Briana Drummer, a 33 -year -old New Yorker, had just left everything she had behind her home in Brooklyn to escape domestic violence when she discovered she was pregnant.
“I left my house and my belongings and I got exactly what I could in a bag, as soon as I said,” My life is more important than all my things, “he said.” This is my first child. So, first, I was anxious. I was really worried. ”
Drummer moved to a family refuge and soon asked for prenatal care in a local hospital where doctors told her about New York Guaranteed income programThe Bridge project, which provides cash payments to several 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,” Drummer said.
The program is one of the dozens that have begun to circulate in recent years in places such as New York and California to help compensate for increasing life costs. Parental care is becoming more and more accurate as prices for Baby baby products are increasing and child care expenses present one charge For families working. Throw in stagnant wages; inflation; invoicesAnd price increases and the building of a family has become very expensive for many Americans.
The work of the bridge delivers up to $ 1,000 unconditionally each month to accepted program participants. Candidates must be legal US residents facing housing instability, 18 years and over, 23 to 40 weeks pregnant and make less than $ 52,000 a year. The guaranteed income programs in the city were Approved in July 2025 for funding $ 3 million by the Municipal Council, whose bridge project received $ 1.5 million. (The project was originally funded in 2021 by private charity.)
“It was a beautiful way to help me go to motherhood without stress not being financially stable enough to get the things I need for a newborn child,” Drummer said, adding, “I probably couldn’t do it” without help.
Above the west coast, the Contra Costa County, a metropolitan area outside San Francisco, has an 8 % poverty rate, which is increased to 10 % for those under 18 years of age. approved his first pilot A guaranteed income program in July 2025. In order to qualify, candidates must register with County funded programs and fall into one of the four categories: Parents to young children experiencing financial difficulties, youth who go from low -income, older people.
Both programs focus on targeted communities that need financial support, offering unconditional cash payments for a specified period of time.
“There are moments of financial fragility that we can identify where guaranteed income can change the result a few years below the road,” said Stacia West, founding director of the Guaranteed Income Research Center, A research center at the University of Pennsylvania that studies unconditional payments.
Research has repeatedly found This economic well -being in the early years of a child plays a key social factor for future health, development, education and profits.
“What we have done in this country is people with lower trapping income in rarity so that they have to survive and unable to reach a different future,” West said.
“We have a lot of data to show that no budget is better than a poor woman with children,” he added. “No one makes better financial decisions and is more aware of her budget than a mom trying to get them out.”
But people in low profitability tasks cannot budget from poverty.
Undaunted payments have allowed recipients to spend on the needs that are more vital to their family, according to a 2024 review The results of the bridge project. For some families, this means that it helps to pay for the cost of housing housing, said Bridge Project Tegan Lecheler. For the locations of the brothers managed by the Bridge project in more rural areas, it helps with car payments or transport costs. Some parents use it to pay for their permission if their job does not already provide it.
“More cash equals more opportunities, more options,” Lecheler said. “It means living in a safer neighborhood. It means choosing to go back to work and put your child in child care, having access to more dietary foods for yourself and for your baby.”
“It simply allows mothers’ flexibility and service to know and fill in any gaps that keep their family to thrive to the greatest extent they could be,” he continued.
Multiple studies In targeted cash payment programs, the idea that guaranteed income programs lead to increased food safety, enhanced physical and mental well -being and improved financial health for guaranteed income recipients in all areas.
In 2021 it expanded the federal credit tax credit, which is estimated to have benefited 88 % of children in the US, led to one of the steepest reductions in children’s poverty over the past two decades, According to the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.
The evidence is “clearly”, said Christopher Wimer, co-director of the Center for Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work.
“It reduces food insecurity and food difficulties and there are some indications that they have improved the degree to which people were on housing payments,” Wilmer said. “Many people used it for food, accounts, rental.”
These findings inspired California’s newest guaranteed income, said Contra Costa County John Gioia Rewire News Group.
In January 2026, 178 low -income people in Contra Costa County will participate in the 18 -month -old pilot program.
Participants will be selected through their registration in programs funded by the County. The supervisory council of the county approved unanimously the program July 8, but was not hesitant by some members of the Board of Directors.
Critics of cash payment programs They often say that cash payments will encourage people to abandon their job and rely on free money. But Wimer says the available data do not support these concerns.
He said cash payments allowed some people to work a little less, especially those who may need to meet family requirements at home. But, he added, funds also allowed others to work longer because they could afford transport and daily care-Extended challenges that some parents hold from full employment.
Gioia, who led the accusation with community supporters to start the Contra Costa program, said skeptics should think of guaranteed income “as an investment in families working to improve their situation”.
“It is an investment that saves us money down the road and increases the number of people who become politically dedicated and prosperous in our community,” he added.
After a year on the Bridge program program, the drummer has graduated with his degree – largely due to his guaranteed income payments, he said. Her financial pillow has given her the space to raise her child in a safe environment, as well as embrace her passion for psychology and neuroscience in the hope of seeking a future in mental health counseling.
She is excited about her future.
“As a kid who was in the foster, I don’t think she was much expected from me,” she said, adding that the program helped her get to where she is today and that she hopes she would give her child the kind of stability she had not grown up.
“I have to become the model I wanted in my life to be a great role model for my daughter,” Drummer said. “So it really pushed me to be better me, and it made me realize that I am more than what I thought I was.”
