Does universal basic income change outcomes for youth aging out of foster care?
View the program ↗Former foster youth face disproportionate risk of homelessness and financial instability once they age out of the system. A government agency needed evidence on whether a universal basic income of $1,000/month for two years measurably changed housing, education, and employment outcomes, in order to decide whether to expand the program. Eligible participants had been in the foster care system between ages 16 and 21 and were living in high-cost Santa Clara County.
- Involved from project initiation, coordinating needs across the agency and partner organizations
- Defined scope and programmed a pre/post design: baseline and matched follow-up surveys, n=72
- Built and launched the instruments in Qualtrics, using standardized questionnaires so results were comparable across time and to outside benchmarks
- Owned all quantitative analysis across housing, education, employment, and financial-security domains
- Co-created digital stories with participants (video, poetry, photography) to show the program's impact — bringing the user lens to the quantitative data
I worked on the program's first pilot phase, an initial cohort of 72 foster youth enrolled in 2020. We conducted monthly check-ins with the same 72 respondents, from enrollment through follow-up roughly two years later, tracking eight quantitative outcome measures over time. Surveys were built and fielded in Qualtrics using standardized questionnaires.
Because the participants were current and former foster youth, I calibrated the instruments before launch — testing that every question was understood as intended, and that respondents would interpret and answer it the same way. Comparing change over two years only works if the question means the same thing in month one as it does in month twenty-four, and the same thing to every respondent. That calibration is what made the numbers below trustworthy.