“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.
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.”
View the whole story here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-leaf-project-homeless-money-canada-charity-b889315.html