How to Move Guaranteed Income from Program to Policy

If you want to reduce poverty, cash matters. That is the central lesson we have gained from a six-year nationally recognized guaranteed-income program in Jackson, MS.

Springboard to Opportunities—the organization we both work for—began operations in 2013 with the goal to break cycles of generational poverty that are particularly persistent in Black communities.

For the first five years, Springboard operated programs for education reentry, workforce development, and afterschool programs, but our families told us they didn’t need another program. They needed cash. So, in 2018, Springboard launched the Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT) to provide direct payments to Black mothers.

We are proud of what our program has accomplished and what similar programs across the country have done. But it is past time to move from programs to policy.

How Guaranteed Income Works

The basic notion behind guaranteed income is simple: Provide cash to families that need it. Our program was designed to specifically support Black mothers living in subsidized housing; they receive $1,000 per month for 12 months with no strings attached. Additionally, mothers receive a $1,000 one-time deposit in a 529 College Savings Plan for each of their children, personalized coaching support, opportunities to participate in community events and gatherings, regular educational meetings around participant-identified topics, and frequent opportunities for storytelling and media engagement.

The average income of mothers at the start of the program is under $12,000 annually, so the payments provide a massive increase to their household finances. Recipients can save money, pay down debt, go back to school, and even exit subsidized housing altogether.

There are also smaller yet crucial benefits: Some parents reported taking their kids on a road trip to meet their grandparents for the first time or being able to buy a backpack for the new school year at the store instead of relying on the donation pile. The impact goes far beyond the economic returns, with reports of mothers feeling much more hopeful about their family’s futures.

The basic notion behind guaranteed income is simple: Provide cash to families that need it.

Over 150 communities in the United States, including us, participate in the Guaranteed Income Community of Practice. Our evaluations, along with so many others’, have consistently shown the importance of cash and trust-based resources in helping low-income families meet their needs, enhance self-efficacy and agency, strengthen family relationships and parental confidence, and support overall wellbeing.

Guaranteed income and the importance of cash benefits for families have recently become more mainstream topics. But as we consider what it might look like to strengthen current cash-based benefits and even create new ones, it is essential that we pull lessons from programs like MMT and, most importantly, from the expertise and wisdom of families themselves.

Drawing from our evaluations and other research and best practices in the field, we offer the following recommendations to create a social safety net that works for all people.

Changing the Narrative around Poverty

Our current social safety net system is grounded in deficit-based, paternalistic narratives about families in poverty, especially those headed by Black women. When applying for benefits, families consistently come across unnecessary roadblocks—assumptions that people in poverty don’t know how to manage their own time and money or how to care for their families. These roadblocks hold up a family’s access to desperately needed support for months and even discourage families from applying altogether. As journalist Alissa Quart has documented, these obstacles are less a “bug” than a feature: The system is designed to accentuate shame and discourage people from applying for benefits to which they are by law entitled.

One MMT mother describes the perception of individuals receiving benefits like this: “People feel like everybody that’s on [food] stamps and stuff like that, that they don’t want work.…But that’s not the case…this is something they need to survive.”

Part of what makes guaranteed income unique is its commitment to an asset-based approach that believes dignity is inherent in all people. If we truly want to build systems that can move the needle on poverty, we have to start by providing space in media, in government, and in our own organizations for families—and particularly Black mothers—to tell their own stories on their own terms. Their stories will challenge our assumptions and practices. Ending poverty begins with being honest about the racism and sexism implicit in our systems, which has trapped families in poverty for generations, rather than creating paths toward liberation.

People-Centered Design

Our current social safety net system is grounded in deficit-based, paternalistic narratives about families in poverty.

We cannot stop at creating new stories and narratives, though. To build better programs and systems, we must also include families in the design and evaluation processes. Most government policy wonks have little to no experience with families living in poverty. Nobody knows better than families themselves what they need to care for their families and exit poverty—and nobody knows better than families who use social safety net benefits how the current system is failing them.

