In the first half of last century, American children and families faced a crisis. Invisible threats paralyzed society as viruses such as polio paralyzed children, claimed lives, and left communities in despair as they searched for solutions. In response, widespread quarantine shut down schools and public places to prevent the disease from spreading; and iron lungs were used to treat people already impacted by severe respiratory paralysis. But then came a groundbreaking prevention strategy through vaccines, massive public health campaigns, and the mobilization of resources to protect every community and get people back to living their lives without fear. Vaccination efforts eradicated polio from the United States 50 years ago and drastically reduced the burden of other deadly diseases, saving millions of lives, restoring hope for the future, and creating a blueprint for how bold prevention measures can transform society. Today, children and families face another crisis. In 2022, over 7 million reports of alleged child abuse or neglect were made to Child Protective Services. 3 million families were subsequently investigated, and around 85% of them were living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Ultimately, of those 7 million reports, 550,000 were substantiated for maltreatment, or somewhere around 1 of every 10. How might we apply a similar public health approach that was used to address our polio crisis to address this crisis where too many families are overloaded by stress and vulnerable to child neglect, CPS investigations, and family separation? As we heard last episode from Jennifer Jones, Prevent Child Abuse America has a bold vision for what this could look like: an aligned and comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem that would empower all children and families to live a purposeful and happy life with hope for the future. One of its core aspirations is promoting economic stability, so that all families have the quality housing, childcare, and healthcare that we all need to thrive. In this episode, we’ll explore how guaranteed income programs and other economic supports that alleviate financial stress might help us move further upstream as an important part of that prevention ecosystem. Over the past six months, I have met many leaders of guaranteed income programs across the country. This journey began when the Bridge Project arrived here in Milwaukee to provide unconditional cash assistance to 100 low-income, pregnant mothers in Milwaukee for the next three years. Today, you will hear my conversation with two of these leaders who I’ve learned from on this journey, Blake Roberts Crall and Dr. Allison Thompson, as we explore the potential of guaranteed income programs as part of this primary prevention ecosystem.
Today’s episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Experts:
:00-:09 - Allison Thompson – “So there’s absolutely a way to address child poverty at the national level. It’s about the will, right?”
:17–5:36 – Luke Waldo – Opening, Bios, and Welcome
In the first half of last century, American children and families faced a crisis. Invisible threats paralyzed society as viruses such as polio paralyzed children, claimed lives, and left communities in despair as they searched for solutions. In response, widespread quarantine shut down schools and public places to prevent the disease from spreading; and iron lungs were used to treat people already impacted by severe respiratory paralysis. But then came a groundbreaking prevention strategy through vaccines, massive public health campaigns, and the mobilization of resources to protect every community and get people back to living their lives without fear. Vaccination efforts eradicated polio from the United States 50 years ago and drastically reduced the burden of other deadly diseases, saving millions of lives, restoring hope for the future, and creating a blueprint for how bold prevention measures can transform society.
Today, children and families face another crisis. In 2022, over 7 million reports of alleged child abuse or neglect were made to Child Protective Services. 3 million families were subsequently investigated, and around 85% of them were living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Ultimately, of those 7 million reports, 550,000 were substantiated for maltreatment, or somewhere around 1 of every 10.
How might we apply a similar public health approach that was used to address our polio crisis to address this crisis where too many families are overloaded by stress and vulnerable to child neglect, CPS investigations, and family separation? As we heard last episode from Jennifer Jones, Prevent Child Abuse America has a bold vision for what this could look like: an aligned and comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem that would empower all children and families to live a purposeful and happy life with hope for the future. One of its core aspirations is promoting economic stability, so that all families have the quality housing, childcare, and healthcare that we all need to thrive.
In this episode, we’ll explore how guaranteed income programs and other economic supports that alleviate financial stress might help us move further upstream as an important part of that prevention ecosystem. Over the past six months, I have met many leaders of guaranteed income programs across the country. This journey began when the Bridge Project arrived here in Milwaukee to provide unconditional cash assistance to 100 low-income, pregnant mothers in Milwaukee for the next three years. Today, you will hear my conversation with two of these leaders who I’ve learned from on this journey, Blake Roberts Crall and Dr. Allison Thompson, as we explore the potential of guaranteed income programs as part of this primary prevention ecosystem.
5:37-5:46 – Blake Roberts Crall and Allison Thompson – Thank you for having us.
5:47-6:03 – Luke Waldo – Why are guaranteed income or direct cash transfer programs needed today?
6:04-7:47 – Blake Roberts Crall – “And I really believe that our social safety net in this country plays a huge, huge role in helping to ensure financial security for our families and their well-being. So that's a really important part of our social infrastructure that we need, and it does a lot for families um and for children. And at the same time, um there's still so much more to do because there are families that are still struggling. We know that people are not able to make ends meet.
And I think that there's an opportunity to look at our social safety net and figure out ways that we can make it better, make it more accessible, more inclusive, and provide more resources to families. um It seems pretty crazy to me that you can be working in this country full time or working more than full time and still not be able to pay all of your bills and still to be struggling financially. The term working poor, we hear that a lot. That's literally people are working, but still under that poverty line. So for me, there's a lot of opportunity to be doing something different and really to think about um how can we build systems of care and well-being for everyone. And I think guaranteed income or basic income is one possible tool that we can add in our toolbox.”
7:48-7:50 – Luke – Same question to Allison.
7:51-10:41 - Allison Thompson - One in eight Americans live in poverty. And even with a full-time job, most families working minimum wage jobs still can't meet their basic needs. In fact, across many US cities, a parent of two children making the minimum wage would need to work between two to four minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet without benefits. And even with benefits, a parent working a full-time minimum wage job with two children typically experiences a $3,000 to $5,000 gap each month between their basic cost of living and their income and benefits.
