Child Poverty Action Lab
Model & Strategy
The Child Poverty Action Lab’s vision is to dramatically reduce childhood poverty, ensuring every child has a life filled with opportunity. Their mission is to utilize data and leverage community partners to strengthen public systems and neighborhood life, aiming to reduce childhood poverty by 50% in a single generation in Dallas. Since CPAL’s inception, Dallas has achieved one of the steepest reductions in child poverty among major U.S. cities, significantly outpacing peer cities in Texas.
The Problem
In the 15 years leading up to the creation of CPAL, Dallas saw the number of children within the city living in poverty increase by 42% while its overall population grew by only 4%. Today, Dallas has the third highest rate of child poverty among major U.S. cities, with one out of every four children growing up poor. While a plethora of nonprofits and programs exist to address poverty, they often lack a data-driven approach and fail to leverage the government resourcing needed to drive continuous and sustainable improvements.
The Solution
CPAL and their partners work relentlessly to create upward mobility for children living in poverty, over 75% of whom are Black or Hispanic. In practice, three principles define this approach:
Scalability: Child poverty is a problem of massive scale and requires the magnitude of government resources to fund solutions of equal scale. CPAL brings together the leaders of nine Dallas public agencies with a collective annual operating budget of over $10 billion to align local resources and take collective action on promising interventions.
Data: CPAL develops and applies evidence-based frameworks for child poverty alleviation programs. Data is used to determine where to develop interventions and to evaluate if those interventions are working. CPAL equips their partners and community leaders with the data to make better decisions.
Partnership: By empowering community-based organizations and residents with tools, resources, and access to leaders, CPAL builds a broad coalition for sustainable efforts to combat child poverty.
To further leverage the investments and lessons learned from this work, CPAL takes the interventions that have been most impactful in Dallas, ranging from eviction prevention to neighborhood-based public safety, and packages them into replicable playbooks for communities across the nation. Since 2018, approximately 455,000 individuals and/or households have directly benefited from CPAL programs and services, including families that have received outreach to deliver rental assistance or legal aid prior to eviction, improved experiences accessing WIC benefits, and access to reproductive healthcare at a Trust Her partner clinic.
Alan has dedicated his career to breaking intergenerational poverty and promoting economic mobility. His expertise has earned him various appointed positions, including co-chair of the Dallas Mayor’s Task Force on Safe Communities and member of the Mayor’s Steering Committee on Workforce Development. He is involved in several advisory and governing boards, including United To Learn, Dallas Thrives, Groundwork Dallas, and the Commit Partnership. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and a B.A. in sociology from Tulane University.
Impact
A sample of CPAL’s applied data work: CPAL developed a new data-sharing infrastructure to deliver daily reports on eviction filings to aid frontline providers supporting renters in need of rent relief and legal aid. Before this, eviction data was not publicly available, so providers could not proactively help families facing eviction and housing insecurity.
Since CPAL’s inception, Dallas has achieved one of the steepest declines in child poverty among major U.S. cities, significantly outpacing peer cities in Texas.
