RMAPI Bridges to Success Program and Evaluation - Henry fitts, director of innovation

The Bridges to Success program is one of the Office of Innovation’s longest running projects for which I have been part of the project team. The program was an early pilot launched by the Rochester Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI) and then led by partner organizations Catholic Family Center, Action for a Better Community, and The Community Place of Greater Rochester. The program provides families a dedicated life coach and a framework for setting and achieving goals to improve major areas of their life. The life coach assists the family in accessing services and resources to achieve the goals. The program is modeled off of the nationally acclaimed EMPath Program which was developed in Boston, and shares the same goals to help families achieve economic mobility and increased household earnings.
 
Importantly, the program is being evaluated using a rigorous randomized control trial methodology that will provide irrefutable evidence of whether the program is working or not. When participants apply to the program, they complete an intake assessment that provides baseline data on the family, and are then randomized into the ‘service’ or ‘comparison’ group. The ‘service’ group receives the full suite of intensive services from the program for two years. The ‘comparison’ group is referred to other area services that can assist with any immediate needs, but doesn’t receive the life coach or long-term, comprehensive approach provided by the program. Both groups are tracked over time through follow up surveys and data provided by the NYS Department of Labor and Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. Comparing the ‘service’ and ‘comparison’ group outcomes helps screen out the effects of any global economic forces that would theoretically either help or hurt both groups equally, such as an economic recession. The difference between the two groups is the true effect of the program. The main metric the program is seeking to improve is household earnings. In effect, the evaluation is testing the impact on earnings of providing a life coach and goal setting framework. The hypothesis is this service helps families better navigate and access the wealth of existing local services and make better long-term decisions to set themselves up for economic success. The official results of the evaluation are expected to be available in 2020, with additional ongoing updates as the participants are tracked after they graduate. We are hoping to see at least a 19 percent increase in earnings attributed to the program.
 
To help design and oversee the sensitive evaluation, our local partners have been fortunate to engage the University of Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunity, who are some of the nation’s leading experts on this type of evaluation in the anti-poverty and non-profit space. The evaluation has been funded by MIT Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s (J-PAL) and their North America Local Government Program. Members of the Office of Innovation provided significant early support for the design of the evaluation, helping to build it into the operational design of the program while working with our non-profit partners to navigate concerns and issues. I have also had the opportunity to attend an intensive J-PAL training on randomized control trial evaluations and a series of J-PAL convenings that brought together other local communities implementing similar evaluations.
 
Click here to read more detail about the evaluation in a recent blog post I wrote for the J-PAL’s blog.