Guaranteed income programs draw praise, political fire as momentum grows

Laura Clancy helped charter schools navigate the pandemic and a family foundation boost learning opportunities for low-income students before she stepped into her dream role last year as leader of The Bridge Project, a nonprofit force in the growing effort to give cash to struggling moms, with no strings attached.

“I wasn’t looking for another job but couldn’t stop thinking about the power of unconditional cash for moms and their newborns,” Clancy said. “If you can’t stop thinking about something, it probably means there’s something really interesting to pursue.”

American policymakers have thought about guaranteed income for decades. The idea turned into a movement during the pandemic which involved philanthropic donors and nonprofits focused on the nation’s most vulnerable, after an increase in the federal child tax credit deduction in 2021 reduced the child poverty rate by nearly half.

Read more: Are cash for moms programs a new way to help deliver millions from poverty?

Venture capitalist Jeffrey Lieberman and his wife, Holly Fogle, launched the Bridge Project three years ago with $16 million through their Monarch Foundation, a private family foundation designed to develop simple, inclusive solutions to societal challenges.

The Bridge Project, with a mission to address child poverty, began to offer monthly cash payments in New York City to those pregnant with their first babies. Its full-time staff grew to seven as its reach spread to Buffalo and Rochester, N.Y.; Milwaukee; and parts of Connecticut, and started working with foundations in those communities to multiply the impact.

It continues to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Next up: a focus on moving more homeless mothers to permanent housing in New York City, a focus from the start, as well as cash for moms’ programs in three Appalachian states.

“One of the amazing things about working with cash is it’s extremely scalable and you don’t need a lot of funding or infrastructure to start in a new place,” said Clancy, who helped Mastery Charter Schools in her native Philadelphia region reopen 26 schools during the pandemic before becoming chief operating officer in 2021 of Samvid Ventures/Desai Sethi Foundation.

The foundation, founded by an immigrant family from India, focuses on fostering education for underprivileged children in Detroit, Miami, New York City and rural India.

The Bridge Project provides guaranteed income for low-income moms during the first three years of the child’s life. It leads the Mother and Infant Cash Coalition, a consortium of 24 organizations with similar interests that have taken root in several states, as well as cities that include Boston; Los Angeles; Seattle; and Flint, Mich.

Clancy, a mother of two who lives in New York City recently talked about successes and challenges that come with such programs, evidence that they work, and efforts in some states to prevent public-private partnerships that include tax dollars for such endeavors.

Excerpts have been edited for clarity.

Q: You arrived at a time when the nonprofit is ramping up to grow substantially. How is that working?
Clancy: For us to start a new site, we don’t need to rent an office. We need to build relationships with local community partners and local government entities, with clinics and hospitals, to get referrals. We need to make sure that moms know how to apply to our program. We need to vet applications and onboard moms. But you don’t need a lot of funding or infrastructure to start in a new place. I don’t think this will be a surprise, but it is very easy to recruit for this program.

Q: Talk about eligibility.
A: Moms must be at least 18 years old and 23 weeks pregnant or less with their first child and have an annual household income under various amounts. We start with a prenatal stipend, then do a higher cash amount. For most of our geographies, it’s $750 a month for 15 months. Then we step down for the last 21 months in the program to half that amount.

Q: Do you work with people on the ground, for instance with the pilot projects started in early 2024 in Buffalo and Rochester?
A: We take about five months before the application opens to get to know key people in the regions we serve. We have a team here in New York City, primarily of trained social workers, connecting with WIC clinics, healthcare organizations, doula organizations, anybody who’s in the related ecosystem, to share with them about the program, make sure they understand the criteria for eligibility, and ask for their feedback. We end up building very strong partnerships.

We have a comprehensive resource guide and monthly newsletter that we send out to our moms. We’re constantly trying to reinforce with moms all the amazing community organizations and resources they can draw on. Often, partners will help us if we say ‘We can’t reach this mom?’ or ‘This mom told us she’s food insecure. Are there some resources that could help them be more successful?’

It’s a nice, virtuous cycle.

Q: How do Bridge Project moms generally differ from each other?
A: About 20% of our moms want to own a home one day. They are super resourceful and very assertive right away. There are 30% of moms who are excited to engage but it’s got to be timed right. Almost all our moms use WIC and Medicaid and other benefits available to them, which is terrific. We always want that. But about 50% of moms say something like, ‘I’ve got this resource guide, so I’m good to go, I can figure it out from here.’ That’s successful for us, too.

Q: What’s the funding split like for the major contributors?
Clancy: It’s about 50/50 between the founders and other organizations. One of the things we’ve been delighted by is in every community –  just as there are babies born who meet the poverty level and moms that really want to find the support they need to be great moms –  we’ve also found people who really, really care about their communities and will make sure babies are set up for a good start to their life.

Unfortunately, babies born below the poverty level and moms who could use the support are everywhere. For example, in Connecticut, home to one of the largest wealth gaps of any state, we already have four times the applications as we have spots.

Q: Which foundations and nonprofits that helped you get off the ground in New York City, as well as serve moms and children in Connecticut, Milwaukee and Western New York?
A: In Milwaukee, the Zilber Family Foundation is a key supporter along with the city council. In Connecticut, we’re supported by two individuals and the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving. The New York City Council just allocated $1.5 million to us to serve pregnant women experiencing housing insecurity. 