To make matters worse, nearly half of all families with annual incomes of less than $25,000 a year also experience pretty significant income volatility, which means that their income each month is prone to both rapid and unpredictable change.
This might be because families are working hourly-waged jobs or doing gig work with unpredictable hours, or it could be that their jobs do not provide paid time off, leading to decreased income when parents' children get sick. But this income volatility puts families in really tough positions. Each month, families are often forced to make hard decisions to survive, decisions about paying utility bills or purchasing more costly, healthy foods. paying co-pays for their own medication versus paying their rent. And the bottom line is that neither the labor market nor the social safety net in the US is sufficient to keep families out of poverty. More is needed.
Increasingly, we also know that economic and material hardship are significant predictors of child welfare involvement. This shows up as neglect often in the child welfare system. penalizing families for not having the means or resources necessary to make up for these market failures or government shortcomings. This type of neglect suggests that addressing inadequate economic resources should be one of the core set of tools for families when aiming to prevent child welfare involvement and out-of-home placement. So guaranteed income has emerged as an evidence-informed strategy to alleviate some of the burden that families bear as a result of the market failures and safety net shortcomings.”
Guaranteed income definition.
10:42-10:49 – Luke – Blake, what is the Madison Forward Fund and what does it hope to change or accomplish?
10:50-15:56 – Blake Roberts Crall – The Madison Forward Fund is a research program that piloted the impacts of guaranteed income on the lives of low-income people.
15:57-17:46 – Luke – It’s important to acknowledge the stigma and mistrust around some of our safety net systems as it has led to billions of dollars left on the table as reported by Matthew Desmond and others recently. If people are embarrassed to access or distrustful of anti-poverty programs, then they aren’t achieving their objectives.
17:47-25:06 - Allison – Recurring, unconditional and unrestricted. Recipients can trust that it will be available to them during the period that it has been promised compared to many conditional and restricted public benefits.
Participants spend the money on basic needs.
Guaranteed income also offers opportunities for economic mobility.
Impacts of pandemic on economic stability.
19,000 participants involved in these programs that are being researched by CGIR.
Positive impacts on people’s economic stability and mobility.
25:07-26:58 - Luke – Poverty does not equal neglect; however, families living in poverty are much more likely to be investigated by Child Protective Services. So guaranteed income may reduce the likelihood that a family is investigated by CPS.
How does GI align with our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative?
26:59-32:01 - Blake – While Guaranteed Income is not a silver bullet, it can improve economic stability and social connections.
Positive impacts on people’s mental health and stress levels. GI allows participants to provide more for their kids, pay rent, cover child care costs. Participant stories are available on the Madison Forward Fund website.
When caregivers can meet their own needs, they can show up better for their kids.
32:02-32:55 – Luke – People’s stories to illustrate the data is always helpful and powerful. Same question to Allison.
32:56-39:38 - Allison – How might guaranteed income be a child welfare intervention? Labor market and social safety net are inadequate to help families meet their basic needs for too many families. Guaranteed income assumes that families know best how to care for their children.
New York child welfare pilot. Los Angeles County pilot with youth that have aged out of child care.
39:39-40:55 – Luke – How might we implement these models into our communities?
40:56-45:57 – Blake – The mechanics and administration of guaranteed income programs are not complicated. There is more and more data improving the evidence base and showing its effectiveness. We need to do more basic education about what guaranteed income is and what it can accomplish. GI is a policy choice that will need to be made to help pay for it.
45:58-47:46 - Luke – Education and mental model shifts will be important to policy and funding changes that support guaranteed income programs. How might guaranteed income programs lead to cost savings if it leads to a reduction in child welfare spending?
47:47-50:20 - Allison – Research on guaranteed income is nascent. There is a growing body of evidence. Thinking more about cost-benefit analysis. The Child Tax Credit expansion during COVID, which mirrors a guaranteed income program, cut the child poverty rate in half.
50:21-50:31 - Luke – When we have the will, our policies can have a profound impact.
50:32-52:25 - Blake – Many states have implemented a state child tax credit. We don’t have that here in Wisconsin. Wisconsin Farmers Union has interest in guaranteed income to support agricultural communities in the state.
52:26-52:50 - Luke Waldo – Closing and Gratitude
52:51-52:57 - Allison – Thank you.
52:58-53:08 – Blake – Thank you.
53:09-56:34 - Luke Waldo - 3 Key Takeaways
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Dr. Allison Thompson 00:00
So there's absolutely a way to address child poverty at a national level. It's about the will, right?
Luke Waldo 00:17
Welcome to season 3 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how we might change the conditions that overload families with stress, so that families can thrive and children grow up with a strong foundation built on positive childhood experiences.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
In the first half of last century, American children and families faced a crisis. Invisible threats paralyzed society as viruses such as polio paralyzed children, claimed lives, and left communities in despair as they searched for solutions. In response, widespread quarantine shut down schools and public places to prevent the disease from spreading; and iron lungs were used to treat people already impacted by severe respiratory paralysis. But then came a groundbreaking prevention strategy through vaccines, massive public health campaigns, and the mobilization of resources to protect every community and get people back to living their lives without fear. Vaccination efforts eradicated polio from the United States 50 years ago and drastically reduced the burden of other deadly diseases, saving millions of lives, restoring hope for the future, and creating a blueprint for how bold prevention measures can transform society.
