Projects

In this series, we invite people with various types of expertise to share their views on how poverty intersects with social systems.

A new randomized controlled trial will work with 1,500 low-wage workers across select metropolitan areas to layer job-quality signals on an AI-assisted job matching platform.

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 researchers 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.

Guaranteed Income to Grow Ann Arbor (GIG A2) was a two-year pilot that provided monthly payments of $528 to 100 Ann Arbor entrepreneurs and gig workers with low incomes, from January 2024 through December 2025. Another 100 people from the eligible applicant pool participated in a randomized controlled trial, without receiving the monthly payments.

The purpose of this project is to assess the feasibility, acceptability, usability, and impact of WorkChat: A Virtual Workday as an intervention to support income growth through sustained employment for adults with psychosis spectrum disorders.

Housing Solutions for Health Equity (HSHE) at U-M was launched in 2021 with the mission of addressing the critical intersection between housing and health equity. 

The project seeks to understand whether educating a community about factors outside of personal choices helps change attitudes toward inequality and anti-poverty programs in the Philippines.

Rx Kids is the nation's first community-wide cash prescription program for pregnant moms and babies.

Using monthly data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U-M’s Rapid Insights Jobs Report analysis provides key charts and findings that highlight new developments in the labor market.

A multi-year collaboration between U-M's Poverty Solutions and the Detroit Phoenix Center aims to include the perspectives of Detroit youth who have experienced housing instability in conversations about homelessness response.

This project worked with a volunteer software development group, Code4Community at Northeastern University, to develop a freely-available, user-friendly version of the letter-generation tool that will be distributed to youth development and job training programs.

The Young Black Men, Masculinities, and Mental Health (YBMen) Project is a global movement that centers the voices, experiences, and realities of Black men and boys.

This project will compare the diverse ways in which previous experiences with Conditional Cash Transfers determined how COVID-19 cash assistance were envisioned and operationalized in Brazil and Colombia.

Complete and adequate plumbing in people's homes is a growing concern for Michigan communities and affects poor and minority households disproportionately.

Poverty Solutions is partnering with the Washtenaw County Prosecutor's Office on a data-driven project focused on uncovering potential racial disparities within the prosecutorial system and increasing the transparency and accountability of the system generally.

The goals of this project are to better understand the state of first-time homebuyer education in Detroit and to analyze public data sources that represent the state of sales and homeownership in Detroit.

Poverty Solutions and its partners have explored supportive land contracts as a path to homeownership and the policies needed to reduce abuse of predatory land contracts.

The aim of this project was to pilot and assess the feasibility of a "community tech workers" model that equips Detroit residents to provide digital support to community members experiencing digital poverty.

This project used a mixed methods case study design to amplify how Black families make decisions and leverage resources in support of their children's mathematics education during COVID-19.

Sixty families in Wayne County eventually engaged with the benefits coach and completed an application for benefits. Sixty-eight percent of them were approved for at least one program, and 32% were denied for their entire application.

A partnership between researchers at Poverty Solutions and Princeton University’s Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Understanding Communities of Deep Disadvantage seeks to unpack poverty beyond income-based measures to other dimensions of disadvantage, including health and social mobility.

Researchers supported the COVID-19 Food Delivery Program's maintenance and the (re)design, implementation, and program evaluation of the (re)design. Their recommendations helped to secure resources to double the program's capacity and sustain its implementation till 2024.

This research project aims to ensure a county resolution declaring racism a public health crisis has a meaningful impact on the health and well-being of residents of color.

This project ran simulations for 10 states to determine how equalizing voting districts based on citizen voting-age population — rather than total population — would impact minority representation and partisan preference.

The Detroit River Story Lab sought to partner with local organizations in their ongoing efforts to strengthen the narrative infrastructure of the Detroit River corridor in order to reconnect communities with the river and its stories.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially damaging to communities of color in the United States.

This grant allowed Sara Heller to expand on three research projects that can provide evidence to guide the development of effective interventions aimed at youth whose families have low incomes.

The research pilot consisted of interviews with 36 University of Michigan students who received free tuition and HAIL scholarship offers and 20 parents who live in Southeast Michigan.

This project developed and fielded a survey of federal Continuums of Care from March 2020 to January 2021 to better understand: how they are organized; strengths and weaknesses they face in their task to end homelessness in their jurisdictions; and how they responded to and were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.