Investing in Youth the Way They ‘Deserve and Demand’: YouthNPower: Transforming Care Direct Cash Transfer Project

Research on youth aging out of foster care often focuses on deficits, emphasizing risk factors and what young people don’t have and didn’t do. So when the YouthNPower: Transforming Care collective created the first Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) pilot for young people who’ve aged out of foster care in NYC, designed with youth who share that experience, they structured their research to focus on something different, asking youth, what do you dream for yourself? 

In their report, where YouthNPower published findings from their baseline survey, young people’s “visions of a good life” were at the forefront.

Here, YouthNPower members Denice Ocana, Ellenie Liang, Julia Davis, Maya Tellman, and T’Coy Adams explain their approach to creating and administering unconditional cash to invest in youth the way they “deserve and demand.” The pilot provided $1,000/month to 100 young people and ran from June 2023 until May 2024.

Q: What was the design process like for the YouthNPower Direct Cash Transfer (DCT) pilot?

Maya Tellman, Facilitator: We used a Participatory Action Research framework, built with the members of the collective. It was a long summer and fall of getting to know each other, and sharing our stories and expertise—from policy development, research, or lived expertise within the system. We also borrowed from other cash pilots happening across the country and created elements from scratch, unique to our project. 

Julia Davis, Facilitator: We wanted participants to engage with us, not just receive money and fill out a survey, but to build collective knowledge in a respectful, responsive way. We wrestled with what it meant to do this. Who would be eligible? How would we find young people? How do we invite them into this work? We also had to balance the tension around the fact that we didn’t have enough for all 500 young people who age out of foster care every year in NYC. A lot of hard work went into thinking through how we offer a time-limited gift in a context of extreme precarity, where young people need, deserve and demand much more. 

T’Coy Adams, Youth Action Researcher: That’s part of the reason we decided against a randomized control trial—we wanted everyone involved to get the cash assistance that they needed, in an equitable way. We felt like it wouldn’t have been fair to include people in our project for the sake of comparison. There were tough decisions, and it took a lot of deliberation and collaboration. 

Maya: Some projects will get impacted people in a room for one meeting, get them to sign off on their work and call it a participatory project. Our method has been collaborative at every single point. It’s not an easy or fast approach, but it creates a deeper, richer and more effective end result. 

We were also very intentional about not wanting our work to replicate other research experiences that people have had, which can be deficit based and only focus on the depths of someone’s precarity. 

Denice Ocana, Youth Action Organizer: Being young, being minorities, we’re used to filling things out and being just a number or a circle on a paper, instead of being able to share our stories, who we are and what we’ve been through. We had conversations like this, and asked questions like these throughout our project to humanize people’s experiences.

T’Coy: That’s one of the main things that sets our pilot apart—dignity and compassion fuels our work. When you treat people with dignity, respect and compassion, there’s a level of trust that you’re able to build, where people feel comfortable coming to you, speaking to you and sharing things they might have not shared otherwise. People have a wide array of experiences that make them who they are, and that’s important to keep at the forefront.

Q: How did this thinking inform the pilot design?

Maya: We wanted to get a full picture of people’s lives. At every touchpoint in the pilot, in surveys, focus groups or interviews, we wanted to give our participants an opportunity to share what they wanted—their desires, hopes and visions of what a good life and future could look like—in their own words. While it’s important to understand where someone is at financially to understand the impact of cash, we wanted to go beyond that. 

Ellenie Liang, Youth Action Researcher: What I think really differentiates our project is that we created a community space. We never emphasized financial literacy or lecturing participants on where to spend their money—”you should get a credit card” or other things like that—people know they can come to us when they need, and we’ll provide support.

Denice: We have had focus groups where DCT participants come in and we share data, look at it together and talk about how it helps us move forward. Participants share that they appreciate these spaces, not just because it is a place to learn what we’re doing with their information, but also because they’re able to connect. A few of them have found each other again after years—they learn that they were at the same place, at the same time, in a home or Upstate somewhere. 

There’s a lot of youth in the foster care system, and there’s not a lot of places for them to share their experiences and truly feel understood in what they have been through. This project is about cash, but it’s also about community, it’s about mental health resources and places to connect.