Q: How have the programs worked outside New York City? What differences have you seen?
A: Researchers we work with at the University at Pennsylvania Center for Guaranteed Income Research said we would be crazy to do anything less than $1,000 a month in New York City, because housing and other costs are so high. Housing lists are way too long everywhere, but what we’ve seen is that some of our moms in Buffalo, Rochester and Milwaukee feel more connected to the institutions where we are referring them. They feel a little less anonymous. New York City has lots of resources and lots of nonprofits, whereas in places like Buffalo, there are fewer.

Q: Can you talk about results?
A: Some of our most exciting early results included an increase of 242% in nest egg savings after six months, and 63% who started the program in transitional housing were in permanent housing after nine months. Ninety percent of our moms reported improved mental health and stress levels after receiving just one payment. Having money lets us all exhale a little bit.

Eighty percent of our moms are working after 18 months in the program, and one of the more interesting findings from our first cohort we weren’t expecting to see is 70% of our moms go after post-secondary education while they’re in the program, typically in the healthcare fields. Buffalo and Rochester have huge health care worker shortages, so we’re giving moms a little bit of space to train for these jobs that are so in demand.

Q: How are moms spending the money?
A: There’s a big international evidence base that shows people who get unconditional cash in situations like this spend money on things that are boring, like diapers, rent, utilities. We’ve found that, too. One of my favorite meta-analyses is from the World Bank, which looked globally at programs like this. It’s not just that people don’t spend this money on vices like tobacco and alcohol and gambling, but they’re actually 82% less likely to engage in those behaviors using money outside of the program. The reason why is because you’re not self-medicating. You’re less stressed. And if you want to meet a group of people who are literally and biologically primed to make very good decisions, it’s people who have babies.

Q: Do you compare notes with organizations in this space?
A: The first, in 2018, was the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, based in Mississippi. I feel like every time we talk to them, we learn a ton. We learn something new from everybody.

There’s a national mother infant cash coalition program housed at Bridge from across the country running different programs. We have two goals. The first is to get aligned, because a lot of these programs have less money and resources than we do, and we don’t want them to have to recreate the wheel in terms of research and development.

The other big goal is making sure that we’re working together to navigate programs primarily at the federal level that could help scale up programs like this.

Q: What have you’ve learned about the gaps and limitations?
A: Cash doesn’t solve everything. I don’t think anyone would pretend it does; $750 a month is not going to lift anybody totally out of poverty, but it really helps.

We’re excited to see more about the impact next year, when our first, formal, big evaluation results come out from Penn. Previous research from Baby’s First Years is that there are absolutely some gaps. To me, the most striking was moms in that program were not any more or less likely to use child care.

Q: The city council in Milwaukee is helping the Bridge Project expand the program with $350,000 this year. Do you hope this model will help more families?
Clancy: Yes. What has happened when we go into a geography with private funding, the nonprofits love it, the moms love it. The vote of confidence and the ability to scale our impact comes when an elected official or an agency head says, ‘I’d love to support this. Let me figure out where I have money that I could use toward this.’

Q: But there is opposition to this approach, including lawmakers leading political efforts in at least six red states to prohibit government involvement and taxpayer funding for guaranteed income programs, including at the local level.
A: It’s a shame. There’s a lot of evidence that from a cost-benefit perspective that it’s way less expensive to do these programs than provide services that government currently provides. I’ll give you an example. We’re working with the New York City Council on this cohort of homeless, pregnant moms. The city of New York spends $6,000 a month to house somebody and is not getting $6,000 worth of benefit. Moms are getting substandard housing. If we can move a lot of them into permanent housing by just giving them $1,000 a month, that to me is a fantastic return on investment. In New York City, the average shelter stay is more than 450 days. Fifteen months at $6,000 a month is a ton of money.

There is bipartisan support for these programs. In Connecticut, for example, we have three main donors. One identifies as a Democrat. The second is a Republican who has a very different take on our program: Moms know what they need and big government is bad. Then there’s a community foundation in Hartford. It’s a nice mix. And all three agree we can stand this up quickly, there’s very low administrative costs and every dollar that we give goes to moms. It’s a pretty good deal for them.

Q: The 2021 child tax credit is often held up as the most significant evidence that if you put more money into the pockets of families, you’re going to get a return on that investment. The American Rescue Plan expanded the family child tax credit for one year, 2021, from $2,000 per child to $3,600 for each child through age 5 and $3,000 for each child 6 to 16, and child poverty fell by 46%. It has since climbed. Your thoughts?
A: During COVID, the payment mechanism also changed so you weren’t just getting the child tax credit after you filed taxes at the end of the year, you were getting it as a regular payment that you could really bank on and plan on. It shows that there’s real appetite for programs like ours. I also think it shows the bipartisan appeal of these things. There was a Republican version that Vice President JD Vance, in particular, used in talking points during the presidential campaign.

Q: Is there a reasonable argument to be made that giant industries benefit from government largesse and public officials don’t necessarily tell them how to spend that money? Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, estimates repealing tax breaks and subsidies to oil companies, agricultural conglomerates, pharmaceutical makers, tech giants and defense contractors would save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars during the next decade.
A: Our country does reflect our priorities with what we spend money on, and by the subsidies that you just named, they’re not reflecting a priority on child well-being.