When Ray got the news that he’d been chosen to receive the cash, he was living in an emergency shelter and trying to find a way out. Unlike what most people tend to assume, he did not buy drugs or drink it away. In actuality, he took a computer course, found housing, and started working toward a job helping people with addictions.

“I kind of want to give back to where I’ve came from,” Ray told CBC, his last name withheld for privacy. “I might one day be that important person that has a powerful voice … a seed can grow into an oak tree.”

Ray was one of 50 people in the New Leaf Project, an experiment run in Vancouver by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia. The premise was almost provocatively simple: take people who had recently become homeless, hand each one a lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars, attach no conditions whatsoever, and see what happens. A separate group of 65 people received no cash and served as the comparison.

The study ran back in 2018, and its results were striking enough that it took years and a peer-reviewed journal to fully vet........

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