follow through on this important work.

2) Growing regional momentum for cash transfers. Over the past several years, a number of cash transfer initiatives have launched in eastern Massachusetts. The most significant of these efforts, Cambridge RISE and Chelsea Eats. have pushed the local conversation on what is possible regarding intervention models for our most vulnerable. BAY-CASH is designed to build on the momentum developed by these sister initiatives, expand our understanding of direct cash transfer programs, and further deconstruct biases against trusting vulnerable neighbors based on rigorous evidence and storytelling.

3) Boston as a national leader. BAY-CASH provides an opportunity for Boston to be a leader as part of a small national cohort working on direct cash transfers for young people experiencing homelessness. Our community has routinely led the field in policy and innovation, including leading the initial advocacy for the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act 40 years ago, and is well suited to continue leading the way. The country trusts Boston as an academic powerhouse, we have a mature funding base, and political leadership both at City Hall and on Beacon Hill to turn a pilot like BAY-CASH into a permanent fixture of our response to homelessness.

4) Greater Boston population matters. Rigorous evidence requires a large enough sample size for statistical significance. BAY-CASH will benefit from partners in Boston and the surrounding communities to conduct a successful recruitment effort (up to 120 young people). For example, Y2Y is one of the most important youth homelessness resources in the region and is located in Cambridge on the other side of the Charles River. To conduct a successful pilot means including Y2Y and other partners in Cambridge, Somerville, Everett, Quincy, Lynn, Dedham and more.

BAY-CASH is closely coordinating with national partners to ensure that our efforts reflect the most promising strategies and are contributing to the national evidence base. Our National Evaluation Lead and Core Partner, Chapin Hall, pioneered our direct cash transfer plus model for young adults experiencing homelessness and they are involved in many of the sister programs currently operating in the United States. Similarly, our National Technical Assistance Lead and Core Partner, Point Source Youth, has worked with Chapin Hall since their first pilot work in NYC and supports a number of communities working toward the same end. Our Project Director meets regularly with these partners and will coordinate with her counterparts around the country throughout the pilot.