Since 2021, Blumont has implemented a housing-centered approach to support displaced women and their families in Colombia — combining short-term rental assistance with social protection and psychosocial services to help Venezuelan migrants and displaced Colombians build a foundation for lasting self-reliance.
A peer-reviewed study, , published in the journal Social Science & Medicine—Population Health, shows this approach works. The research was led by Dr. Ilana Seff and Dr. Lindsay Stark at Washington University in St. Louis. Drs. Seff and Stark are also academic advisors to the .
Juan Pablo Franco Jiménez, Blumont’s Country Director in Colombia, is a co-author of the paper and shared additional insight as to how this study came about and what it means for continued efforts to support displaced communities.
Short term rental support helped displaced Colombian families begin to rebuild.
How did this study come about?
When we first incorporated rental support into programming with displaced women in 2021, one word kept coming up: tranquilidad. It translates roughly as “peace of mind,” but the women using it were describing something deeper—emotional safety, stability, a sense that life was no longer on the edge. We heard it repeatedly and wanted to capture this idea in our work.
To understand the pathways to self-reliance, we expanded data collection beyond traditional markers like income or ability to pay rent to include questions about agency and well-being. An found that combining rental support with social protection and psychosocial services kept families housed and reduced reliance on aid a full year after rental support ended.
To measure self-reliance more rigorously, we reached out to the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative, whose Self-Reliance Index (SRI) the U.S. State Department and others use to assess livelihood interventions. Housing wasn’t the typical use case—but we saw an opportunity.
Blumont’s Acogida team in MedellÃn worked with local partners to support Venezuelan migrants looking to build stability.
What did you hope to learn?
This work focuses on our Acogida program, which provided nine months of rental support, social protection, and connections to local services for Venezuelan migrant families in Colombia. A housing-centered approach challenges a common perception that efforts to help families find stability should start with livelihoods and income. Some people also doubt that a short-term intervention could have a lasting effect—is nine months enough for families to build capacities and affect longer term outcomes? Again, we were observing a difference but we wanted data to prove it.
So…can nine months of rental support have a longer-term effect?
Yes!
A study led by Dr. Stark entitled , published in the journal Cambridge Prisms: Global Mental Health, evaluated outcomes for 517 female-headed Venezuelan households before and after the nine-month Acogida rental assistance program. It found that rental support alleviated financial pressure in the immediate term while freeing up the mental bandwidth that families need to move out of survival mode.
Improvements were seen across almost every dimension of self-reliance measured: food security, healthcare access, savings, employment, safety, and relational capital. Subjective well-being and perceived agency both improved significantly. And the effects lasted beyond the rental support itself.
The recently published second study, published in and led by Dr. Seff, goes further, comparing rental support recipients to a matched group of equally vulnerable households who applied for assistance but did not receive it due to funding limits. This design — known as propensity score matching — is the closest researchers can get to a controlled experiment without random assignment, and it allows for a much more credible answer to the question: did the program actually cause these improvements, or would families have gotten better anyway?
Again—the answer is yes. At two months after the program ended, households that received assistance scored between 0.3 and 0.9 standard deviations higher than the comparison group across nearly every outcome measured — including overall self-reliance, peace of mind, life satisfaction, sense of agency, self-efficacy, and sense of community. We also saw that not only were these changes sustained at the one-year post intervention mark, in some instances, the gap between those that received assistance and those that had not widened (even as both groups saw improvement overall).
While gains in income were seen in the short term, that effect wasn’t statistically significant in a longer period. What we saw is that the capacity to be self-reliant — to feel in control, to believe in one’s ability to shape the future — is built through stability, not income alone.
What should we take away from these studies?
When a family has reliable housing, they have stable ground to build on. The acute stress of not knowing whether you can pay rent or where your children will sleep consumes the mental and emotional energy people need to make decisions, pursue opportunities, and invest in their futures. Remove that stress, and something shifts. Families start to plan — not just for tomorrow, but for years ahead. It is tranquilidad.
Data show that rental assistance does not hand families stability — it gives them the conditions to build it themselves. The improvements seen across self-reliance, peace of mind, agency, and sense of community are not the program doing the work for people; they are evidence of what people can do when the ground beneath them is not constantly shifting.
For donors and policymakers, the case is straightforward: short-term, targeted rental assistance for the most vulnerable displaced households is an efficient, cost-effective investment with broad and lasting effects for women, their children, and the communities they are building.