Slingshot Memphis

Slingshot Memphis is a poverty-fighting center of influence that's igniting a movement to revolutionize the way we fight poverty. Unlike business, medicine, and many other sectors that have established, objective processes for measuring outcomes, the poverty-fighting ecosystem simply hasn't. This has made it nearly impossible to know which programs and services most effectively reduce social and economic gaps. Slingshot has addressed this by developing a new, standardized methodology to measure poverty-fighting effectiveness. By providing previously unavailable insights about poverty-fighting outcomes, we empower decision makers to allocate financial and other resources toward solutions that produce effective outcomes for our neighbors experiencing poverty. We believe that as our community embraces this new methodology—or “Poverty-Fighting Feedback Loop”—we can measurably reduce poverty and accelerate access to equitable opportunities for all Memphians. To turn our mission into reality, we work with poverty-fighting organizations to study their effectiveness, identify opportunities to enhance their outcomes, and invest directly to amplify high-impact programs and services.