From pilot to policy: using critical participatory action research to build youth power and economic inclusion for young people with experience in foster care

Background: Over the past decade, unconditional cash transfer pilots have proliferated across the United States. Many are designed as top-down policy 'experiments' that rely on narrow definitions of validity, privileging randomized controlled trials and decontextualized outcome measures. In youth policy and child welfare contexts, such approaches risk epistemological violence by devaluing lived experience, denying resources to communities, relying on reductive variables and reproducing dominant narratives of deservingness. Aims and methods: This article examines YouthNPower: Transforming Care, a pilot designed by and for young people with experience in the child welfare system that provided US$1,000 per month for one year to 100 youth who aged out of foster care and was accompanied by research, organizing and policy engagement. Rooted in a critical participatory action research (CPAR) framework and using a mixed-methods design, the study drew on surveys, interviews and focus groups to document impact while resisting extractive research logics and exclusionary hierarchies of evidence. Findings: Findings indicate that unconditional cash stabilized housing, supported education, employment and wellbeing, and increased participants' sense of agency. At the same time, the research documented the limits of cash alone within conditions of structural precarity. Participatory methods also surfaced how dominant policy myths about irresponsibility and dependency are contradicted by youth's financial decision-making under constraint. Discussion and conclusion: YouthNPower demonstrates how CPAR can intervene in evidence-based policy making by strengthening epistemological accountability, redistributing epistemic authority, widening what counts as evidence, and positioning policy research as a site of collective struggle rather than post hoc evaluation.