F4GI

The Fund For Guaranteed Income (F4GI) organization could be thought of as bureaucracy ninjas, specializing in the development of technology for sending cash and resources to low-income families across America – without the red tape and with no strings attached. They develop and implement platforms that more effectively deliver guaranteed income and housing aid programs, so more of the money gets into the right hands at the right time, at less cost to the provider.

But they’re much more than a tech company. Their aim is to build a new safety net that enables the kind of financial redistribution they believe is needed for a just and sound society. In so doing, they’ve become an integral delivery vehicle in a large petri dish of social experiments, pilot programs and sophisticated research studies. They use the resulting knowledge of impact, systems, and processes to further hone their delivery platforms, contribute to advocacy, and influence policy to get low-income households more cash support.

Founder Nika Soon-Shiong’s PhD in Universal Cash Transfer systems and years with the World Bank implementing such programs globally formed the basis for creating F4GI. She started the organization during COVID, when 155 cash transfer pilots launching across America necessitated more effective delivery mechanisms. 

“Pilots aren’t enough unless they establish a set of tools for the future or change a policy,” Nika says. “We started by building and implementing a payment platform for the Compton Pledge Guaranteed Income program, with a lot of community and official input.” As more communities began their own GI programs, F4GI was able to build on their Compton platform to support them.

With each program – they now run dozens across the country – their learning, connections, and influence grow.

“We’re interested in reshaping the conversation around welfare fraud,” says Nika. “It’s always framed as poor people taking more money than they should. But the bigger financial waste comes from companies and policy makers building poor programs that cost too much, don’t get the money into the right hands, and over-charge recipients.”

In addition to streamlining processes and cost for government funding bodies, F4GI funnels revenues into supporting small community efforts in financial aid.

F4GI modifies its programs for every situation, through dialogue with the communities and funders involved. They tackle obstacles potential recipients have to overcome in order to even receive funds, including a system of prepaid debit cards that can be delivered to an NGO when recipients don’t have a fixed address or a bank account.

A prime example of the evolution of their work is the direct rental assistance program they’ve developed with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). F4GI is among a number of The Patchwork Collective’s grantee partners to recognize that keeping a roof over people’s heads is cheaper and less destructive to society than letting those people enter the houseless cycle. The Housing Pledge program F4GI has developed with HUD is an expansive project designed to test a new way of doing that.

In the current Housing Choice Voucher program, HUD uses a system in which 1 in 10 eligible households are chosen to receive aid, even after waiting 2 ½ years or more for that possibility. HUD pays landlords directly on behalf of the approved renter. Meanwhile, 60% of landlords who stopped participating in the system did so because the bureaucracy was too onerous, and only 61% of recipients actually manage to use their hard-won vouchers because the many steps that have to be completed can’t be accomplished in the time given, including finding a willing landlord.

The Housing Pledge pilot’s goal is to improve the program’s success rate by removing many of the current obstacles for all parties. Cash subsidies will go directly to the renter, who can pay the landlords in full each month as most renters do, increasing their potential to find adequate housing. Search support is also part of the program. Paperwork on all sides is reduced, including a more streamlined process for HCV administration and lease agreements. Landlords get stable tenants who are financially backed by the program.

A robust impact measurement study is being developed to ensure maximum learning from the pilot. Success factors will include not just the usual questions of how many people remained housed, but tangible efficiency markers such as time saved by the housing authority, landlords, and tenants. All are important aspects of effective infrastructure development. 

The Housing Pledge is just one of many programs developed or enabled by F4GI. All have to do with elevating human wellbeing through the effective redistribution of wealth across multiple sectors of society, a goal near and dear to The Patchwork Collective. “TPC’s multi-year, catalytic grant was critical to evolving our approach from the beginning, when it was still very experimental and a product of the urgency of that time,” says Nika. “We needed to be in the world testing pilots and programs, not spending our time fundraising. TPC was pivotal in making that possible.”

The Patchwork Collective believes in taking calculated risks of this nature, to forward the kind of critical social change that can only come through experimentation. We look forward to following F4GI’s continued progress in this area.

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