Today, children and families face another crisis. In 2022, over 7 million reports of alleged child abuse or neglect were made to Child Protective Services. 3 million families were subsequently investigated, and around 85% of them were living at or below 200% of the federal poverty line. Ultimately, of those 7 million reports, 550,000 were substantiated for maltreatment, or somewhere around 1 of every 10.
How might we apply a similar public health approach that was used to address our polio crisis to address this crisis where too many families are overloaded by stress and vulnerable to child neglect, CPS investigations, and family separation? As we heard last episode from Jennifer Jones, Prevent Child Abuse America has a bold vision for what this could look like: an aligned and comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem that would empower all children and families to live a purposeful and happy life with hope for the future. One of its core aspirations is promoting economic stability, so that all families have the quality housing, childcare, and healthcare that we all need to thrive.
In this episode, we’ll explore how guaranteed income programs and other economic supports that alleviate financial stress might help us move further upstream as an important part of that prevention ecosystem. Over the past six months, I have met many leaders of guaranteed income programs across the country. This journey began when the Bridge Project arrived here in Milwaukee to provide unconditional cash assistance to 100 low-income, pregnant mothers in Milwaukee for the next three years. Today, you will hear my conversation with two of these leaders who I’ve learned from on this journey, Blake Roberts Crall and Dr. Allison Thompson, as we explore the potential of guaranteed income programs as part of this primary prevention ecosystem.
Blake Roberts Crall is the Program Manager for Madison’s guaranteed income research program, the Madison Forward Fund. She is based at the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison. Blake is passionate about revolutionizing our social safety net and using direct cash policies as a tool for economic justice. She comes to this work with years of experience on the ground as a SNAP and Medicaid navigator, managing low-income tax clinics, and with 15 years of experience designing and implementing programs that tackle income inequality and poverty. Her work in public policy focuses on basic and guaranteed income, low-income tax credits, and early childcare systems.
Dr. Allison Thompson is the Executive Director of Penn’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research (CGIR), which is an applied research center specializing in cash-transfer research, evaluation, pilot design, and narrative change. Dr. Thompson has nearly 20 years of experience in applied research, program evaluation, and leadership in operations and management. Prior to her leadership at the CGIR, Dr. Thompson was appointed as the Senior Research Officer for Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families, where she created and led a research team designed to produce actionable data to guide government leaders in decision-making and policy development with a focus on promoting racial equity, mitigating disparities, and utilizing a public health approach to supporting families and communities. She has experience working with city, state, and county level policymakers, securing and managing multi-million dollar grants, budgets, and contracts, and her work has been featured as a model for best practice by major foundations and federal agencies, such as Casey Family Programs and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Children’s Bureau.
Thank you both for joining me today, and welcome.
Blake Roberts Crall 05:37
Thanksso much for having me. I'm really honored to get to be part of the discussion today.
Luke Waldo 05:40
And thank you. Welcome Allison.
Dr. Allison Thompson 05:41
Thanks, Luke, for having me today as well. Happy to be here. Wonderful. Well,
Luke Waldo 05:47
Thank you both again for being here. I'd like to start our conversation today with a big why, right? So why do you both believe that guaranteed income or direct cash transfer programs are needed today. And I'll start with you, Blake.
Blake Roberts Crall 06:04
I think a lot about on a big picture, the systems that we have available to take care of each other and to take care of our communities. And I really believe that our our social safety net in this country, plays a huge, huge role in helping to ensure financial security for families and their well-being. So that's a really important part of our social infrastructure that we we need, and it does. It does a lot for for for families and for children. And at the same time, there's still so much more to do, because there are families that are still struggling.
We know that people are not able to make ends meet, and I think that there's an opportunity to look at our social safety net and figure out ways that we can make it better, make it more accessible, more inclusive, and provide more resources to families. It seems pretty crazy to me that you can be working in this country full time or working more than full time and still not be able to pay all of your bills and still to be struggling financially. The term working poor, we hear that a lot, that's literally people are working but still under that poverty line. So for me, there's a lot of opportunity to be doing something different, and really to think about, how can we build systems of care and well-being for everyone? And I think guaranteed income, or basic income, is one possible tool that we can add in our toolbox.
Luke Waldo 07:48
Thank you, Blake, and I'll turn it over to you. Allison,
Dr. Allison Thompson 07:51
Great. Thanks. So why guaranteed income and why now? I think we all know and have lived through a pretty dramatic increase in the cost of living in the United States over the past four years, and wages just have not kept pace. One in eight Americans live in poverty, and even with a full-time job, most families working minimum wage jobs still can't meet their basic needs. In fact, across many US cities, a parent of two children making the minimum wage would need to work between two to four minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet, without benefits and even with benefits, a parent working a full-time minimum wage job with two children typically experiences A three to $5,000 gap each month between their basic cost of living and their income and benefits. To make matters worse, nearly half of all families with annual incomes of less than $25,000 a year also experience pretty significant income volatility, which means that their income each month is prone to both rapid and unpredictable change. This might be because families are working hourly waged jobs or doing gig work with unpredictable hours, or it could be that their jobs do not provide paid time off, leading to decreased income when parents' children get sick. But this income volatility puts families in really tough positions each month, families are often forced to make hard decisions to survive, decisions about paying utility bills or purchasing more costly healthy foods, paying co pays for their own medication versus paying their rent.
And the bottom line is that neither the labor market nor the social safety net in the US is sufficient to keep families out of poverty. More is needed. Increasingly, we also know that economic and material hardship are significant predictors of child welfare involvement. This shows up as neglect, often in the child welfare system, penalizing families for not having the means or resources. Necessary to make up for these market failures or government shortcomings. This type of neglect suggests that addressing inadequate economic resources should be one of the core set of tools for families when aiming to prevent child welfare involvement and out of home placement. So guaranteed income has emerged as an evidence informed strategy to alleviate some of the burden that families bear as a result of the market failures and safety net shortcomings. Guaranteed Income refers to regularly distributed, unconditional and unrestricted cash transfers. In other words, these are cash transfers that are predictably distributed each month no matter what, and can be spent on anything.
