Thanks to $1.9B in federal grant funding from the American Rescue Plan, Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot took bold action to put residents at the heart of the City’s response. Aligned with recommendations from the 2019 Chicago Resilient Families Task Force report “Big Shoulders, Bold Solutions: Economic Security for Chicagoans” (click this link to view the report), the Lightfoot administration set aside $31.5M to pilot a monthly cash assistance program that would benefit 5,000 Chicago residents - the largest pilot in the country by number of households served.
Our Guiding Principles
"Our entire city has been living through unprecedented times, which made it all the more important for us to take an bold approach in providing our residents with relief," said Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot. "Our Cash Assistance program was that relief for many of our most vulnerable residents, and underscores the importance of City government developing innovative solutions to the challenges our communities are facing during the pandemic."
Standing up a large-scale program that will reach the city’s most vulnerable and hard-to-reach residents is no easy feat.
But thanks to examples set by cash assistance programs all over the country – from our own emergency rental assistance programs from the Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) and Department of Housing (DOH) to guaranteed income pilots like those in Chelsea, MA and Los Angeles, CA – we were able to take a running start to operationalize our pilot.
While most pilots across the country have taken up to 18 months to stand up, the CRCP was able to move from design to first payments distributed within just six months. Five key principles guided all of our major design and implementation decisions: the CRCP needed to be equitable, inclusive, scalable, human-centered, and supportive of individual choice at every stage.
“The development of this entire pilot is rooted in flexibility and choice. In providing that flexibility, the participants of this pilot are afforded the dignity to determine their own definition of success and move forward on their own terms,” said DFSS Commissioner Brandie Knazze.
The work began by convening an Advisory Group of more than 40 leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to discuss the challenges that our City’s low-income residents are facing, and how to design and promote the pilot for maximum impact.
Our weekly conversations gave us the space to grapple with difficult questions, such as: where should we set the income limit in the eligibility criteria? How do we balance citywide outreach with deep outreach to vulnerable populations? How can we minimize application burden while ensuring compliance and accountability?
"Success of the CRCP required that we look at this concept from all angles, and it was critical to bring these perspectives to the table before implementation of this project,” Economic Security of Illinois Director, Harish Patel said. “CRCP's success in supporting 5,000 Chicagoans over the course of a year will open up opportunities for even greater impacts in the future."
That guidance helped determine the outreach, selection, and administration strategies that would ultimately inspire over 176,000 individuals to apply. In the coming weeks, we will share more stories and datapoints that illustrate how we kept our guiding principles at the center of each decision about design and implementation.
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