Faith-Based Organizations and Poverty
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PST)
- Chair: David Phillips, University of Notre Dame
The Impacts of Clubfoot and Clubfoot Treatment on Ethiopian Children
Abstract
How closely do the impacts of NGO interventions align with their mission statements? We specifically study the mission statements of the largest faith-based development NGOs, who across denominations have widely adopted an integral human development (IHD) framework. These NGOs maintain a set of holistic objectives based on the example of Jesus' engagement with the poor. To formalize dimensionality reduction into an impact metric congruent with IHD-aligned mission statements, we derive value weights on IHD outcomes based on the revealed preference of Jesus as he addressed different facets of human flourishing in the New Testament accounts of his life and ministry. Working with Hope Walks, a faith-based development NGO funding clubfoot interventions in 15 countries, we use a quasi difference-in-differences methodology on data collected from 564 children in Ethiopia to estimate average treatment effects on the treated (ATT) across spiritual, physical, social, psychological, and educational outcomes. We find large and statistically significant treatment effects across all five facets of human flourishing, but only when the clubfoot intervention is carried out in infancy. Using our IHD impact index, we find our estimated ATTs of the Hope Walks intervention to exhibit larger holistic impacts than a set of previously studied faith-based development interventions.The Role of Community-based Support for Foster Families in Stabilizing Foster Care
Abstract
Children who have spent time in foster care are at an elevated risk of a wide range of adverse outcomes, including poverty, teen pregnancy, substance abuse, arrest and incarceration, low academic achievement, and poor physical and mental health measures. These differences persist even after controlling for racial, economic, and neighborhood effects. Research and policy tend to focus on foster-child-level interventions designed to ameliorate harms from participating in the foster care system. An alternative approach is to limit the harm from participating in the foster care system by improving the quality of foster care placements through better support for foster caregivers. Such support could increase foster placement stability by decreasing high rates of foster parent turnover and increasing the propensity of caregivers to become repeat foster parents. Hands of Hope provides a model of church-based support networks for foster families, which prescribes dedicated teams of volunteers to provide various supports for foster parents and kids. In this descriptive paper, we track excess demand for foster caregivers, foster parent continuance, and foster placement stability at the county-year level and identify local characteristics that predict these measures. We describe the importance of foster placement stability for both caregivers and children, and discuss options for measuring stability and potential interventions to improve stability in the foster care system. We also compare raw differences in foster parent continuance rates that evolve in matched control zip codes with and without access to a Hands of Hope participating church. We show that the presence of Hands of Hope support networks predicts an improvement in foster parent supply relative to comparable zip codes without a Hands of Hope presence.The Effect of Holistic, Wrap-Around, Intensive Case Management on Employment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial
Abstract
This paper measures the impact of a holistic anti-poverty intervention run by Action for a Better Community and Catholic Family Center in Rochester, NY. Bridges to Success provides mentoring that creates space for adults living in poverty to define their own long-term goals and then over a period of two years provides intensive staff support, short-term financial incentives, and community connections that facilitate progress toward those goals. This study measures the effectiveness of such an approach in a randomized controlled trial comparing people offered the program to group offered services that instead meet an immediate need. During the program, people offered long-term, holistic programming are 10 percentage points more likely to be employed. Most of this difference appears to persist after programming ends.Discussant(s)
Daniel Hungerman
,
University of Notre Dame
Russel Toth
,
University of Sydney
Neil Silveus
,
Hope College
Craig Gundersen
,
Baylor University
JEL Classifications
- I3 - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty
- O1 - Economic Development