We have exciting news! Today, we’re releasing our evaluation report for our fourth Magnolia Mother’s Trust cohort. This evaluation continues to reinforce the critical things we have seen and learned in the past – MMT increases mother’s self-efficacy, builds more confidence and hope for the future, expands children’s cultural capital, and ensures mothers have enough to meet their families needs as they see fit.
You might wonder why we keep releasing evaluation reports each year. If we’ve already shown the power of cash and benefits for families, why continue to research more? But it is our belief that all cash-based initiatives — from cash policies to guaranteed income pilots, and even our own program — should continually be informed by the voices of recipients and responsive to shift and evolve based on their feedback and expertise. Including our own fifth cohort, which will be starting later this year.
So that is exactly what this report does. It highlights what makes MMT different from other programs including dedicated staff, community building amongst participants, and personalized support that recognizes individuals’ goals and helps them get there. It also investigates the systemic barriers that continue to prevent MMT participants from being able to fully utilize all the benefits of the program. And it includes recommendations for all of us to build stronger, more holistic policies and programs that actually serve the needs of families.
And we’re doing the same thing. In all our work, we take the learnings from our evaluations to continue to reimagine Springboard services. Just this past week, a round of severe storms knocked out power for almost a week for much of the city of Jackson including some of our residents. While crisis relief work often looks like providing food and water or scrambling for in-kind resources, we have learned from MMT and our Jackson water crisis response evaluations that often cash is most helpful, and that’s what we provided – $150 cash disbursements to families affected.
As we spoke with families, each one was dealing with something different – food that had spoiled in the fridge, paying for gas to get back and forth between home and friends and family where they could find some air conditioned relief in the heat, spending money saved for bills on takeout because they had no way to cook. But cash allowed each of them to meet their needs as they saw fit. Moving forward, cash will continue to be our response in crises like this, at least until our families tell us something else is needed.
We hope you’ll take some time to read the highlights and reports linked to below and learn from our families’ wisdom as we have. We are so grateful to our partners at Social Insights Research who spent the last year conducting such a strong, resident-centered evaluation that allows us to always be learning and improving, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for recognizing the power of evaluation and continuing to fund the project.