Luke Waldo 10:42
Thank you, Allison. I'd like to turn now to Blake to learn more about the Madison Forward Fund and what it hoped to change or accomplish.
Blake Roberts Crall 10:50
Sure, I'd be happy to provide a little bit of information about the Madison Forward Fund, which, as you said, Luke, is a guaranteed income research program. It ran in the city of Madison, started in the fall of 2022 and it was, it was a research program, so that was the first goal was to understand what impact guaranteed income can have on the well-being of low income families in the city of Madison, and we were really fortunate to get to work with a great group of partners, including the city here, Mayor Rhodes Conway, University of Pennsylvania, where Allison is from, also the Institute for Research on Poverty here at UW Madison, a group called Mayors for a Guaranteed Nncome and TASK, which I can talk more about their role soon.
But it was a guaranteed income research study where we gave unrestricted cash to residents of the city for one month or sorry, for one year. And so each participant received $500 every month for a total of one year. So that's $6,000 for each family. And they didn't have to do anything in exchange other than be eligible for the program, right? And so this was a program that was targeted towards low income families that had children living in the city, and once they qualified, they were guaranteed to receive that income for one year in total. And as far as we know, this is the first guarantee Income program in the state of Wisconsin. So we're really excited about that, and really just trying to find out, well, what happens if you give people this cash, and particularly wanting to know about, is there something about guaranteed income that makes it different, or can have a different impact compared to other types of policy interventions for poverty?
So it's really exciting to get to be part of that research study. It ran for one year, right? So it ended in 2023 and there's a whole bunch of research questions that go along with it, which we can talk more about. And it was really founded on a few core principles that I think are important to talk about for why we wanted to look at guaranteed income and why we wanted to design the program the way that it was designed.
So one of those core principles is really that people are working hard and they still can't make ends meet. Families are still struggling, and a lot of that labor is unrecognized in the rest of our social safety net. So unless you are working in a formal paid employment, a lot of times you're excluded from other types of benefits, or have to try to fit yourself into that mold of formal employment when we know so much work is happening. It might not be paid, it might not be formally recognized, but people are taking care of children. They're taking care of elderly family members, taking care of the disabled, etc, doing volunteer work, working in their community. So we wanted to recognize all types of labor and have that be reflected in the program design. So that's why, one of the reasons why people didn't have to show us formal employment in order to be eligible, because we know people are working, yeah, one of the other core values is that people know best, and we wanted to honor recipients expertise in being able to make their own decisions about what they need and what their families need to thrive.
So this program the funds were unrestricted, meaning participants could spend the money however they needed each month and because they get to decide. And they they know best, and families needs are going to be different from family to family, and they're going to change over time. So this was a flexible source of funding that could fill in as needed. And then the last value that we tried to have reflected in the program design is that maybe we could even on a higher level, perhaps, think about freedom of choice, trust and self-determination as a way to be bringing some trust back into our social safety net and welfare systems and change some of the stigma that's often often associated with participating in welfare programs, even the term welfare often has a negative connotation in our culture. So we're trying to think about how can programs like this be run in a way, or use language in a way that tries to change some of that stigma?
Luke Waldo 15:57
Thank you, Blake. I appreciate that last point in particular, as I've had a number of conversations over the last couple of years on this podcast and within our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities, initiative about the fact that we are leaving, oftentimes, billions of Federal dollars on the table because of right, the stigma that oftentimes comes with participating in certain social safety net programs, right, the challenges or hoops that families have to jump through to receive some of those benefits. You know, it's been reported by people like Matthew Desmond in his recent book Poverty, by America, that that these challenges are again leading to billions, if not 10s of billions, of dollars every year that poor families are eligible for but don't, don't access for for a myriad of reasons.
And so it's not only about accessibility. I think, as you pointed out, it's really important to to think about really rebuilding trust, or building trust for the first time, in some cases, between some of our systems and the families that they should be designed to be serving, right?
So, so I want to, I want to shift over to you, Allison, and would love for for you to expand upon some of what Blake has already shared about these guaranteed income or direct cash, cash transfer programs that you've seen, and also some of kind of the key lessons learned from the research and evaluation that's been done at your organization.
Dr. Allison Thompson 17:47
Thanks, Luke, yeah, maybe I'll start by talking a little bit kind of piggybacking off of what Blake said, certainly consistent with what she said about what we hope to see in these gi programs, what we think they might how they might function, or what they might change or accomplish. So, as I mentioned, guaranteed income, three core features of guaranteed income are that it is recurring, unconditional and unrestricted, and so GI programs can serve to smooth income volatility and promote economic stability in the short term. GI provides regular, recurring, predictable cash that is unconditional, as Blake said, once recipients are eligible and are in these programs, they don't lose this benefit. It stays throughout the duration of the program, and so recipients can trust that it's going to come every single month. This stands in stark contrast to conditional supports or programs, which is what most people experience through our safety net. And conditional supports and programs can be anxiety provoking because the possibility of a shut off is real. So families can worry that a slight increase in income could mean that their benefits might decrease or even shut off, or perhaps a lapse in their work, maybe due to child's illness or other family stressors. May mean that they lose their cash, but the unconditionality of guaranteed income gives a sense of security and calms some of the stress associated with income volatility, and so for families, this is really important.
