In 2021, the expanded Child Tax Credit cut U.S. child poverty almost in half — the lowest rate on record. It expired that December and the gains reversed. The expectation might have been a reckoning: the sector had just lost the most effective child poverty intervention in a generation, overnight. Instead the gala went on. So did the theory-of-change diagrams and the pitch decks. How was that possible?

The thesis starts with the artifacts themselves. Theory-of-change documents, branded reports, and fundraising decks don't transparently communicate about poverty — they coordinate professional work and shape the people who produce them. Made and remade daily, they may cultivate a professional class whose sense of moral purpose is bound to an apparatus that cannot structurally deliver what it promises.

From 2019 to 2025 I worked at Robin Hood as a designer and strategist in its grantmaking department. I co-led the redesign of the foundation's pitch deck — families framed in soft light, structural causes conveniently omitted — and contributed to the theory-of-change framework the thesis reads closely.