When It's Hard to Make Ends Meet, Can Smart Apps Help?

Cities around the world take an unconventional yet effective approach to combat poverty: measuring happiness. Cities like Vancouver, British Columbia have found success in building personal relationships among the economically disadvantaged members of the society, which leads to a more productive and satisfying work life.

Children who have been through traumatic experiences have trouble opening up to people. A virtual program in Mexico City created by psychotherapists uses animated characters to get children to explain their thoughts.

Though cities around the world range in size, demographics, and countless other factories, they share a common trait: cities are loud. The app Hush City offers an easy way to find a quiet space amid the noise. The app uses crowdsourced data to report on quiet, and not so quiet, areas in densely populated areas around the world.

Depression and anxiety impact people across socioeconomic levels and geographic boundaries, despite being thought of as mostly isolated to wealthier western regions. Because training mental health professionals can be costly, many countries outside of the west have turned to training lay people in counseling tactics and practices.

Cherokee Point Elementary School in San Diego became a trauma-informed school in 2015, and since then suspensions have fallen to zero (and remained that way since) and they no longer need a campus police officer. The school's approach includes revised disciplinary practices, social-emotional instruction, free breakfast, school-wide training about trauma, strong parental engagement, and intensive individual support. They even partner with community organizations that all them to create and offer a wider variety of services than the school could on its own.

Fresh Prescription is a Detroit-based program that creates a mechanism for doctors to prescribe healthy food and fresh produce instead of medications to low-income patients, pregnant women, and people with young children. The program provides patients with a card where they can spend money on fresh fruits and vegetables from local food vendors, bridging the gap between good nutrition and good health.

This article uses the stories of five different activist women across the United States as examples of successes using the human-centered design strategy of centering the people most directly affected in the decision-making and healing process. The women work in a variety of justice areas (from housing equity to incarceration), but they all testify to a community justice model as being the most effective and empowering solution to past and current injustices.

To successfully address some of our most pressing social, economic, and health issues, simply making resources available is not always enough. Behavioral science is helping non-profits and other organizations to leverage natural human traits and tendencies to increase successful adoption of life-improving initiatives in fields from healthcare to development finance.

A large number of Americans are "unbanked or underbanked"—meaning they are not tied to traditional financial institutions to manage their money—which makes saving difficult. Walmart has managed to serve this population with a debit card program called MoneyCard that provides financial incentives to users to regularly put aside money into a "vault." This approach effectively takes into account behavioral economics in terms of how humans approach short- versus long-term rewards. Launching in August 2016, the program's membership had grown more than 130% and savings increased by 38% by December 2016.

States deal with poverty and employment differently, depending on their state legislature and, historically, their racial composition. Oregon is a predominantly white state with some of the most generous welfare and employment programs available in the union. Giving states the option of flexibility with their anti-poverty programs can cause some to reduce their safety nets, but Oregon serves as a model for bipartisan cooperation on generous welfare and employment reforms.