We talk a lot about family stressors and the child welfare system, and guaranteed income is different than other forms of supports in that it is unconditional and provides families a sense of security so families can spend the money however they want. And we found, though, that unsurprisingly, on average, recipients of guaranteed income tend to use the money to meet their basic needs of themselves and their children. So Stanford Basic Income lab has a great website, and you can see on the site aggregate spending patterns for guaranteed income recipients, and you'll see that most of the money is spent to meet basic needs. And so then in the long term, after some economic stability is achieved, guaranteed income also provides the possibility of economic mobility. So shifting from just economic stability in the short term for shorter programs to economic mobility for longer periods of time, the guaranteed income could be offered so this extra income in the long term, might enable guaranteed income recipients to enroll in a training program to ensure better transportation for a better job, maybe even save for larger assets, such as a home drop extra gig work or extra hours and spend more time with their children and with their families.
In talking about some of the key lessons learned from our center, I wanted to start off by just providing some background about our center and how it was formed. So we'll start there and then jump into some key lessons learned. The Center for Guaranteed Income Research, or CGIR, was formed at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice in 2020 during the pandemic. Our co-founders are doctors Amy Castro and Stacia West, and they were the key leads, the key researchers for Stockton's SEED experiment, which was one of the nation's first large guaranteed income pilots in recent years, midway through their experiment in 2020 the pandemic hit, and folks across America lost their income in mass and experienced poverty. People began to realize that their loss of income was not because of their moral failures or poor money management, but because of a structural event, the pandemic, that led to the loss of jobs and income for many people, and the solution offered was cash to offset lost income in the form of stimulus checks. I think this experience, along with the flexible ARPA dollars, led to a number of jurisdictions across the US being able to experiment with guaranteed income programming and pilots.
So our center was formed to provide a similar research design across many of these guaranteed income pilots. In fact, today, we are the evaluator for more than 35 guaranteed income programs, and across most of them, we use a similar mixed methods design, making use of a similar core survey and in depth interviews to both understand the impact of guaranteed income at a specific site level and also to be able to pool our data into a singular data set to ask more in depth questions about for whom and under what circumstances guaranteed income might function best. At the conclusion of all of our site-specific guaranteed income studies, will hold the world's largest database on guaranteed income.
We currently have about 19,000 people enrolled in treatment and control groups across all of our guaranteed income pilots. And so to date, our center has completed its evaluation of guaranteed income programming for about 15 geographically diverse sites. These include unconditional cash pilots launched in mid to large-sized US cities in the Northeast, the South, the Southwest, the Midwest and the West coast. So all over the US, as well as a site in the Northeast. Across sites, eligibility criteria varied. Some programs gave cash payments to a portion of their population experiencing poverty. Other sites were more targeted in their programming and gave cash to specific sub-populations of people in financial hardship, so folks like single caregivers, non-custodial fathers, youth and young adults inconsistently engaged in school or work community college students and residents returning to their community from prison, among many of The sites and across most populations evaluated by our center, our findings so far suggest an overall positive impact of guaranteed income on participants, financial health, housing quality, employment, choices and opportunities and their time spent with family.
Really, guaranteed income frees families from the need to work multiple jobs and longer hours, and gives them time back so parents are then able to spend more time with their children, which in turn leads to more positive child outcomes, like more participation for children in extracurricular activities, or better educational outcomes, but the extent and duration to which guaranteed income is effective in producing change across these outcomes tends to vary by population, place and program, and we think that this variance likely suggests that local policy subsystems and other place based factors like cost of living interact with GI program. Serving, serving to either enhance it, or, in some cases, when safety nets are limited, the GI then also might be limited.
Luke Waldo 25:07
Allison, I appreciate that you spoke to some of the lessons learned. I was first intrigued by the potential of guaranteed income programs when it when it was introduced here in Milwaukee through the Bridge Project, not because it was designed to prevent child maltreatment, but because there were very clear objectives to really address the overload of stress that parents and get caregivers experience when burdened by financial instability or poverty, right? Because what we what we know is that nearly nine out of every 10 families that are investigated by the child welfare system live at or below the federal poverty level.
So while poverty does not mean neglect, what we do know is that poverty does mean greater likelihood to be investigated by a very intrusive system like the child welfare system, right? And so how might guaranteed income or other right poverty reduction like initiatives also be seen as a child maltreatment prevention or at the very least a child neglect prevention intervention as well. But I wanted to begin shifting our conversation to how might guaranteeing income be seen more as a child maltreatment, child neglect, prevention intervention, yeah, within the context of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative, how might these programs align with any or all of those critical pathways? And then we'll get into how might our audience start to take these models and bring it into their communities as well. So we'll leave that for the last part of the conversation. So I'll turn it over to you, Blake, and then we'll have you, Allison, follow.
Blake Roberts Crall 26:59
I see connections on every one of those pathways, Luke, so we could probably dive into any of them. I really see guaranteed income as one of many tools that we need in our toolbox, right? It's not going to fix everything. It's not a silver bullet. So to remember that, but that, in combination with other policies and services and resources, I think there is a lot of potential there, and I see it as it's a way to be infusing resources for parents and caregivers. It's a direct means of support so then parents can show up as parents the way that they want to and to support their kids.
And so Allison talked a lot about how it can be a tool to give families time so that they're not overworked. They're able to spend more time with their kids and be present. And you know, we don't have the final research results from our pilot in Madison yet that'll be coming out in the next few months, which is really exciting. But what we do have in the meantime are anecdotal stories from participants, and that's where I'm starting to see some of these connections that you're talking about Luke, where a individual person's experience of receiving $500 a month and knowing that it will be there every month for a year, how that's playing out.
