Cash Payments Support New Parents as Costs of Living Soar

Briana Drummer, a 33-year-old New Yorker, had just left everything she had behind in her Brooklyn home to escape domestic violence when she found out she was pregnant.

“I left my home and my belongings and just took what I could 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 sought prenatal care at a local hospital, where physicians told her about New York City’s guaranteed income program, the Bridge Project, that provides cash payments to a number of mothers for the first three years of the baby’s life.

“It’s just a very dark hole I would have seen myself in without the Bridge Project payments,” Drummer said.

The program is one of dozens that have begun rolling out in recent years in places like New York and California to help offset soaring costs of living. Parenthood is becoming increasingly expensive, as prices for basic baby products rise and child-care costs present a growing burden for working families. Throw in stagnant wages, inflation, tariffs, and price hikes, and building a family has effectively become too expensive for many Americans.

The Bridge Project gives up to $1,000 unconditionally each month to accepted program participants. Applicants must be legal U.S. residents experiencing housing instability, 18 years or older, 23 to 40 weeks pregnant, and make less than $52,000 annually. Guaranteed income programs in the city were approved in July 2025 for $3 million in funding by the city council, of which the Bridge Project received $1.5 million. (The project was initially funded in 2021 by private philanthropy.)

“It was a beautiful way to help me transition into motherhood without the stress of not being financially stable enough to get the things that I needed for a newborn child,” Drummer said, adding, “I probably wouldn’t have been able to do it” without help.

Over on the West Coast, Contra Costa County, a metropolitan region outside of San Francisco, has an 8 percent poverty rate, which rises to 10 percent for those under the age of 18. The county approved its first pilot of a guaranteed income program in July 2025. To qualify, applicants must be enrolled in county-sponsored programs and fall under one of four categories: parents to young children who are experiencing financial hardship, youth transitioning out of foster care, low-income seniors, and formerly incarcerated individuals.

Both programs focus on targeted communities in need of economic support, offering unconditional cash payments for a specific amount of time.

“There are moments of financial fragility that we can pinpoint where guaranteed income might change the outcome a few years down the road,” said Stacia West, the founding director for the Center for Guaranteed Income Research, a research center at the University of Pennsylvania that studies unconditional payment programs.

Research has repeatedly found that financial wellness in a child’s early years plays a key social factor in their future health, development, education, and earnings.

“What we have done in this country is trap lower-income people into scarcity such that they have to be preoccupied with survival and unable to kind of reach for a different future,” West said.

“We have a lot of data to indicate that no one budgets better than a poor woman with children,” she added. “No one makes better financial decisions and is more aware of her budget than a mom that is trying to make ends meet.”

But people in low-earning jobs can’t budget their way out of poverty.

The unconditional payments allowed recipients to spend on what needs are most vital to their family, according to a 2024 review of the Bridge Project’s results. For some families, that means it helps pay for the skyrocketing cost of housing, Bridge Project’s National Director of Programs Tegan Lecheler said. For the sister locations run by The Bridge Project in more rural areas, it helps with car payments or transportation costs. Some parents use it to pay for their leave, if their day job doesn’t provide it for them already.

“More cash equals more opportunities, more choices,” Lecheler said. “It means getting to live in a safer neighborhood. It means getting to choose to go back to work and put your child into child care, having access to more nutritional food for yourself and for your baby.”

“It really just allows moms flexibility and agency to know and to fill in any gaps that are keeping their family from thriving to the full extent that they could be,” she continued.

Multiple studies on targeted cash payment programs back the idea that guaranteed income programs lead to increased food security, enhanced physical and mental well-being, and improved financial health for guaranteed income recipients across the board.

The 2021 expanded federal Child Tax Credit, which has been estimated to have benefitted 88 percent of children in the U.S., led to one of the steepest declines in child poverty in the last two decades, according to the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.

The evidence is “unambiguous,” said Christopher Wimer, a co-director for the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work.

“It reduced people’s food insecurity and food hardship, and there’s some evidence that it improved the degree to which people were up on their housing payments,” Wilmer said. “A lot of people used it for food, bills, rent.”

These findings inspired California’s newest guaranteed income program, Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia told Rewire News Group.

In January 2026, 178 low-income people in Contra Costa County will participate in the 18-month cash payment pilot program.

Participants will be chosen through their enrollment in county-sponsored programs. The County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the program on July 8, but it wasn’t without hesitation from some board members.

Critics of cash payment programs often say that cash payments would encourage people to leave their jobs and rely on the free money. But Wimer says that the available data don’t support those concerns.

He said cash payments have allowed some people to work a bit less, particularly those who may need to meet at-home family demands. But, he added, the funds have also enabled others to work more because they could afford transportation and day care—expensive challenges that keep some parents from full-time work.

Gioia, who led the charge alongside community advocates to launch the Contra Costa program, said skeptics should think about guaranteed income “as an investment in families that are working to improve their situation.”

“It’s an investment that saves us money down the road and increases the number of people who become civically engaged and thriving in our community,” he added.

After one year in the Bridge Program project, Drummer has graduated with her bachelor’s degree—in large part because of its guaranteed income payments, she said. The financial cushion gave her the space to raise her child in a safe environment, as well as embrace her passion for psychology and neuroscience in hopes of pursuing a future in mental health counseling.

She’s excited for her future.

“As a child that was in foster care, I don’t think much was expected of me,” she said, adding that the program helped her get to where she is today and that she hopes will give her child the kind of stability she lacked growing up.

“I have to become the role model I wanted in my life in order to be a great role model for my daughter,” Drummer said. “So it really pushed me to just be a better me, and made me realize that I am more than what I thought I am.”

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