‘In child welfare, you start the relationship with a report in your hand that accuses you of being a bad parent. I can’t think of any other accusation that would hit home harder. With unconditional cash, you’re starting the relationship saying, we assume that you are good and knowledgeable about how to spend your money. It’s the opposite of a pejorative system.’
Allison Thompson is the Executive Director of Penn’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research (CGIR), which specializes in cash-transfer research, design and evaluation, and she was previously the Senior Research Officer for Philadelphia’s Office of Children and Families. Here, Allison explains the potential of unconditional cash in supporting families, especially as it relates to child welfare.
Q: What are you seeing from guaranteed income (GI) research in terms of effects on family stability and well-being?
A: We partner to support evaluation across more than 35 pilot sites, looking at the impact of guaranteed income on a number of areas, including quality of life; sense of self, hope, and mattering; income and employment; and caregiving.
We see that a lot of families who are living in poverty experience income volatility—changes in the amount of money that they receive each month—and that’s often because they are relying on unpredictable work. But by adding in a guaranteed income, you have a more predictable flow of income. You know that, every single month, $500 is coming to your account, no matter what you do, no matter what comes, whether you are sick and can’t take your shifts or whether you’re well.
When people know they have guaranteed income for a set amount of time, it gives them room to be able to address material hardships and then start to think ahead and set goals for the future. The first six to eight months is often used for addressing immediate concrete needs and getting to a place of stability. Beyond that, people are then able to think about the future.
We’ve found, across many of our studies, that guaranteed income is associated with increases in employment, rather than decreases. This is not surprising given that people are able to use the guaranteed income to set goals, have more choice in terms of jobs, and have more time and capacity to reach those goals. We have found that, by smoothing income volatility, guaranteed income often allows families the cushion to drop the gig work or the second job that is supplementing their income in order to do things like go get their CDL license or a real estate license and then take a job that pays more.
Another core finding we’re seeing consistently across studies is that guaranteed income creates more time for parents to spend with their children. We see recipients talking about the ability to engage in self care for themselves, for their children and their families. In a recent pilot in Columbia, South Carolina that was conducted with primarily Black fathers, they talked a lot about how wonderful it was to have some income to be able to give to their children in meaningful ways that felt really rewarding. For example, many of these fathers reported being able to take their children to places that they hadn’t been able to before and that it really strengthened their relationship and connection with their children.
CGIR uses a similar evaluation approach across most of our sites so that we can compare findings across pilots. In addition to the core survey that we administer across sites, jurisdictions also can pick a few of their own measures of interest. Thinking about the areas of family stability and well-being, some sites have looked at measures that are more specific to parent-child interactions, or to child development or academic performance. We have some exciting findings in terms of improved academic performance and involvement in extracurricular activities among the children of GI recipients, which again, may be due to parents having more time with their children.
Q: Research shows that economic “shocks” and setbacks often precede child welfare involvement. What implications might GI have for reducing interactions with the child welfare system?
A: So many families are reported to the child protective services system because of poverty-related stressors, and yet, our systems are inadequate at effectively addressing poverty. Historically, the toolkit for Child Protective Services is largely case management and surveillance, especially for families that are deemed “low risk.”
So there is a mismatch between need and response. The need is resources, because people are experiencing poverty, and the intervention is case management and surveillance, which doesn’t address resources. This mismatch has really stunted progress for families in many ways, and has been a harmful approach in terms of accusing families living in poverty of being neglectful.
Guaranteed income of $500 a month is not enough to end poverty. But the logic behind $500 or $1,000 a month in guaranteed income is that it can help to stabilize income and buffer folks from some financial shock. Nearly 40% of Americans can’t afford a $400 unexpected emergency. So across our sites, a core outcome we look at is the ability to handle a $400 emergency expense. It’s striking that across many of our studies and on average, recipients of guaranteed income have an increased ability to handle an economic shock.
Guaranteed income is best thought of as a resource to augment a strong social safety net. Strong medical systems are still needed, strong educational systems are needed. The housing system is still needed. All of those systems need to be robust. The guaranteed income sits on top of that.
