In 2020, federal pandemic relief excluded undocumented immigrants by design. They paid taxes, lost work, and qualified for nothing. This was built to reach them anyway.

Co-designed at Robin Hood, it delivered more than $10 million in direct cash to roughly 5,000 undocumented New Yorkers, fast, with the documentation burden kept low enough that people could actually receive it. No theory of change, no pilot. Cash, to people who needed it, in the months it mattered.

It stays the clearest case I have that a system like this can be built at speed when the will exists.