News

Contact: Lauren Slagter, lslag@umich.edu

ANN ARBOR – Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan has awarded nearly $87,000 to support faculty research as part of its annual grant program on new ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. 

Natasha Pilkauskas

“At Poverty Solutions, we take a broad view of poverty as the result of interlinked systems that don’t work for people with low incomes. These projects examine diverse facets of poverty, employing various methodological approaches. The research has strong promise to generate new insights into effective ways to alleviate poverty through conditional cash transfer programs in Latin America, helping low-wage workers find higher quality jobs, and promoting equitable access to healthy food in Detroit,” said Natasha Pilkauskas, associate faculty director of faculty engagement at Poverty Solutions and associate professor of public policy. 

As a university-wide presidential initiative, Poverty Solutions supports interdisciplinary research conducted by faculty across U-M. The 2026 faculty grant recipients are: 

Equitable by Design: Informing Michigan’s Food-as-Medicine Programs Through the Experiences of Trans Women of Color in Detroit 

Principal investigator: Kristi Gamarel, associate professor at the School of Public Health

Kristi Gamarel

In 2025, Michigan implemented Medicaid In Lieu of Services (ILOS), which enables Medicaid health plans to offer healthy and medically tailored home-delivered meals, healthy food packs, and produce prescriptions as substitutes for other covered services. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also is investing in efforts to strengthen community-based food access. Through an eight-year partnership with the Trans Sistas of Color Project (TSoCP) in Detroit, Gamarel and the research team have documented that 78.3% of trans women of color surveyed were food insecure, 66.7% earned less than $1,000 per month, and 39% were unstably housed. Working with the executive director of the Trans Sistas of Color Project, the researchers will interview trans women of color about their experiences with food assistance, food pantries, food banks, and medically linked food pathways to identify structural factors shaping access. Based on those findings, they will convene trans women of color, administrators of Medicaid In Lieu of Services, and MDHHS staff to co-develop a policy brief with implementable recommendations to promote equitable access to food-as-medicine programs. 

Helping Low-Wage Workers Find Better Jobs: Skills-First Matching and Job-Quality Nudges

Principal investigator: Anant Nyshadham, associate professor at the Ross School of Business

Anant Nyshadham

Nearly half of U.S. workers ages 18–65 (44%) earn low hourly wages, and roughly 6 million Americans remain below the poverty line despite being employed, which underscores that a job alone does not guarantee economic security. Job-to-job transitions to higher-quality employers are a key pathway out of poverty, yet low-wage jobseekers have little reliable information about which employers offer wage growth, stability, and decent working conditions. This project builds on Nyshadham’s prior randomized controlled trial (RCT) with entry-level jobseekers, where skills-based AI-assisted job matching combined with jobseeker preferences increased employment by 7 percentage points (a 12.3% increase) relative to a standard job-search platform. A new RCT will build on those findings by working with 1,500 low-wage workers across select metropolitan areas – including Detroit – to layer job-quality signals on the AI-assisted job matching platform. The goal is to assess whether better information can redirect people’s job search toward higher-quality jobs and improve long-run economic security.

Beyond Short-Term Relief: Long-Term Trajectories of Cash Transfer Programs in Latin America

Principal investigator: Luciana de Souza Leão, assistant professor of sociology

Luciana de Souza Leão

Conditional Cash Transfer programs have become one of the most widely adopted anti-poverty policies in Latin America. In contrast to welfare transfers that link cash transfers to work requirements, Conditional Cash Transfer programs often only require families to take their children to school and to health check-ups to receive the benefits. This project examines the evolution of Conditional Cash Transfer programs in five Latin American countries – Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru – between 1995 and 2025. The study has three objectives: 

• to document long-term trajectories in program characteristics and impacts; 
• to test competing explanations for program expansion and retrenchment, focusing on fiscal pressures, electoral incentives, partisan ideology, and institutional design; and 
• to assess how program architecture affects the vulnerability of Conditional Cash Transfer programs to gradual institutional change. 

By highlighting policy design choices associated with CCT program stability the research will provide practical insights for policymakers designing or reforming anti-poverty programs in national contexts.