Sutherland launches initiative to address families' barriers to upward mobility

Salt Lake City’s Sutherland Institute has launched its Work & Opportunity Initiative with an accompanying research report.

“The primary goal of the Work & Opportunity Initiative is to identify and address any barriers to upward mobility experienced by Utah families, especially those striving to escape poverty,” the institute said in a statement accompanying the release.

Sutherland’s initial policy and research effort anchoring the Work & Opportunity Initiative is a new report titled “Strengthening the American Dream: Addressing benefits cliffs to empower safety net participants to pursue work and opportunity.” The paper features a statewide survey of current and recent social safety net participants, prepared in partnership with Lighthouse Research, that identifies reported instances of Utah families altering their economic decision-making due to fear of triggering a “benefits cliff.”

The survey of social safety net participants found that 77 percent of respondents expressed concern that earning extra income would trigger a loss of benefits that would make their families worse off and that 43 percent at some point intentionally limited their household income in order to avoid triggering loss of benefits. Twenty-six percent said that they had at one time or another lost government assistance due to earning too much, then lost or quit the job and re-enrolled in government programs.

The paper includes a framework of policy recommendations, such as increasing state-level flexibility from the federal government to explore innovative alternative approaches to safety net reform, providing enhanced financial planning tools for safety net participants and conducting additional study of social safety net recidivism.