My Brother’s Keeper

This Edge piece is a collaboration of Calvin Johnson, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research, Evaluation, and Monitoring and Todd Richardson, Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development

You may recall that Todd’s last Edge post with Mark Shroder was on the troubling Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration program, which revealed that boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods experienced deleterious mental health outcomes and an associated increase in risky behavior. These findings highlight for us what has proven to be a national challenge and a more specific challenge for HUD’s efforts to use housing as a platform to improve quality of life — in what ways can housing serve as an intervention to provide poor youth with ladders to opportunities known to be associated with success in adulthood?

The results of the MTO demonstration are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of challenges these youth face. Compared with both white men and minority women, minority men have much lower rates of educational attainment, much higher rates of being murdered, and much higher rates of unemployment.

President Obama highlighted this challenge in February when he signed a presidential memorandum establishing the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force. The task force’s mission was to determine what public and private efforts are successfully improving outcomes for minority boys and young men and how to expand on them; how the federal government’s own policies and programs can better support these efforts; and how to increase the involvement of state and local officials, the private sector, and the philanthropic community in these efforts.

The task force’s 90-day report to the president provides a blueprint for action with roles for government, business, nonprofit, philanthropic, faith, and community partners. The task force paid particular attention to interventions at different life stages that most significantly affect the chances for success in adulthood:

• Getting a healthy start and entering school ready to learn.
• Reading at grade level by third grade.
• Graduating from high school ready for college and career.
• Completing postsecondary education or training.
• Successfully entering the workforce.
• Keeping children on track and giving them second chances.

The report states that “at each of these life milestones, some individuals start to fall behind. Once a young person falls behind, success becomes exponentially more difficult.” The focus, therefore, is on equipping young people with “the tools they need to build successful lives.”

To be clear, administering these critical interventions is a multiagency effort. The U.S. Department of Education reaches these youth through its partnerships with local schools. Most extremely low-income children are now covered by public health care thanks to programs offered through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The U.S. Department of Justice has contact with far too many of these youth; by age 23, nearly half of black males and 44 percent of Hispanic males have been arrested one or more times. And the U.S. Department of Labor is supporting workforce development programs in low-income communities nationwide through its YouthBuild program, which was housed at HUD until 2003.

HUD’s role is place-based, focusing directly on supporting the well-being of neighborhoods and communities as well as their residents. With HUD funding, public housing agencies and private owners of assisted properties provide affordable housing to the 28 percent of minority youth and their families who are living in poverty — 1.5 million boys ages 17 and under in 2012.

Because HUD connects with youth where they live rather than at school, in a medical clinic, or in a criminal justice or workforce development setting, the agency is well positioned to initiate neighborhood-focused strategies. HUD is also in a good position to engage families before children start school, during the crucial years between ages 0 to 4.

But which place-based strategies work? Certainly, MTO shows that moving to lower-poverty, safer neighborhoods alone does not appear to work; in fact, it might be counterproductive.

Several promising strategies exist that could potentially benefit the youth targeted by My Brother’s Keeper:

• Nurse-Family Partnership. This program offers new mothers home visits from nurses who provide support to those who otherwise would not receive pre- or postnatal care. Findings from the evaluation’s 15-year followup indicate that nurse-visited families show dramatically better outcomes than families without nurse visits on several measures: childhood injuries through age 2, smoking during pregnancy, child abuse and neglect, delinquency convictions, and workforce participation among single moms.
• Becoming a Man (BAM) – Sports Edition. This intervention, while youth were involved, resulted in 40 percent lower violent arrest rates and increased school engagement (attendance) compared with the control group. After BAM ended, however, the decrease in violent arrests disappeared.
• Jobs Plus. This intervention provided employment and training assistance to all working-age, nondisabled adults who were living in a public housing development and were unemployed or underemployed. Services were delivered at an onsite job center. Among many other positive findings, participants significantly increased their earnings.

As My Brother’s Keeper takes shape, we will look for opportunities to promote these promising interventions as well as others that we currently have under evaluation, such as Family Self-Sufficiency and Family Options for homeless families.