Our own guaranteed-income program was built alongside our families. Not only were they the ones to first explicitly tell us that they needed cash, but they also helped determine the amount, the duration of the program, the disbursement schedule, and the program’s additional supports.

Our families knew what they needed, and by including them in the design process, we have been able to create a program participants describe as a stable foundation for community and financial support that alleviates stress and allows them to better care for themselves and their families. They continue to provide feedback and input after each cohort, which has resulted in subsequent adjustments.

Government policy should work similarly. And the fact that it presently does not tell us a lot about current government priorities and dysfunction.

A Multi-Generational Approach

Current social safety net benefits tend to use success metrics that narrowly focus on outcomes for adults. Yet guaranteed income programs like ours have shown that cash-based benefits are good for the whole family and have a lasting impact on parent-child relationships, children’s financial knowledge, and confidence and hope for the future.

As one participant’s child said, “Life got better, and I felt less guilty when I ask for things. We got an allowance after we started getting the money. We also got to go on our first trip, and we got to do more stuff.…After the program ended, we moved and my mom had a good job, and it paid her a lot…I’m not as scared of my future.”

It’s also crucial for policy to acknowledge the unpaid labor of caregiving, which has long been overlooked and devalued. The mothers in our program are quick to say that they see caregiving as their most important job. This includes caring for children of course, but people who cannot afford the sky-high costs of care facilities or at-home nursing support often rely on other family members across generations to provide elder care or medical support. Guaranteed-income programs can enable low-wage workers to dedicate more time to their caregiving roles.

As one MMT participant said, “It made me strive harder to have more income without having to work so many hours and be away from my family.…I also realized that having more income made us less stressful as a family, and the kids felt more comfortable with asking to try out for extracurricular activities.”

Moving to Policy

In 2021, the federal government ran a one-year experiment called the expanded child tax credit, which increased the amount of the credit and expanded eligibility for families that were previously too poor to qualify. That year, the child poverty rate fell by over a third. Tragically, this benefit was allowed to expire—and child poverty levels went back up. A 2024 analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities conservatively estimates that reinstatement of the 2021 law would lift 2.6 million children out of poverty.

This year, both the Democratic and Republican presidential campaign platforms claimed to favor expanded child tax credit support. Guaranteed income and the importance of cash benefits for families has become a somewhat normal topic of political conversation. But past efforts to implement guaranteed income as public policy, including a modest effort earlier this year to restore some of the 2021 child tax credit benefits, fell short. There have been gains at the state level, but getting enough support to move federal policy across the finish line remains a challenge.

We have seen the lasting benefits of even short-term guaranteed-income programs, especially when it comes to improvements in parent-child relationships, overall confidence, and self-efficacy. Yet we also know that, particularly for families in generational poverty, the short-term investment that philanthropic-funded pilots offer is often not enough to break long-term cycles of poverty.

Racist and sexist economic policies and social structures have long denied people in marginalized groups the opportunity to build generational wealth and achieve critical economic stability. While families get a boost during short-term pilots, it takes a significant amount of time to build the foundation families are looking for to both escape poverty and start building wealth.

In other words, short-term, timebound pilots and programs, while beneficial, are insufficient. With many provisions of the 2017 Republican tax bill (Tax Cuts and Job Act) set to expire in 2025, the nation has an opportunity to retool tax policies to help families break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

Expansions of tax credits that support low-income families, like the child tax credit and earned income tax credit, are the first steps toward creating a more equitable society that ensures all families have access to greater financial stability—but more can be done. The idea of a federal guaranteed income is neither new nor historically partisan. And as over 150 pilots nationwide have shown, guaranteed income works.

It is time for public policy to take seriously the needs and stories of low-income families by implementing policies that offer them a sustainable pathway to build wealth and escape poverty. It is time for guaranteed income to become public policy across the United States.