100 former foster youth received $1,000 a month for a year.
How did it change their lives?
One day, in his third year of college, Jasiyah Gilbert received a mysterious text message from an unknown number. It invited him to apply for a “direct cash transfer” program offering free money to former foster youth.
“I’m thinking, Oh, this gotta be a scam,” said Gilbert. “What idiot would give me a thousand dollars a month?”
The “idiot” in question was YouthNPower: Transforming Care (YNP), an intergenerational collective centered around young people with histories in the foster care system.
To find out what unconditional cash could do for former foster youth, YNP launched a direct cash transfer pilot in New York City in June 2023. The pilot provided 100 participants, aged 18 to 22, with $1,000 every month for a full year, no strings attached. (Gilbert, who applied despite his suspicions, was one of them.) The pilot also protected participants’ existing benefits, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Cash Assistance, through a state-issued waiver.
Helping poor people unconditionally is controversial. In May, several prominent figures of Donald Trump’s second administration wrote in The New York Times, “For many, welfare is no longer a lifeline to self-sufficiency but a trap of dependency.” Two months later, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act expanded work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP, including eliminating exemptions for youth exiting foster care.
This policy stands in contrast to the approach taken during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the federal government oversaw the distribution of more than 476 million payments (stimulus checks) totalling $814 billion. For a year, the poverty rate hit record lows, then moved back up after the relief programs expired.
Even without a pandemic, the roughly 1,000 foster youth who age out of care every year in New York City face exceptionally bad outcomes. By their early 20s, nearly half will be unemployed, a quarter will have faced homelessness, and fewer than one in twenty will have earned a college degree.
Earlier this summer, YNP released their findings from the pilot in a 27-page report entitled Starting to Live. According to YNP, participants primarily used the money for food (95%), rent (82%), and transportation (80%) (suggesting that almost everyone was struggling to afford basic necessities). The study concluded that the cash provided participants with the financial security needed to handle emergencies, pursue their education and career goals, and improve their mental and physical health.
In addition to their own report, YNP commissioned an independent evaluation of the pilot from the Center of Innovation through Data Intelligence (CIDI), a policy think tank under the Office of the Mayor of New York City.
CIDI’s evaluation compared the 100 participants to a similar group of former foster youth during the pilot period. CIDI found that participants were more likely to be employed than the comparison group, but typically for shorter durations and for lower pay. CIDI also found that the median shelter stay for participants was longer than that of the comparison group. Besides these findings, CIDI found “no sufficient evidence of differences between the treatment and comparison groups.”
Nevertheless, both YNP and CIDI endorsed a direct cash transfer program for former foster youth as a permanent policy. YNP’s report recommended a statewide program providing $1,500 a month for youth up to five years after exiting foster care. CIDI’s report simply acknowledged that a direct cash transfer program “could supplement and complement existing programs.”
To find out why the two studies’ seemingly mixed results led to similar conclusions, I interviewed two pilot participants who received the money, along with collective members from YNP and researchers from CIDI.
Lived Experience as Expertise
“Our pilot,” said YNP facilitator and PhD student Maya Tellman, “is the first pilot targeted toward people aging out of care that was co-designed with young people who have experienced the child welfare system.”
Participants met with the collective for the first time during YNP’s “Welcome Days.” There, participants learned about the goals of the pilot: to measure the effects of unconditional cash on former foster youth and to conduct this research collaboratively. Participants were invited to partake in (paid) surveys, interviews, focus groups, and collaborative data analysis over the course of the pilot. According to Tellman, the collective wanted to treat the experience of aging out of care “as a very valuable form of expertise in its own right.”
The “Welcome Days” were also a time for building community. “It’s hard to find people who understand things that you’ve gone through,” said Gilbert. Crystal Drake, another participant, said that the gatherings helped her “know that I’m not alone.” Establishing camaraderie helped YNP develop “deep trust with participants,” explained Tellman, “which allowed us to maintain participation [in surveys, interviews, etc.] over the lifetime of the pilot and beyond.”
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Talking to Gilbert and Drake after reading the reports helped me better understand the pilot’s impact. Though they came from different backgrounds and used the money for different things, both said the cash provided immediate stability that opened up possibilities for the future.
Jasiyah Gilbert entered foster care in his mid-teens. He was placed with foster parents he knew from his church, but focusing on school was still difficult. “You’re dealing with a lot of emotional trauma,” he explained. “When you’re in geometry class, unfortunately, you’re not thinking about geometry. You’re thinking about your next court date.”
Some 34% of participants reported “previous bad experiences in school” as an obstacle to further education, according to YNP’s baseline survey. Not surprisingly, 85% of participants also cited a lack of money.