So what I'm hearing again, these are just anecdotal stories, but I think can potentially point to some themes. Is that almost everyone talks about how the impact on their mental health and their stress and anxiety level, I think that is huge. Allison mentioned that too. People are telling me that this is creating room and bandwidth in their lives so that they are feeling less crunched. They know that no matter what else happens there, at least there will be this one payment, and so they can rely on it, and that provides relief, right? That that security means a lot to people, and they talk about it because that provides relief, knowing that they can provide for their kids, that it seems to be a huge piece for our participants that they want to be able to provide for their kids, and this is a resource for them to do that.
And that's what we're seeing in terms of how people spend the money, right? They're spending it on things for their kids, whether it's diapers and formula or healthy food or whatever food they want to be you know, for their family that week, they're spending on childcare, on rent costs, transportation and health care, medical needs. So that's a lot of what we are seeing and hearing so far, anecdotally. The parents in the program also talk about how it means a lot to be able to spend more time with their kids, right, to be able to potentially not have to work so many hours. One mom in particular, I'll just you know, all of these stories, I'll say are posted on our website. So I encourage people to go to our website, madisonforwardfund.wisc.wisc.edu, and read in more detail, we have a fantastic group of participants who volunteered to share their stories, so I'm just relaying what is there that they have shared.
But one mom had a baby right before she joined the program. She worked as a contractor, so didn't have access to paid leave when her baby was born, but she said that this money allowed her to essentially take time off from her work and be with her baby at the very beginning of after that baby was born during the postpartum period. So for her, this was a huge relief to know she didn't have to go back to work right away with a brand new newborn baby. So I think that's one, just one example to point to.
And then I think there's a lot that we that I want to be learning, learning about the impact on employment and educational opportunities, training opportunities. I'm sure Allison can fill in more about what we're learning from other research studies, but I'm excited to learn about that, because folks in our program have talked about they've used the money to enroll in in a training class. One woman, for example, enrolled in a paralegal training program and almost immediately got promoted in her job, because they saw that she was acquiring new skills and kind of gotten this new career pathway. So I think that's really telling. Yeah, so I think there's a lot of connections, and all of this means that if parents are getting what they need, they're thriving. They're less stressed that that's going to show up for their kids too.
Luke Waldo 32:02
Thank you, Blake. I think it's important to put a face to the data right. First of all, it's really important to know what's happening, kind of at the larger level, the population level that Allison has shared and that you've shared as well, Blake, but I think it really hits home for a lot of people to hear about what is happening in Madison for a new mom when she receives, you know, the monthly payment that she otherwise wouldn't have received, right? And what it means, not only for her, but for those first few critical months of that child's life, right? Those stories matter, and I don't want that to get lost right in this very important and bigger conversation about what we're seeing in the data across the country and, for that matter, even in your own program here in Madison. So thank you for sharing those stories. So with that, I'm going to turn that question over to you, Allison.
Dr. Allison Thompson 32:56
I really appreciate the question about how might guaranteed income be a child welfare intervention. I think it fits very nicely. I've mentioned and been talking about the fact that our labor market in the US is not adequate to meet basic needs, that parents can be doing everything right, working a full-time job, making minimum wage and living in poverty. In addition, our social safety net is insufficient. Families can be connected to all the benefits that they're eligible for and working a minimum wage job and still not be able to make ends meet. And yet, perplexingly, parents are reported as the guilty party when their need when their children's needs cannot be met, so they can be doing everything right, working in a system that is stacked against them, not able to meet their children's basic needs, and the parents are penalized and reported to a child protective services hotline, rather than the governments or systems that are intended to support them. They're not held accountable. They're not being reported. It's the parents, and often this shows up in the form of neglect reporting.
And so neglect reports, such as like lack of supervision or deplorable housing or insufficient food, can all be thought of as proxies for poverty, right? And so you know, just as we've been talking about, because the labor market is not adequate, we can't tell families, we'll just work more, because they are often working full time jobs and still not able to meet these basic needs. We can't say, well, just get connected to benefits, because they often are connected to these benefits and it's still not enough. And so guaranteed income could be a solution to come in and sort of act as a buffer where the labor markets are insufficient, where the social safety net isn't enough, guaranteed income can sit on top of those and help families be able to meet their basic needs, and in that way, it really does serve as a way to meet children's basic needs and serve as a child welfare intervention. In addition to is the ability to reduce stress for families in.
You know, child welfare report assumes some inadequacy on behalf of the parent or the family, but a guaranteed income intervention assumes good for the family. It assumes that families know how to meet their basic needs if they had the right resources. It assumes that families know how to best spend their money for their children, and that foundation of trust and assumption of good also sets up families to do well. It helps in terms of reducing parental stress to enter a program where the assumption is that you're a good parent.
There are examples of very innovative and forward thinking happening within child welfare jurisdictions. A couple of these pilots our Center is evaluating and so really happy to talk about the incredible work going on right now in the state of New York. So New York State just wrapped up a direct cash transfer pilot provided 150 families in three counties, $500 a month for one year, and these were families that had been referred to New York's differential response, which is called the Family Assessment Response, or FAR. And so there are no safety concerns present, but rather families are reported because of other well-being concerns for their children, which are often poverty related. And so our Center conducted a pilot for New York's DCT, or direct cash transfer program. And as I mentioned, we randomly selected and assigned 150 families to the treatment arm to receive the $500 a month for a year, and then randomly selected and assigned 300 families also who were referred to FAR but they did not receive the cash. Both groups were invited to participate in compensated research activities in the forms of surveys at baseline before the cash intervention started every six months thereafter. And we'll wrap up with our last survey in January, which will be six months after the cash pilot ended.
