Show Your Work is a 7-part series from the Health Trust on how we operate, how we make decisions, and why we think the community deserves more than our word for it.
Not everyone in Natrona County has walked through the door of a nonprofit. But most people have benefited from the infrastructure those nonprofits provide, whether they know it or not.
If you have attended a free event at David Street Station, used the public library, watched a child play youth sports or attend summer programming, or needed crisis services to be there when someone you know hit a breaking point, you have used a system that Trust-funded organizations help keep running. Those services do not appear out of nowhere. They require staff, programming, coordination, and sustained investment. That is what the Trust helps to provide.
The cheaper option is usually the one nobody sees
Here is the part that gets left out of most conversations about nonprofit funding. It is not just a good thing to do. It is the fiscally responsible thing to do.
The research backs this up, program by program.
A teenager with a boxing club and a coach in his corner costs the community a lot less than that same teenager cycling through the juvenile justice system. Researchers who study after-school and mentoring programs put the return at up to three dollars saved for every dollar spent, mostly through reduced crime and higher lifetime earnings for the kids involved. That is measured against an average cost of $112,555 a year to incarcerate a single juvenile in the United States.1
A man leaving prison with a bed at Hope House and a case manager costs less than that same man returning to jail. The White House’s own Council of Economic Advisers reviewed programs that address mental health and substance use before release and found a return of $1.47 to $5.27 for every dollar spent,2 after accounting for both reduced crime and lower long-run incarceration costs. Hope House is not the only local example of this math. Thrive Together Initiative connects people navigating reentry from incarceration or addiction with the same kind of housing, employment, health, and peer support network, and Casper Housing Authority CARES runs Foundations, transitional housing specifically for women reentering the community from institutional settings. Three organizations, three versions of the same bet: it is cheaper to help someone land on their feet than to pay for what happens when they don’t.
A family that gets rent help before an eviction costs less than a family the county has to shelter after one. A Chicago study of a rental assistance call line found that people who got help were 76% less likely to end up in a shelter within a year, and the assistance itself averaged about $9,700 less per person than the cost of the shelter stay it prevented.3
The need does not go away when the nonprofit does. It shows up somewhere else, usually somewhere far more expensive: a jail cell, an emergency room, a shelter already past capacity. A community pays for these problems either way. Nonprofits are the version where we pay for the fix instead of the fallout.
By the numbers, in Natrona County
Jail costs $147 a day to operate. Sober living arrangements in Casper, the kind Hope House and similar reentry housing rely on, run $350 to $1,000 a month, averaging around $500, or roughly $16 to $17 a day. A day in jail costs about nine times what a day of sober living costs. The same pattern holds for health care. Banner’s own pricing shows a standard primary care office visit at one of its Casper clinics runs $232 direct pay. A Level 4 emergency room visit at Banner Wyoming Medical Center runs $1,029 at the discounted cash price, and up to $2,450 at the full list charge.4 That is more than four times the cost, for a visit that, for many people, primary care could have handled.
The Rocket Docket program, which grew out of the Natrona Council for Safety and Justice (NCSJ), put real numbers behind this math in its first year. In 2025, defendants in the program were ordered to serve 4,231 days in jail. They actually served 1,105. The remaining 3,126 days were spent in treatment at the Community Corrections facility instead, which comes out to $459,522 in avoided jail costs at $147 a day. The program issued more than $75,000 in treatment credits over the year, covering everything from AA and NA sessions to residential treatment. In an average month, well more than half of participants receiving credit were not reoffending in Casper Municipal Court. That is what paying for the fix instead of the fallout looks like in practice, not as a national statistic, but as something happening in this county right now.
The pattern holds at the community level too. Places with strong nonprofit infrastructure see less crime, fewer emergency room visits for problems that could have been caught earlier, and more families who stay stably housed. That affects property values and tax burden for everyone in the county, including people who have never applied for a nonprofit’s services and never will.
There is a national number that puts a scale on all of this. The CDC estimates that health problems linked to difficult experiences in childhood, the kind our partners work to prevent and interrupt, cost the country an estimated $14.1 trillion a year in direct medical spending and lost healthy years of life.5 Natrona County’s share of that is not knowable from this figure alone, but the direction is clear. The earlier the intervention, the cheaper the outcome, for the family and for everyone who shares a tax base or an emergency room with them.
What that looked like in 2026
The Trust’s two primary investment mechanisms together will move more than $13 million into the Natrona County economy this year. That figure lines up with the breakdown in We spend $17 million a year. Not all of it goes where you think: the Banner distribution runs about 58% of this year’s $17 million budget, and community investment runs about 25%, a combined $13.5 million on this year’s numbers. The required annual distribution to Banner Wyoming Medical Center supports the region’s largest employer and Wyoming’s only Level II trauma center. The community investment portfolio funds nearly 100 organizations that employ people, bring state and federal dollars into the county, and reduce demand on emergency services that every resident pays for.
Add in the Trust’s own operational spending, staff salaries, contracted services, facility costs, and the total annual contribution to Natrona County is bigger than what most people picture when they think of a foundation that funds nonprofits.
Paying for the fix earlier
Right now, most of that community investment reaches people after a need has already shown up: after a teenager is at risk, after someone is released from incarceration, after a family is already behind on rent. That is real work, and it matters.
But the Trust is also asking a different question. What if some of these needs could be prevented instead of just met? Our Pathways to and Through Houselessness report came from talking directly to people who had been unhoused, not guessing at what would help. A separate study, the Community Housing Report, found a shortage of 1,117 units affordable to households earning $25,000 or less in Natrona County, with 66% of residents surveyed naming the cost of living itself, not a lack of services, as the main driver of housing instability. Read together, the two reports show a fuller picture: one explains how individuals end up unhoused over a lifetime, the other explains why the housing market itself can’t absorb them once they’re looking for a way back.
Preventing houselessness before it starts is almost always the cheaper move. Keeping someone housed costs far less than helping them find housing again once they’ve lost it. But prevention will not solve every case. Some people are already unsheltered today, and ending homelessness entirely is not a realistic goal for any single community. That is why the Community Housing Report calls for expanding affordable and supportive housing at the same time as prevention work, not instead of it. Affordable and transitional housing costs more per person than prevention does, but it still pays for itself. Someone living unsheltered is the most expensive version of this problem for a community to carry. Jail stays, emergency room visits, and shelter beds add up fast, whether or not anyone intended to foot that bill.
The justice system mapping done with NCSJ does not just describe the problem. It shows where, earlier in the process, a different decision could have changed the outcome entirely. That is the same logic behind why the Trust has grown its investment in advocacy and research over the past several years. Funding the nonprofit that catches someone after a crisis is necessary. Funding the work that prevents the crisis is where the real savings, financial and human, tend to be.
That shift is gradual and it is intentional, and it is a conversation we will keep having.
What the Trust does is convert a one-time hospital acquisition into an annual, multi-stream investment in the community’s health, infrastructure, and economy. That investment does not end. It compounds. And it reaches people who will never walk into a nonprofit office, apply for services, or know the name of the organization that helped make their community livable.
You do not have to use nonprofit services to benefit from that. You already do.
Sources
- After School: The Prime Time for Juvenile Crime, Police Chief Magazine ↩
- Returns on Investments in Recidivism-Reducing Programs, White House Council of Economic Advisers ↩
- The Impact of Homelessness Prevention Programs on Homelessness, Science ↩
- Banner Health Hospital Price Transparency, Banner Wyoming Medical Center and Banner Medical Group pricing data ↩
- Economic Burden of Health Conditions Associated With Adverse Childhood Experiences Among US Adults, JAMA Network Open ↩
