WIC Playbook
CPAL, IDEO.org, and Texas and Dallas WIC have partnered to understand how we might increase uptake of WIC benefits from both clinic and participant perspectives. Through research and prototyping in Dallas, we discovered pain points and a few opportunity areas to test with the goal of improving the benefit program.
This Playbook is your first step to prototyping different concepts within the opportunity areas. It highlights some of the key ideas, gives you guiding principles to follow, and helps you start building low-cost, quick, and low-fidelity prototypes to test and iterate upon. This process will help you start to identify which ideas will have the most impact.
View more
CPAL Partner Spotlight: Dallas College
What happens when a college system turns data into action?
- In this CPAL Partner Spotlight, we explore how Dallas College partnered with the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) to better identify and support student parents — an often-overlooked group facing barriers to completing their education.
- By integrating CPAL’s data analysis with Dallas College’s holistic Student Care Network, the college was able to identify 8,500 student parents supporting more than 25,000 children — and connect many of them with public benefits, wraparound services, and long-term opportunities for economic mobility.
- "CPAL helped us ask the right questions—and the ripple effect is now touching veterans, foster youth, dual credit students, and more."
2025 Rental Housing Needs Assessment
The 2025 Rental Housing Needs Assessment establishes a shared fact base on rental affordability, supply, and opportunity in the City of Dallas.
- Dallas faces a 46,000-unit shortage of rental homes affordable to very low-income households earning ≤50% of Area Median Income (AMI). Since CPAL first published this report in 2023, the gap has grown by more than 12,000 units.
- Between 2021 and 2023, the number of rental units priced below $1,000 per month was cut in half — a loss of over 50,000 units. Today, 90% of affordable units for low-income renters are unsubsidized and vulnerable to market pressures.
- Half of all renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing, including 75% of single parents with children and 65% of senior renters. Extremely low-income renters spend, on average, 78% of their income on housing, leaving little room for other necessities.
Role of Junk Fees in the Dallas Rental Housing Market
During summer 2024, CPAL began to explore the role of junk fees in the rental housing market in Dallas.
- 56 out of 60 apartment complexes surveyed charged mandatory monthly fees (i.e., “junk fees”), in addition to the base rent.
- These fees cost renters, on average, $756 to $984 per year, further eroding housing affordability.