And so the idea here is that, as I said, New York is really interested in experimenting with an intervention that would directly respond to the poverty related issues that these families face. And so, you know, throughout our study, we'll be really interested in looking at outcomes related to family and child's well-being, and also looking at outcomes related to reporting to the child welfare system.
So another example can be found in Los Angeles County. So Los Angeles County developed a guaranteed income pilot for youth who have aged out of foster care. So to be eligible for this pilot, youth were in their early 20s, and they had aged out of foster care in Los Angeles County and were experiencing financial precarity. And so our center is evaluating this randomized, controlled trial with 200 youth who've aged out of foster care in the treatment group receiving $1,000 a month for two years, and 288 youth in the control group who are not receiving cash, but both groups are participating in research activities. I think this is a really good example of a potential policy initiative that jurisdictions might consider, because we know that each year there's a defined finite group of youth, about, actually under 20,000 youth who age out of foster care each year in the US and youth are aged. Youth age out of foster care when they're separated, initially from their families by the state placed into foster care, and then the state is not able to achieve reunification or legal permanency with another family. So arguably, you know, the state has not been able to secure a forever family for these youth. And so usually, at the age of 21 the state ends its support, and youth are forced to be on their own. And so I think there's good logic here to consider how the state might continue to support these youth. You know, throughout their transition into adulthood, many youth who aged out of foster care have experienced traumatic events, including these severed adult ties, and often have minimal economic support, so there are increased risk for poor outcomes such as financial precarity, homelessness, unemployment and poor physical and mental health outcomes, and so guaranteed income for these youth might serve as a buffer during this transition. As youth are transitioning out of a youth system into adulthood, this cash provides a little buffer or additional support throughout their transition.
Luke Waldo 39:39
Thank you, Allison for providing those kind of child welfare specific examples. I think it provides a really nice bridge to our final conversation here around how we might implement these programs more in a more targeted fashion, as you've just mentioned in Los Angeles County and in New York, to specific populations, like those that are, at least, have become, have become exposed to the child welfare system, or or or like systems. Or those that have been involved with the child welfare system for a long time and are now transitioning out of that system. So I appreciate providing those examples in that context.
So I would like to finish our conversation with maybe some of the nuts and bolts or some of the opportunities or lessons learned from your experience with with these programs and how our listeners might implement these models in their communities or across our state and our country. And so I'll turn it over to you, Blake, to start that conversation, and then Allison, I'll have you finish us off here.
Blake Roberts Crall 40:56
I think the mechanics of giving people money are not that complicated. It's relatively straightforward in terms of administration. And that's one of the beauties of it, right? That's one of the things that makes it so great. Not to say it is completely easy, but it's not that hard to implement a program if there is support for it and funding for it, of course, that is the biggest challenge, I would say, of how to pay for these, these types of programs. There's a lot of new research coming out, more and more every day about the impact of guarantee income programs, so we can have a better and better sense of how to use it in a targeted way, in an effective and efficient way, with the impact that we're looking for, and it's relatively, relatively easy to implement, and we need to figure out how to pay for it, because that, at the end of the day, that is going to be the biggest challenge that I see. But part of that comes with building support for the concept.
So I think a lot about what happens if we have evidence for a policy that's a certain policy or program might be effective and it might work, but if we don't have support for it, then those policies never get passed. So a lot of the work that I think would need to be done if we were going to try to implement more programs like this is around narrative change and just and education and outreach. Many, many people, I would guess, the vast majority of people don't know what guaranteed income is, so that's a great opportunity just to do some basic education talking about the concept. One of the things I love about my job is that I get to talk to lots of different people about guaranteed income, and most people, once they start to ask a few questions and hear about it. It makes sense to them, right? I think it can be a tool that gets used in lots of different aspects, whether it's wealth, child welfare, whether it's housing, homelessness, health equity, lots of different components. So I think people understand that, but what gets in the way is a lot of stereotypes about what happens when you give people money, especially if those people are poor. So I think there's a lot of work that we can be doing, that we're trying to do, and more that needs to be done there.
How to pay for it is another big question. You know, it is a policy choice if we want to be investing in programs like this or other types of anti-poverty programs, especially ones that we have growing evidence that can be very impactful. There's a few examples from across the country of different entities that are looking at different ways to be funding some of these programs, which I think are really interesting. There's a network of mayors across the country, and so Madison is part of this network. It's called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. This was how our pilot originally got started. So this is a group of elected officials who have come together and said we might not have enough funding and resources to run programs like this at scale indefinitely, but we can be testing them at a small level and trying to use that information to advocate for it, for change, for federal policy change and all of those pilots, Allison has mentioned some of them. Madison is one of them have looked at funding from different use different funding mechanisms to be able to run these experiments. Madison's program was entirely privately funded. We were very fortunate to have philanthropic support from the community. To be able to launch this program. And very, very excited that we have some support from groups here, locally, private entities that are going to fund a second iteration of the program in Madison, which is great, but still, this is not a long term solution. Some other groups are looking at things like cannabis revenue from taxation, from cannabis revenue, general state revenue, corporate taxation, potentially green energy dividends from drilling or mining, solar energy, wind energy, things like that. There's also some really interesting work happening around using TANF dollars to be supporting programs like this. So I think there are options out there. The conversation needs to move towards looking at how that can, how we can get support for those types of things, generally moving forward.
Luke Waldo 45:58
Thank you, Blake, I think it's really important to acknowledge this shift, as you've mentioned, kind of the education around this, the shift in kind of our mental models, is going to be critical to move towards meaningful policy change that can lead to more public funding of these, these sort of programs.
