Briana drummer, a 33-year-old New Yorker, had just left everything she had behind her house in Brooklyn to escape domestic violence when she found out that she was pregnant.
“I left my house and my possessions and just took what I could do in a bag. I just said:” My life is more important than all my things, “she said.” This is my first child. So first I was anxious. I was really worried. “
Drummer moved to a family shelter and soon looked for prenatal care in a local hospital, where doctors told her about that of New York City Guaranteed income programThe Bridge Project, which offers cash payments to a number of mothers for the first three years of the baby’s life.
“It’s just a very dark hole that I would have seen myself without the payments of the Bridge project,” said Drummer.
The program is one of the dozens that have started in recent years in places such as New York and California to help compensate for the increasing costs of living. Parenthood is becoming increasingly expensive, such as prices for Basic baby products rise and costs for childcare present one growing burden For working families. To stake stagnating wages” inflation” ratesAnd price increases, and building a family has effectively become too expensive for many Americans.
Every month, the bridge project unconditionally gives up to $ 1,000 to accepted participants in the program. Applicants must be legal American residents who experience home instability, 18 years or older, 23 to 40 weeks pregnant and earn less than $ 52,000 annually. Guaranteed income programs were in the city Approved in July 2025 for $ 3 million in financing by the city council, the bridge project of which received $ 1.5 million. (The project was initially funded by private philanthropy in 2021.)
“It was a great way to help me to go to motherhood without the stress that I was not financially stable enough to get the things I needed for a newborn child,” said drummer, adding it, “I would probably not have been able to do it” without help.
On the west coast, counter Costa County, a metropolitan region outside San Francisco, has a poverty rate of 8 percent, which rises to 10 percent for those under the age of 18. The province the first pilot approved of a guaranteed income program in July 2025. To be eligible, applicants must be registered in programs sponsored by the province and fall under one of the four categories: parents for young children experience financial problems, young people who switch from foster care, seniors with a low income and previously tied individuals.
Both programs focus on targeted communities that need economic support and offer unconditional cash payments for a specific amount of time.
“There are times of financial vulnerability that we can determine where guaranteed income can change the outcome a few years later,” said Stacia West, the founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research, A research center at the University of Pennsylvania that studies unconditional payment programs.
Research has been found repeatedly That financial well -being in the early years of a child plays an important social factor in their future health, development, education and income.
“What we have done in this country is people with a lower income in scarcity, so that they have to deal with survival and be unable to reach some kind of a different future,” said West.
“We have a lot of data to indicate that nobody better budgets than a poor woman with children,” she added. “No one makes better financial decisions and is more aware of her budget than a mother trying to make ends meet.”
But people in low -earning jobs cannot do that Budget their way out of poverty.
The unconditional payments were able to spend recipients on which needs are most essential for their families, according to an assessment of 2024 of The results of the bridge project. For some families this means that it helps to pay for the towering costs of housing, said the national director of Bridge Projects Tegan Lecheler. For the sister locations run through the bridge project in more rural areas, it helps with car payments or transport costs. Some parents use it to pay for their leave, if their daily task does not offer them.
“More money is equal to more opportunities, more choices,” said Lecheler. “It means to live in a safer neighborhood. It means choosing to go back to work and bring your child to childcare, to have access to more food food for yourself and for your baby.”
“It really only lets mothers flexibility and freedom of choice able to know and fill in gaps that do not flourish their families to a full extent that they can be,” she went on.
Multiple study On targeted cash payment programs, the idea that guaranteed income programs lead to increased food security, improved physical and mental well -being and improved financial health for guaranteed income recipients across the board.
The 2021 extensive federal tax credit for children, who has benefited an estimated 88 percent of the children in the US, led to one of the steepest decades of child poverty in the past two decades, According to the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.
The evidence is ‘unambiguous’, said Christopher Wimer, a co-director of the Center for Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work.
“It reduced the food insecurity of people and the hardships of food, and there is some proof that it improved the extent in which people had their housing payments,” Wilmer said. “Many people used it for food, bills, rent.”
These findings inspired the newest guaranteed income program from California, told Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia Rewire News Group.
In January 2026, 178 people with a low income in counter Costa County will participate in the 18 -month pilot program for cash payment.
Participants are chosen by their registration in programs sponsored by the province. The County Board of Supervisors the program unanimously approved On July 8, but it was not without hesitation of some board members.
Critics of cash payment programs Often say that cash payments would encourage people to leave their jobs and trust the free money. But Wimer says that the available data that ensures do not support.
He said that in cash payments have enabled some people to work a little less, in particular those who may have to meet the requirements of home family homes. But, he added, the funds have also enabled others to work more because they could afford it transport And daycare—Expensive challenges that some parents keep full -time work.
Gioia, who led the indictment in addition to the proponents of the community to launch the Costa program, said that skeptics should think about guaranteed income “as an investment in families working to improve their situation.”
“It is an investment that saves our money on the road and increases the number of people in our community and is flourishing,” he added.
After a year in the Bridge program project, drummer graduated with her bachelor’s degree – in general because of the guaranteed income benefits, she said. The financial pillow gave her the space to raise her child in a safe environment, and to embrace her passion for psychology and neuroscience in the hope of pursuing a future in the counseling of mental health care.
She is enthusiastic about her future.
“If a child who was in foster care, I don’t think much was expected of me,” she said, adding that the program helped her to get where she is now and that she hopes to give her child the kind of stability that she missed growing up.
“I have to be the role model that I wanted in my life to be a great role model for my daughter,” said Drummer. “So it really pushed me to just be a better I, and made me realize that I am more than what I thought I was.”
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