Despite facing these and other challenges, in 2020 Gilbert enrolled at CUNY’s College of Technology.
He had been living with his grandmother since leaving care and was expected to contribute to bills. The support he received from student financial aid and SNAP was “better than nothing,” but not enough, and he couldn’t fit a part-time work schedule around his classes.
The payments helped Gilbert prioritize school and start saving money for the first time.
In this respect, the pilot was not “life changing,” Gilbert said, but “definitely uplifting.” The payments helped him prioritize school and start saving money for the first time. He covered more of his grandmother’s expenses too.
Interestingly, some of the most significant impacts of the pilot on Gilbert’s life were not from the payments at all. For example, Gilbert had long wanted but not been able to afford therapy. The collective connected Gilbert with a free therapy service at Mount Sinai.
The collective also connected Gilbert with the nonprofit Children’s Rights, where he worked part-time on several committees. “At first, I felt very out of place,” he said. “I’m sitting here with a bunch of lawyers and social workers and researchers and, you know, people with doctorates and master’s degrees and JDs.” Ultimately, those connections led him to the Legal Aid Society, where he works today.
These other benefits (not to mention research stipends) made me wonder whether any of the results of the pilot could be attributed solely to the cash. But according to researchers, extra provisions were necessary to build trust.
Crystal Drake entered the foster care system as a newborn. She was relocated more than 10 times as a child and forced to transfer to new schools again and again. She was misdiagnosed with “depression and…concentration issues” and put on Abilify (a heavy antipsychotic), Concerta, and Ritalin from ages 10 to 13.
Drake said she received little assistance from her caseworkers over the years, and was left to navigate high school on her own. Still, she graduated in 2020.
In 2021, Drake was discharged from care and moved into public housing. By 2023, she was a mother of two, supporting her family through a combination of SNAP, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Cash Assistance.
During the pilot, Drake—who loves playing the flute—thought about returning to school for a music degree. But work remains elusive, and what she can earn as a high school graduate isn’t enough to pay for child care.
[Related: Adoption still matters for older youth]
Receiving $1,000 a month did, however, help Drake “feel more free.” She was able to give her children happier birthdays, take them to the museum, and visit the zoo—“things that people that have a lot of money take for granted.”
Participants’ stories challenged “the assumption,” explained YNP researcher and former foster youth Ellenie Liang, that “this money will be used for…selfish means.” In reality, said Liang, the money was used for things like “their kids’ child care…their mom or dad’s business…[and] medical bills.”
Numbers and Nuance
CIDI researchers acknowledged that their report was based on inherently limited data. “It doesn’t have any nuance to it,” said Tim Ross, who partnered with CIDI on the evaluation. While YNP could “talk to the kids” and ask “what happened,” CIDI could only look at raw numbers.
Courtesy of Ean Soh
Ean Soh
The cash allowed participants to “take risks,” explained Tellman, so CIDI’s finding that participants earned lower wages during the year could be seen in a positive light. The young people may have accepted a short-term pay cut to pursue more meaningful or future-minded work or education.
“This is a preliminary piece,” said Maryanne Schretzman, the Executive Director of CIDI. “I think we’ll see maybe differences over the next year when we do a follow-up study…but most importantly, what we did see is that it didn’t diminish the young people getting involved in labor.”
Whether or not a cash policy is the answer, it is way past time to try something new, said Julia Davis, a founding member of YNP and the Director of Youth Justice and Child Welfare for the Children’s Defense Fund-New York. “We have been doing the same thing for over 20 years for young people aging out of foster care,” said Davis. “We’ve pushed in programmatic supports, expanded public benefits, pathways to educational vouchers—and we haven’t really changed the outcome for young people.”
For now, it remains to be seen what impacts the pilot will have had on participants in the year beyond the final cash payment. Both YNP and CIDI are expected to release their results from these longer-term evaluations by next summer, but any findings will have to be weighed against changing economic conditions, including deep cuts to social safety net programs. “The economy is a tough situation,” said Schretzman. “I’m not sure what it will look like.” The full implications of the pilot, added Ross, may not be visible until “four or five years” from now.
In any case, the combination of cash and community seemed liberating for the participants I interviewed. “For a brief moment,” said Jasiyah Gilbert, “the number one worry doesn’t have to be money.”
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This story originally appeared in Represent, published by Youth Communication.
Ean Soh does not have foster care experience. He graduated from Leonia High School in June and is an incoming freshman at the University of California, Los Angeles. He enjoys rock climbing, rhyming, and completing tricolons.
