Photo: Tony Anderson | Digital Vision
A monthly cash payment program for new mothers in New York is going from pilot to permanent, as the city debates using public dollars to fuel guaranteed income initiatives. The Bridge Project, which launched in 2021 through the Monarch Foundation, started as a temporary program that gave monthly debit cards to pregnant mothers in northern Manhattan neighborhoods, hoping to test the benefits of no-strings-attached cash on the first three years of a baby’s life. Participants receive $1,000 a month for 18 months, and then $500 a month for another 18 months after that. As the Bridge Project recruits a new cohort of mothers to receive benefits, it is transitioning from a piloting-and-research phase into a more permanent one, says Megha Agarwal, executive director of the Monarch Foundation and the Bridge Project. Agarwal hopes cities start treating guaranteed income not as an experiment, but as a key part of their social services infrastructure. Stories of individuals helped by the guaranteed income projects accompany data from several of these initiatives that Agarwal believes provide more than enough evidence on the value of cash transfers. “The simple question of: Could this actually alleviate child poverty? Could it lead to better outcomes for children? The answer is very clearly yes,” said Agarwal.
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