Q: What have you learned about the impact of cash on young people who are aging out?

Julia: We know cash works—part of our inquiry is understanding how it works, especially for this population. 

One key finding from the midpoint survey was that young people felt like they had more choice in their life. This was because of access to the cash itself, but it also represented freedom from the system and the experience of emerging adulthood and independence.

For young people living inside the child welfare system, choice is very limited. Where you live, where you work, what you can do and what you get is really restricted. What we saw, and what we really want to uplift throughout our work, is that self-determination and freedom is so deeply intertwined with having the basic supports you need to make those choices.

T’Coy: We found that the money affected people in so many different ways. Even though it was for a limited amount of time, participants shared that they were able to save and use the money for things they might’ve not been able to do before. Overall, it helped. 

Despite the fact that the amount is so little, we saw participants literally giving their last to people who need things, who they love and who are connected to them. Some participants helped their grandparents, others supported their children or godchildren. The impact wasn’t just on one person, but on the people connected to them as well. 

Ellenie: We’ve seen that shift from the first survey, to the midpoint, to our last one. In the beginning, they were all about survival and paying bills. Throughout the 12 months we’ve seen a shift to helping family and friends and others. Once you can care for yourself, you can care for others.

Maya: That really captures the ripple effect of unconditional cash on families and communities. Our data shines light on the behaviors, desires, networks, and communities that young people are part of as they transition out of care.

Julia: This individual, family, and community impact changes how we think about cash in the research but also in policy framing, shifting from an individual, almost medical “dose-response” model to a broader public health model. 

Q: What about in terms of interactions with the child welfare system?

Julia: Over a third of our participants are parenting. You can see in the first report how concerned they are about intergenerational contact with this system, and that 52% have already had that experience even just a few years out of custody. 

We’ve collected data about system contact and experiences around that, as well as administrative data at the city level to look at the impact of cash on investigations and other interactions with the child welfare system. We are also interested in the experience of being a parent more holistically.

The experience of early pregnancy or early parenting is considered a negative outcome. Our work shows that young people find an enormous sense of joy and place in the world through parenting. In many ways, having families is also an important way of healing from the experience of having their family relationships ended or disconnected by the system.

Q: You say in your report that “cash is not sufficient as a singular policy solution.”  How is this idea reflected in your DCT pilot and in YouthNPower’s work more broadly? 

T’Coy: Cash is really important—it helps people survive and acquire things they need. But there are things that cash doesn’t necessarily help with. 

For example, many people want mental health support but face barriers to finding a therapist they truly trust. Their insurance might cover a therapist, but not a good one who can offer true concern and care like they want and need. That’s just one example, but it applies to other sectors of people’s lives. Cash works, sure, but there are things it doesn’t address. 

Julia: In our work, cash support is nested in the bigger transition out of foster care. We see our political and policy work—our inquiries, organizing and activism—as needing to be deeply interconnected and responding to community needs, situating unconditional cash in a context of other demands as well, such as demands for affordable housing options. This work has been building collective action as we’re building collective knowledge.

Ellenie: We always wanted to be a resource and support for other youth. When youth transition out of care, it’s a vulnerable time where they may not know what to do. They’re on their own, with no one to rely on, no one that they can go back to. 

What came out of the pilot is that, on top of seeing us as a resource, they saw support within each other. We saw a lot of participants creating friendships outside of the work, and that was heartwarming. It wasn’t what we expected, but it was great.

Maya: Some people in the guaranteed income world may believe that cash is the end-all-be-all, but that’s never how we imagined it. Everyone in our collective believes in giving young people cash and the freedom to choose what they do with it. We also recognize that guaranteed income should not replace the broader social safety net that can give young people the services that T’Coy is describing. Cash also shouldn’t replace a much larger social safety net that we can dream of, like what Ellenie is describing with spaces of community for young people.

Julia: Money is one thing, but the experience of transitioning out of foster care is a bigger experience. We’ve known that the project wouldn’t end with the pilot. It is really intended to build a bridge to power building and change, with the promise of community accountability to bigger demands.

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