Recognizing that Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among America’s largest cities and the imperative to improve residents’ economic circumstances, the City of Philadelphia released a Poverty Action Plan in March 2020 with the goal of lifting 100,000 Philadelphians out of poverty over five years. One of several solutions proposed in the plan included forming a fund, known as The Poverty Action Fund, to support scalable, community-based strategies to reduce the number of Philadelphians living in poverty. The city’s first major step toward meeting this goal was committing $10 million through The Poverty Action Fund to United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey (UWGPSNJ) to oversee The Promise. The Promise is a public-private partnership dedicated to meeting some of the goals of the Poverty Action Plan. Key aspects of The Promise include “community challenges,” wherein community-based organizations receive funding from UWGPSNJ to partner on efforts to improve city residents’ material conditions. Because eligible Philadelphians leave millions of dollars’ worth of public benefits and refundable tax credits on the table each year, the first community challenge launched, called the Family Stability Challenge, funds service provider coalitions to collaborate on connecting underserved populations with benefits and credits. In 2022, UWGPSNJ engaged the Urban Institute to conduct an evaluation of the early implementation of the Family Stability Challenge (FSC).

This report provides a scan of relevant literature and contextual information important for understanding the FSC. Key findings include the following:

• Philadelphia’s poverty rate is high, with more than 22 percent of residents living below the federal poverty level in 2021. And the distribution of poverty and the inability to meet basic needs is highly unequal, with racial and ethnic minority groups experiencing poverty and material hardship at disproportionate rates compared with White residents. Further, poverty is concentrated in certain neighborhoods.
• Public benefits and refundable tax credits have key roles to play in reducing material hardship for people with low wages or who are unable to work and are linked to improved long-term financial stability and other positive well-being outcomes for recipients.
• That said, public benefits and tax credits alone are not a long-term solution to poverty. The current suite of benefits and credits have important limitations, including limited eligibility and low benefit levels offered by many programs. Further, eligible people face various barriers to accessing benefits and credits, including administrative burdens like extensive paperwork and long wait times. And the jobs people who receive public benefits are likely to qualify for are often unstable or do not pay enough to lift a family out of poverty, meaning people cycle between work and public benefit receipt or receive benefits to supplement insufficient income.
• Though evidence for effectiveness of cross-organizational collaborative approaches to improving services is limited, several promising models exist. Evidence suggests that being intentional about partnering in ways that complement in-house capacities can lead to more useful collaboration. Setting shared goals and developing strong data-sharing practices are also promising practices.

These findings have several implications that funders, human services practitioners, and others in Philadelphia’s antipoverty ecosystem may want to consider moving forward:

• Poverty is a critical problem that affects people’s well-being, and public benefits and tax credits are important for ensuring people experiencing poverty can meet their basic needs. But eligible people often leave these resources on the table. Therefore, increasing the capacity of service providers like the FSC partners to facilitate access is important.
• Public benefits and tax credits have limitations and people experiencing poverty have limited opportunities to gain stable and well-paid employment. This means that increasing access to these resources alone is only part of the solution to ensure people avoid material hardship.
• Models of promising cross-organizational collaboration offer FSC coalitions approaches to learn from moving forward to strengthen their own collaborative approaches. They may want to focus on ensuring collaborative activities are complementary and a value-add to individual organizations’ work.

In the coming year, the Urban Institute team will release additional reporting on the early implementation of the FSC and provide insights for future work on the effort and for the field.