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31 FINANCIAL STABILITY
Challenge Low-income New Yorkers are highly
Response Your support fuels our ability to fight for access to financial stabilization services and public benefits. Advocating for increased wages enables lower-income families to keep pace with inflation, save money, and invest in their futures. Proposed budget cuts to critical programs like food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid, housing supports, and workforce development, threaten the financial stability of already vulnerable New Yorkers. Our advocacy is informing policymakers about the consequences of cutting these programs. Your support helps us keep the City’s safety net intact, preventing more New Yorkers from failing into poverty.
susceptible to destabilizing financial shocks, such as an unexpected medical bill, a spike in their rent, or a reduction in job hours, which can set families on a downward financial spiral. Many eligible New Yorkers are unaware they may qualify for public assistance benefits. As the affordability crisis broadens, a third of parents with children have taken a second job to help make ends meet and 73% of parents of children report reducing the amount of money they put into savings. Research tells us that accessing programs like food stamps and housing assistance stabilizes eligible lower-income families and better positions them for upward economic mobility.
Here’s What You Made Possible
IN 2024
Following an extended advocacy effort funded by Robin Hood, New York City’s minimum wage increased to $16.50 at the beginning of 2025 and is scheduled to increase another 50 cents per hour in 2026. Future increases in the state’s minimum wage will be indexed to rising inflation.
Your gift to Robin Hood helped families unlock more than $90 MILLION in public assistance programs last year. The average annual government benefit per household was $750 for utility assistance and $15,000 for housing support.
GRANTS TOTALED $16.7 MILLION
Since the start of this advocacy effort, lawsuits by nonprofit hospitals against patients
Reining in medical debt and reforming collection practices targeting low-income New Yorkers. Through the #EndMedicalDebt campaign, funded in part by Robin Hood, a newly enacted state law bans medical debt lawsuits against patients living 400% below the poverty line and caps their payments at 5% of the gross family income. The law also establishes clear protections for underinsured patients, eliminates income and immigration status requirements, and prohibits hospitals from denying care due to unpaid medical bills.
Forty-three percent (43%) of families with children cannot cover an unexpected $400 expense with cash or a cash equivalent.
DROPPED BY 82% .
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