The “Weight Watchers” Approach to Fighting Poverty

Weight Watchers helps people to lose weight using a system that is heavily dependent on user feedback, if you’re charting and tracking your food intake, then you have a realistic shot at making the kinds of choices and changes that are going to lead to weight loss (but don’t get me started on the recent points shakeup, I want no part of that firestorm.)

Can a similar approach, engaging low-income families in a system of self-reporting and constant feedback, work to fight poverty?

That’s not what Maurice Miller started out trying to learn, but he seems close to finding out anyway. Last Tuesday, Maurice was the lead speaker at an event here at New America, “Social Innovation and Community Solutions for a New War on Poverty.” At the event he described how he came to walk away from a long career in the traditional social service industry and to found a new model, the Family Independence Initiative. FII allows low-income families to organize themselves and decide what actions and choices will best meet their immediate needs and help them to grow toward financial security in the long run. By following through on those choices and reporting the results to FII, families can earn monetary rewards. The program has been studied by outside evaluators and found to have positive impacts on the participating families.

It’s an innovative idea, and one that’s been tried by FII in the bay area, Hawaii and Boston. It cuts down on program overhead and has potential as a way to make limited resources go farther. We think it’s an idea that’s worth thinking about and studying further, sort of an (un) conditional cash transfer. If you’re interested in learning more about the project you can watch the event video, which also features commentary from Marta Urquilla of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation and Mark Greenberg from the Administration for Children Families at HHS. You can also read the two papers we recently published on FII, the first is an essay by Maurice Miller, talking about the project and how he came to develop it, the second is an analysis of policy implications of the FII model, written by my colleagues Anne Stuhldreher and Rourke O’Brien.

If you’re pressed for time, watch the interview below where Reid Cramer interviews Maurice Miller, it’s a worthwhile 6 minutes: