Brionna Miller holds her youngest son Kni’daar at her home in Buffalo. Miller is among 50 moms and children in a pilot funded by the Bridge Project, a New York City-based nonprofit that is funding guaranteed income programs in several communities across the Northeast and Midwest. These programs provide monthly stipends, with no strings attached, to help families with low incomes raise their families. (Photo by Sharon Cantillon)
As Brionna Miller and her boyfriend prepared for their second child early last year, a letter arrived from their landlord, who had just sold the house where they lived.
“We had 30 days to get out,” Miller said. “It caused a lot of stress, including on my pregnancy.”
Relief came when she learned she was eligible for a program that provides up up to $750 a month – with no strings attached – to give newborns in families of modest means more runway toward a promising future.
“We had something to lean on,” said Miller, of Buffalo, who soon found temporary housing for her boyfriend and their sons – Kni’aar, now 4, and Kni’daar, 16 months.
The Bridge Project, a philanthropic program in six states and counting, helped the family cover the cost of utility bills, diapers and clothing.
Miller bought $500 worth of baby wipes when Kni’daar was born, thanks to the program. She also opened a savings account, is considering returning to school and recently landed a part-time job delivering medications to nursing home patients.
“There is the stability that they offer me,” she said. “That helps me not to be stressed out.”
Her family is among thousands across America to benefit from “cash for moms” programs that ease the burden on families and neighborhoods.
Government officials and nonprofits across the U.S. had toyed for decades with the idea of providing a universal basic income to the nation’s most vulnerable, typically with modest monthly amounts designed to provide a hand up. So far, philanthropic groups, foundations and individual donors have shouldered most of the financial load.
“It is going incredibly well in Michigan,” said H. Luke Shaefer, co-director of Rx Kids, which started serving families last year in Flint, Michigan, and has grown to other parts of the state. Rx The program has provided almost $11 million to more than 2,100 babies, and more than 2,700 families have enrolled.
Such programs also can serve as lightning rods, particularly in red and purple states, where recent interest in giving out money without conditions has come under fire if taxpayers foot some of the cost.
Still, there is growing consensus in several states that temporary assistance for babies and toddlers, and their parents, can pay dividends across decades – and government funding would magnify the impact.
“We have a lot of philanthropic support, and we’re very grateful, but it cannot be the only thing,” said Stephanie Silkowski of the Bridge Project.
“People are hungry for these types of models,” said Stephanie Silkowski, director of policy and strategic initiatives for the Bridge Project. “We have a lot of philanthropic support, and we’re very grateful, but it cannot be the only thing.”
Pandemic momentum
Advocates leaned into the cash-for-moms idea during the COVID-19 crisis, when the federal child tax credit was raised from a partial deduction of $2,000 per child to a full deduction in 2021 of up to $3,600.
The U.S. child poverty rate fell that year by nearly half. It returned to pre-pandemic levels after the child tax credit increase expired in 2022.
The Bridge Project – launched four years ago in New York City to offer monthly cash payments for up to three years for pre- and postnatal success – was among initiatives inspired by the impact of the higher child tax credit.
It has since launched successful pilot programs in Buffalo and Rochester, New York; Milwaukee; across Connecticut; and, most recently, the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.
Venture capitalist Jeffrey Lieberman and his wife, Holly Fogle, kicked off the Bridge Project with a $16 million investment from The Monarch Foundation, their private family philanthropy designed to develop simple, inclusive solutions to societal challenges.
The project is a key partner in the z, a collaboration of related nonprofits, researchers and advocates working to establish best practices to support new families with unconditional cash. Member organizations hail from 11 states, including California, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and New York. Three organizations, including the Bridge Project, focus nationally.
How it works
Moms in Bridge Project programs in Buffalo and Rochester each get a flat $1,500 when pregnant, $750 a month for 15 months after their baby is born, then half that monthly amount for another 15 months. Rates elsewhere are based on the cost of living.
The sums provided aren’t enough to handle every need for a family with a new child. Funders see it as a start, and point to research, including a 2020 study from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University that concluded as little as $250 a month to families can help reduce household poverty by up to 40%.
Miller provided the Bridge Project with her name, address and family income, and later proof of pregnancy.
The project has a representative in each community and works closely with other public and private partners to assure that moms get support. They also provide tips on family budgeting and learning opportunities.
More than half of the 50 participating mothers enrolled in Buffalo are people of color, then-Mayor Byron Brown said during a news conference last year touting the pilot program. More than half have annual household incomes below $15,000, while 15 have no household income. Half live in rental properties. A few experienced homelessness when they started receiving payments.
“According to studies, children born and raised in poverty are exposed to compromised brain development and physical growth, poor living standards, psychological distress and lack economic prospects in their adulthood,” Brown said. “We are here to break that cycle.”
Cash for moms programs also can differ.
The Bridge Project places household income limits on those they help.
Rx Kids supports every new mom in every community it serves, regardless of income.
“I think that is part of our success,” said Shaefer, professor of social justice and social policy at the University of Michigan. “The programs operate in really poor places, but they are available to everyone who lives in those places, so the income guideline is basically a geographic one.”
Rx Kids has deliberately targeted moms in cities, towns and rural communities where median household income is below Michigan and nationwide averages. It now operates in Flint, Kalamazoo and the Upper Peninsula, and began taking applications in May from families in metro Detroit.
“Almost everyone takes the money,” said Shaefer, whose latest co-authored book, “The Injustice of Place,” explores the common history of poor communities across Appalachia, the Deep South and South Texas, and offers ways to improve those regions, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Need and supply
The Bridge Project, Rx Kids and similar programs are making a dent in addressing child and family poverty in places they serve, but it has become painfully clear to those bankrolling the efforts that far more support is needed.
In Connecticut, the Bridge Project and its philanthropic partners can fund 550 families.
Brionna Miller is among 50 moms and children in a pilot funded by the Bridge Project, which is funding guaranteed income programs in several communities across the Northeast and Midwest. These programs provide monthly stipends,with no strings attached, to help families with low incomes raise their families. (Photo by Sharon Cantillon)
“We got 3,000 applications in the first week and a half,” Silkowski said. In the Appalachian program, expanded in January, more than 4,000 moms applied for 500 slots.
Even with some government support, the challenge remains daunting.
The Zilber Family Foundation decided two years ago that it would establish a Bridge Project program in Milwaukee with $1.6 million, enough to cover the costs for 100 moms over three years. An anonymous donor pledged $450,000 and the City Council earmarked $350,000 in COVID-relief funds for expansion. The outlay helps serve 122 families.
Nearly 1,000 mothers applied, said Lianna Bishop, executive director of the foundation, founded six decades ago by Milwaukee real estate developer Joseph Zilber and his wife, Vera., to fund programs and projects that foster economic stability and a better quality of life in their native city.
The foundation launched its Bridge Project program in June 2024.
“A lot of people had questions about unconditional cash being a risk,” Bishop said, “but we saw it as an opportunity to invest in individuals that needed financial resources, especially in the neighborhoods that we focus on. The Zilber Family Foundation is interested in continuing this type of funding … but ultimately, we need a national solution to providing a more robust social safety net for families.”
The Monarch Foundation and its Bridge Project staff also are “clear-eyed” about the limits of philanthropic support and fiscal constraints at the local, state and federal levels of government, Silkowski said.
“What makes strategic philanthropy even more critical right now for us is that a philanthropy’s role has never been about permanent support,” she said. “It has been about catalyzing public investment by lowering risk and proving that things work.”
Bipartisan aspirations
The U.S. political climate may seem anathema to such programs – and indeed, lawmakers in some states have proposed legislation to assure taxpayer money isn’t used for them.
Opponents often conflate them with the idea of universal basic or guaranteed income programs that give money to low-income people indefinitely so they can reorient their lives, Shaefer said.
A recently released three-year study of 3,000 people in Illinois and Texas reported such programs incentivize less work, and make those enrolled more likely to continue on government assistance programs.
The study looked at adults across the lifespan and was somewhat of an outlier, Shaefer and others said. Dozens of other related studies show cash recipients don’t work less or waste the money, according to GiveDirectly, a global nonprofit that solicits and directs donations to some of the world’s poorest households, and tracks spending of those it supports.
Shaefer said programs that help new families thrive from the start consistently show more promising results – and are popular among lawmakers from both major parties who have seen them work first-hand.
He prefers to call them “child cash transfer” programs. He stressed that their time limit, and focus on a particular population at a crucial period, set them apart – with the potential to impact new families the same way Social Security lessens poverty among older Americans.
Such programs have been used around the world, he said, in some cases for decades.
State and local lawmakers in both major parties are among those who count themselves open to the idea.
“Rx Kids is a program I believe all Michigan residents can get behind,” Republican State Sen. John Damoose said when announcing its expansion into his district, which includes parts of the state’s Upper Peninsula. “Every bit of science shows that the time right before birth and in the first year of life has an incredible impact on a child that will last a lifetime. I am especially proud that Rx Kids recognizes the need in the rural areas of our state.”
Government and philanthropic dollars go to low-income rural communities “far below per capita what it is the case in our urban centers,” Shaefer added. “I think we’re paying the price for not investing in those places. In the Upper Peninsula, there’s a lot of people who say, ‘We feel completely forgotten.’”
Vice President JD Vance, who touted child tax credit expansions last year on the campaign trail, signaled a desire in January for more support of new parents during a March for Life rally speech in Washington, D.C., four days after he and President Donald Trump were inaugurated.
“I want more happy children in our country,” he said, “And it is the task of our government to make it easier for young moms and dads to afford to have kids, to bring them into the world and to welcome them as the blessings that they are.”
Storm clouds
Despite political aspirations, foundation and nonprofit leaders harbor significant fears about government support for cash assistance efforts as the GOP-controlled Congress and Executive Branch eye ways to cut spending for safety net programs, including Medicaid and food stamps.
Miller, her boyfriend – a full-time certified nursing assistant – and their sons benefit from both those programs, as well as the Bridge Project.
Kauribel Javier, center, projects and special initiatives coordinator with the Bridge Project, helps bring new mothers together to bond and share strategies during the three years after the birth of a first child. About 30% of the children are two-parent households that meet low-income guidelines for support. (Courtesy photo provided by the Bridge Project.)
Medicaid covered the costs for both boys when they were hospitalized this year with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). “That would bankrupt us if we had to pay out of pocket,” Miller said.
Silkowski and other child cash transfer program advocates said they expect philanthropies to continue their work as they try to find common ground with Democrats and Republicans when it comes to the best and most cost-effective ways to administer and provide federal block grants, Medicaid waivers and other tax dollars to help America’s most vulnerable citizens.
In Wisconsin, where cash for moms programs have been established in Milwaukee and the state capital of Madison during the last three years, Republicans have passed bills in two previous legislative sessions – both vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers – and introduced it this spring for a third time.
“It’s been a complicated issue, at least at the state level,” said Bishop, who wondered if rural programs in her state would add more perspective.
“I think there’s some education we’re tasked with now that we have a program in flight,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be conceptual anymore. These are real people experiencing real impact.”
Big plans in New York
New York State lawmakers in the Democratic-dominated Legislature have taken up the cause. Nearly one in five children in the state live in poverty, the ninth worse state rate in the nation.
The suffering is most acute in the upstate cities of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, ranked second, fifth and seventh, respectively, among the largest cities in the U.S. with the highest rates of child poverty. in 2022, the most recent available federal data show.
State lawmakers in May passed a state budget in which Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed more benefits for families, including the nation’s first statewide baby allowance program, the Birth Allowance for Beginning Year (BABY) Benefit, which will provide eligible families direct cash payments during pregnancy, in addition to $1,200 at birth.
The Bridge Project informed the idea, reporting earlier this year that after one year in the program, 63% of participants in transitional shelters secured stable housing, 18% pursued post-secondary education, and families experienced a 53% decrease in food security.
“Too many children throughout our state live in poverty, including one [of] two in Rochester,” Democratic Assemblywoman Sarah Clark said in a statement. She urged passage of the benefit and represents part of the city. and surrounding suburbs of Brighton and Irondequoit. “It is our responsibility,” she said, “to ensure that every child has their basic needs met.”
Scott Scanlon is a former editor with The Buffalo News. David Robinson, New York State health care reporter with USA Today, contributed to this story. This article was reported through a fellowship supported by the Lilly Endowment and administered by the Chronicle of Philanthropy to expand coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits.
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