Ideally, we would have systems of support for families that are robust enough to address parental stress outside of CPS. In that way, families would be able to adequately care for their children and meet their needs without the harmful impacts of a CPS system for issues of poverty.
The mechanism of giving unconditional cash also has specific benefits. In child welfare, you start the relationship with a report in your hand that accuses you of being a bad parent. I can’t think of any other accusation that would hit home harder. It is predicated on lack of trust. With unconditional cash, you’re starting the relationship saying, we assume that you are good and knowledgeable about how to spend your money. And that you’re the best one to make these decisions. It’s the opposite of a pejorative system.
One of our primary research questions is around the impact of guaranteed income on people’s sense of self, and we look at the impact of unconditional cash on participants’ feelings of hope and mattering. We’ve seen that a key feature of unconditional cash is that it’s premised on trust and the assumption that people know how to spend their money best. When the foundation of an intervention is trust, it does something for people in terms of their internal sense of self and worth. In one of our studies in St. Paul, we found that when the guaranteed income stopped, financial health dipped because people weren’t receiving the cash. However, the internal experiences of hope and sense of purpose continued to improve even after the cash stopped.
Q: How are you directly looking at child welfare in the GI research space?
A: We have two child welfare-focused studies – a pilot in New York State, and the other in LA County. The New York State pilot focuses on families eligible for a Family Assessment Response or FAR (which is called CARES in NYC). These are cases reported to the state’s child protective service system that are not considered high risk.
By addressing and improving financial health through the guaranteed income, we expect to see that parents would experience reduced stress and be able to spend more time with their families. We have also hypothesized that we’ll see reduced re-reporting to CPS systems because of the reduction in poverty and poverty-related stressors.
Families who had experienced FAR were identified and contacted by OCFS. From the folks who consented into the study and were interested in being part of the project, we randomly selected and assigned 150 participants into a treatment arm to receive $500 of unconditional cash for one year, and then randomly selected and assigned 300 families into a control arm to participate in compensated research activities but to not receive the guaranteed income. The pilot ends this summer, with the last cash payment in July, and we expect to have results in December 2025.
This pilot is a part of creating an evidence base for what works for strengthening families, especially for folks that have had child welfare exposure. We also think it can offer information about what might reduce the likelihood of reporting. If our hypotheses are supported, we can ask: How do we go further upstream so that cash can be given to families outside of the child protective services system?
Q: Given these promising impacts, how do you see GI moving from research to policy?
A: In some places, that work is being done right now. Nationally, there’s so much excitement and energy around unconditional cash. In Cambridge, Mass., they have used the research to advance policy work and scale their GI program to the city level.
There is a growing evidence base that exists in terms of guaranteed income, and at the same time, it’s also a very new field. Through these experiments, we’re getting a clearer picture about how guaranteed income functions for people who have lived in persistent poverty. Now we’re looking at how guaranteed income may function for people that experience an acute event, whether it be a report to the child welfare system, or recent immigration. We also have studies looking at very specific financial needs for refugees that come to the United States, and we have two pilots that look at returning citizens from prison who experience a lot of financial burden when they return to communities. In all of these studies, there are still questions that need to be answered about how cash functions for different populations. How unconditional cash functions in relation with other policy systems is complex, and the needs people have are complex.
One of the key changes that we’ve seen from this work is in regard to the narrative around spending. Originally, our center did not want to track spending data. We don’t care how people spend their money. But a family group of advisors from one of the earliest pilots pushed back and said, “We want our spending data to be shown. There’s so much need for narrative change and people misunderstand and misrepresent how we spend money. We want that shown.” We see that people across pilots consistently spend the bulk of their money on caring for their families and their basic needs, with the largest expenditures being food, transportation and retail stores like Home Goods, Target and Walmart.
Early on, lots of media reporters would ask about spending habits and make assumptions that were reflective of old and racist tropes about people misusing their money or spending it irresponsibly. But those questions have largely stopped. There’s a greater acknowledgement that people are spending the money on basic needs. By showing those data and the consistency across time and space, that narrative is shifting.