New Report Outlines What Minnesotans Living in Poverty Need to Get on Pathways to Thriving
The State of Minnesota stands out as one of the nation’s most charitable, both in the amount given by individual donors and the number of philanthropic organizations. But public and private funders commonly make decisions about investments and programming without asking people with lived experience what they need.
A new report from Research in Action and CoLab — A Collective Vision: Community Pathways to Economic Thriving — reverses that trend and provides community-directed solutions to an intractable problem.
In 2024, CoLab partnered with Research in Action to conduct the first systematic, community-centered, and participant-led study of what Minnesotans living in poverty need for long-term thriving. Using the Equity in Action model, RIA worked with young adults and caregivers of children under 11 years old in Hennepin, Ramsey and Saint Louis counties to understand potential solutions to ending intergenerational poverty.
"CoLab is built to fund and support actionable research on programmatic and policy solutions to intergenerational poverty,” says Matt Morton, CoLab’s Executive Director. “Through this partnership with RIA, we set out to 'pass the mic' to youth and families living in poverty to understand what types of support they feel are most helpful to their long-term thriving.”
Over the course of just 10 months, RIA convened a Community Action Council made up of 10 young adults (aged 18-30) and parents of young children experiencing poverty to co-develop our research approach, partnered with 19 community-based organizations to collect more than 500 responses to an online survey and conducted focus groups with impacted people to further refine a set of actionable recommendations.
What we learned fell into five key finding areas that redefined the parameters and primary components of poverty and made clear that there are few, if any, current pathways to thriving.
“We found that, here in Minnesota, we are, in fact, getting it wrong when it comes to solving intergenerational poverty,” says Dr. Brittany Lewis, Research in Action’s Founder and CEO.
“It’s not about not having a job, as nearly half of our participants had full-time employment but could still not make ends meet. It’s not about being unaware of supports or unable to prioritize tasks to access readily available programs, but the reality that it takes the equivalent time and effort of another full-time job to simply apply for those programs and maintain support. It’s not about securing the right benefits to attain upward mobility because as soon as you start closing the gaps that allow you to work toward better opportunities you lose those benefits and, again, have to scramble to meet the ever rising costs of basic needs, like food and housing.”
Thanks to their expertise navigating these systems, participants articulated clear steps that direct service providers, philanthropy and other institutions can take to end the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
“What we learned from talking to those with the lived expertise navigating these systems is that we must reduce requirements and shorten wait times,” Dr. Lewis says. “We have to give people money and get out of the way. We need to focus on both physically stabilizing folks with supports like housing and utility assistance and actively address the mental and emotional trauma of intergenerational oppression and poverty. And we need to create spaces and systems that demand less of those who have been harmed the most and instead give them the time and energy they need to invest in tangible, long-term goal setting. The only solutions that will truly work are the ones provided by impacted communities.”
“CoLab will use these insights to help guide our philanthropic investment priorities in research — and we hope other public and private sector funders will similarly dedicate time to these findings and explore opportunities for bolstering alignment between their investments and community-identified solutions," Morton says.