What the Padua Program Actually Proved — and What Therapists Can Draw From It

A randomized controlled trial by the University of Notre Dame's Lab for Economic Opportunities found that participants in Catholic Charities Fort Worth's Padua program were 25% more likely to achieve full-time employment, earned 46% higher incomes, and were 64% more likely to secure stable housing compared to a control group.[^1] Goodwill Greater Milwaukee & Chicago recently announced a partnership with Catholic Charities Fort Worth to bring the model to Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, extending a program developed in 2015 and now tested at research scale.

Those numbers describe economic and housing outcomes. They do not describe therapeutic ones. The distinction is important for clinicians who want to draw practical conclusions from the data without overstating what the trial can support.

What the program does

Padua pairs each participant with two dedicated caseworkers — a case manager and a caseworker — who provide coordinated support across employment, housing, education, and emotional resilience with no fixed time limits. The only enrollment requirement, as Brendan Perry, Director of Padua National at Catholic Charities Fort Worth, explained to EWTN News, is that participants be 18 years old and willing to work.[^1] Goals are set by the participant; timelines are organized around the person rather than a funder's reporting cycle.

Perry traced the program's design to a pattern Catholic Charities kept encountering: the same people returning in crisis, year after year. "We weren't truly creating economic mobility," he told EWTN News, describing the organization's earlier efforts.[^1] He framed Padua's founding question as: what if clients set their own goals, timelines were built around people instead of funders, and root issues were addressed rather than symptoms?

The trial confirmed that this structure produced better employment and housing results than what participants would otherwise have received. What it did not measure — and was not designed to measure — is which specific element of the program drove those results. The two-caseworker staffing model, the absence of time limits, the client-led goal structure, and the holistic coordination across domains were bundled together as an intervention. The study validates the package; it does not isolate any single mechanism.

What the evidence can support for clinical practice

Psychotherapy research has independently established that the working alliance — the quality and continuity of the relationship between helper and client — predicts outcomes across modalities. That body of evidence applies specifically to clinical relationships, not to case management. The two contexts share structural features (sustained contact, a shared goal, the gradual accumulation of trust) but differ in aims, methods, and the populations studied. Drawing on both bodies of evidence requires keeping the distinction visible.

With that caveat in place, the Padua outcomes do support a limited set of observations relevant to clinical practice.

Clients experiencing poverty, housing instability, and employment disruption arrive in therapy with adversity that is structurally entangled. A child's anxiety is often downstream of repeated forced relocation, itself downstream of income instability. Treating the anxiety while leaving the material conditions unaddressed produces the same presenting problem again. Competent case conceptualization in this context means mapping the adversity system — identifying which conditions are within the therapeutic frame and which require referral or coordination with other services — rather than treating a symptom cluster in isolation.

Client-led goal-setting, which Padua builds into its structure from the outset, corresponds to a well-established finding in psychotherapy: treatment goals that originate with the client's own named values produce more durable outcomes than externally imposed behavioral targets. In session, this means spending real time eliciting what a client actually wants for their life before constructing a treatment plan from diagnostic criteria alone.

The Padua model's absence of arbitrary time limits reflects a practical recognition that economic and housing instability cannot be addressed in ninety days. Clinicians working within managed care constraints face a different kind of pressure, but the underlying principle applies: a client who has experienced fragmented, time-boxed services may test whether the therapeutic relationship will hold before engaging seriously with the work. Premature termination driven by institutional timelines rather than clinical readiness is a real cost, and treating the alliance as something worth monitoring and protecting — naming ruptures directly, returning to them in session — is a concrete response to that risk.

The vocational dimension, carefully

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person understands human beings as relational, rational, free, and oriented toward transcendent goods, including meaningful work and contribution.[^2] Padua addresses employment as one of several interlocking goods — not because a job resolves everything, but because work is part of what flourishing looks like for most people.

Clinicians can hold the same frame without overstating it. Exploring a client's sense of meaningful contribution, and the ways unemployment or underemployment affects identity and purpose as well as finances, is a legitimate therapeutic task. The Padua data do not validate any particular clinical technique for doing this. They do confirm that programs built around the assumption that whole-person attention produces better outcomes than symptom management are not simply expressing a mission statement — at least at the level of economic and housing measures.

What the replication means

The expansion to Englewood closes a gap Perry identified as central to the program's design from the beginning: producing a model that is not only effective in one context but replicable and testable elsewhere. Licensing the Padua model to Goodwill Greater Milwaukee & Chicago is the first step in answering that question at scale.

For Catholic mental health practitioners, the most defensible takeaway from the trial is structural rather than clinical: long-term, client-led, holistically coordinated accompaniment produces measurably better economic and housing outcomes than standard alternatives. The therapeutic implications — around alliance, goal-setting, and complexity in case conceptualization — rest on their own independent research base, which the Padua results are consistent with but do not independently establish.

References

[^1]: Amira Abuzeid, "Catholic Charities Fort Worth expands research-backed anti-poverty program to Illinois," EWTN News, July 6, 2026. https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/goodwill-greater-milwaukee-and-chicago-to-bring-proven-anti-poverty-program-to-chicago-from-fort

[^2]: Craig S. Titus, William J. Nordling, and Paul C. Vitz, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person: Integration with Psychology and Mental Health Practice (Sterling, VA: Divine Mercy University Press, 2020), pp. 272–273.