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Growing evidence on the links between poverty and psychology has prompted increased interest in the psychosocial impacts of economic interventions and the economic impacts of psychologically motivated interventions. In practice, psychologically motivated programs typically comprise one of many components in multifaceted poverty alleviation programs. This paper asks, what are the benefits of allocating complementary, marginal investments in anti-poverty programs towards skills development or psychologically-targeted interventions versus direct economic assistance The paper benchmarks two program-based investments against an unconditional cash transfer by randomly assigning participants in an existing anti-poverty program to one of three groups. The first is psychologically-targeted. It focuses on promoting self-confidence, sense of value and self-worth, and perceived social status. The second targets specific skills: goal setting, public speaking, and networking. Both program-based investments cost around USD $35 per participant, motivating a benchmark, cost-equivalent unconditional cash transfer. The findings show that the psychologically-targeted intervention significantly improves psychosocial outcomes but shows no economic gains relative to cash, while the skills-based program improves economic outcomes with few effects on psychosocial outcomes. The results illustrate that low-cost psychologically-targeted and skills-based interventions can be effective marginal investments relative to a small cash transfer, but their benefits may accrue in different domains.

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Out-of-school-time (OST) programs have long focused on children's social and emotional development as part of their mission of building a culture of connectedness and positive relationships between youth and adults. Research demonstrates that high-quality, evidence-based social and emotional learning (SEL) programs are associated with positive outcomes, including improved behavior, attitudes, and academic performance. This report provides tips and recommendations for incorporating high-quality SEL instruction and practices into OST programming for children and youth. The lessons are derived from the RAND Corporation's study over four years of more than 100 afterschool programs across six communities — Boston, Dallas, Denver, Palm Beach County, Tacoma, and Tulsa — participating in The Wallace Foundation's Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative. The report summarizes a variety of approaches and actions that OST programs developed over four years to support children's social and emotional development, including adding SEL content and practices into their programming, training staff in SEL, engaging families, and adopting continuous improvement systems to monitor and refine these efforts.