And so I'm curious Allison, as we think a bit about what Blake has just shared. I'm also curious, because I know that this conversation comes up oftentimes with not only policymakers, but with just the general public, this idea of, if we're going to be spending, say, our tax dollars on guaranteed income programs. How might those dollars save us money elsewhere? We spend about $33, $34 billion every year on child welfare. Right? If we can start to demonstrate that spending, say, two, four, $5 million just here in Milwaukee alone, which is our largest child welfare population in the state, on families who are at risk of coming into the child welfare system because of reasons of poverty, although that is written into our neglect statute that we cannot remove for reasons of poverty. But as you've pointed out, Allison, a lot of a lot of these things that show up are oftentimes a consequence of of poverty. If we can start to demonstrate that that investment in families is leading to a significant reduction in child welfare, and therefore we're saving maybe 10 or $20 million on Child Welfare expenses, right? That becomes a much easier argument to make, but I'm curious if there are any research questions or any analysis that's been done around cost savings when it comes to guaranteed income programs.
Dr. Allison Thompson 47:47
Yeah, that's a great question. And I, you know, I just want to remind us, too, that the science behind guaranteed income is very nascent. You know, our Center produced its first report from our American guaranteed income studies, which are the site specific pilots that we're evaluating right now last year. So it's only been about a year that we've been producing findings and reporting out on our evaluations of specific sites. So we're in, like, the very beginning stages of this work as scientists that said, I mentioned that we're producing a very large data set to be able to ask some of these interesting questions for whom and under what circumstances might guaranteed income work best. We have begun to think about some cost effectiveness analyses as well, and so there is a lot more to come in that way.
Currently, our Center is focusing much of our effort on asking our direct research questions about the impact of guaranteed income on a host of outcomes, but yes, we are absolutely thinking more about these additional questions, and certainly thinking about cost benefit analysis. I wanted to comment, though, Luke on your statement that you know what might it look like if we invest more in addressing child poverty as a country, rather than just putting lots of money and investment into a reactive child welfare system. And I want to remind folks that during the pandemic, the United States expanded the Child Tax Credit in 2021 and that expansion of the Child Tax Credit nearly cut the child poverty rate in half in a single year. So there's absolutely a way to address child poverty at a national level. It's about the will, right? And many folks would say that this expanded Child Tax Credit really mirrored a guaranteed income many families, actually more than 80% of US children benefited from the expanded Child Tax Credit, and those families received regular payments each month to address their children's needs. And I'll say it again, it cut the child poverty level in half but then the Child Tax Credit expansion expired, and in the year following, the child poverty rate soared again. And so I think that there is a world where, as a nation, we can use our tax code and think about how we get cash into families hands to better support their children.
Luke Waldo 50:21
Awesome.Thank you. That's a powerful point when we come together at a policy level and we have the will we can have pretty profound impacts on families across this country.
Blake Roberts Crall 50:32
So there's a lot of movement. And your listeners might be wondering, well, what else is happening in Wisconsin around direct cash assistance, whether that's in the form of a tax credit or in the form of a guaranteed income or something similar. And I would just point out that many other states have adopted or are starting to enact state Child Tax Credits. So that's something that folks in Wisconsin or other states, wherever your listeners, or might be interested in learning more about its effect, it's very similar in that it's a direct cash payment unrestricted. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there, and I'd love to see what that could look like here in Wisconsin, where we don't have a state Child Tax Credit.
And then just to, just to highlight some other work that is happening around guaranteed income in Wisconsin. The Governor's Health Equity Council put out a report last year that was highlighting different policies and practices to be supporting health equity, which I think really connects to child welfare. And guaranteed income was one of those. So that was really interesting to see and and then I also think it's interesting to note that groups like the Wisconsin Farmers Union have started to have interest in policies like this. So last year, the Wisconsin Farmers Union voted and passed a resolution amongst their membership calling for the testing of a guaranteed income program in rural Wisconsin, because I think they see the connections the same things that we're thinking about here, of how can guarantee income be supporting families in rural areas, farming families, agricultural communities, for a lot of the same reasons that we've been we've been talking about here. So I just wanted to highlight those two because I think that they're really interesting and show some of the momentum that's happening in the state.
Luke Waldo 52:26
That's super exciting. And I think a great way to end our conversation. I want to thank you both for joining me today and sharing your knowledge and expertise in this very promising space, and for committing so much of your life's work to improving the lives of children and families. So thank you again for being here and for all that you do.
Dr. Allison Thompson 52:51
Thank you Luke, for having me. It was really great to be able to talk about these issues with you both today.
Blake Roberts Crall 52:58
I echo that. Thanks to both of you. I really enjoyed the conversation, and thank you. Thanks for covering this topic.
Luke Waldo 53:09
I hope that this episode and insights from Blake and Dr. Thompson have you thinking more about how guaranteed income and other economic and concrete support programs might contribute to a comprehensive primary prevention ecosystem. Before we go, as always I wanted to highlight three key takeaways to reflect on as we move into our next episodes.
Thank you for joining us for today’s episode. We hope that you will come back and listen next week as we continue to explore how we might change the conditions that overload families with stress, so that families can thrive and children grow up with positive childhood experiences.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share with friends, family and colleagues. Also, leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people.
To learn more about the experts that you heard today, visit the Show Notes, which is where you will also find links to sources or information that were mentioned in today’s episode.
Thank you again for joining us. See you next week.
This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Carrie Wade, who is responsible for our technical production and original music composition. I can't express my gratitude enough to Carrie for all she has given to this project. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children’s Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast.
Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your Host and Executive Editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.