By Brigid Schulte

In two short years, from March 2020 to March 2022, a devastating and deadly global pandemic shuttered businesses, schools, and child care facilities and threw millions of people out of work. In response, the U.S. federal government passed sweeping pandemic relief packages totaling $5.2 trillion to stabilize families, tackle public health threats, and keep the economy afloat. This was the largest government investment in domestic programs, as measured by the share of gross domestic product, outside of wartime and five times the size of the response to the 2008 Great Recession. As an astounding 22 million people were suddenly without work in April 2020, the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression in the 1930s, economists worried that families—particularly those already living in poverty or struggling to survive in low-wage jobs—were headed for a financial apocalypse.¹ Public health officials cautioned that families and individuals could lose their work, housing, and access to medical care, making an already deadly pandemic catastrophic.

Instead, the unprecedented federal investment in family economic security actually improved financial well-being. Many families who struggle financially for their daily survival had a taste of what a more stable life with less economic insecurity and far less stress might be like. Many who had felt invisible, including those with disabilities or chronic illnesses, said the support made them feel cared about and that they belonged as valued members of society. For a brief and powerful moment, the public saw clearly that the government really can work to make people’s lives better when it chooses to do so. We also saw that families work hard, often in full-time jobs, and because of low pay—particularly in care and service work—and lack of basic public goods and services like child care, simply can not make ends meet.

For the past two years, the Better Life Lab team has sought to gain a fuller picture of people struggling with economic precarity and poverty narratives and understand, through their experience, the impact that this unprecedented federal aid during the pandemic had on them and their families, and the lessons to be learned. Our goal was to hear directly from families about their experiences, their hopes, and what they say they need to thrive, and, working with our New America colleagues at the New Practice Lab, create a space for families to imagine a new sense of what’s possible.

Working backward to policy from family-centered learning, we saw a new narrative emerge about the kind of economy, business practices, public policies, and mindset shift that finally acknowledges the worth and dignity of all humans and has as its goal their well-being, quality of life, and flourishing.

Our reporting shows that in order to thrive, to be free of crippling financial burdens and the anxieties that they cause, families need more easily accessible and holistic supportive resources that ensure, at minimum, a basic standard of living. These include, but aren’t limited to, stable housing, adequate nutrition, and access to health care and affordable child care. We found that giving families flexibility and cash works. Families fare better when government policies give them more choice and control in meeting their families’ needs. This is better, we found, than the current piecemeal design of what’s conventionally known as the “safety net,” that’s inherently complicated, overly restrictive, designed without family input, and often more focused on preventing fraud—which remains rare—than on helping families achieve long-lasting economic security and well-being.² We found that, beyond better benefits programs, families need good jobs with good pay, stable schedules and benefits, and an equitable economy that works for all people.

We also found that designing better public policies and an equitable economy will require dismantling some powerful and harmful narratives about poverty that shape our institutions, our policies, and the way programs are delivered. For instance, at the height of the pandemic, the media reported that Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia told his colleagues he planned to vote against expanding the Child Tax Credit because he feared people would waste the money on drugs, rather than spend it on their children. He also said he opposed providing paid sick days because he thought people would feign illness to go hunting.³ Instead, research found that most families used the bulk of the expanded Child Tax Credit to pay for housing, food, and child-related goods and services.⁴ And paid sick leave helped stop the spread of the deadly and contagious COVID-19 virus.⁵

Republican politicians through the years have also argued against providing basic support to families, asserting, without evidence, that they would make people dependent on government aid rather than self-sufficient.⁶ In fact, it was GOP politicians Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan, intent on cutting the New Deal and Great Society programs aimed at providing families with a stable foundation, who first introduced the idea of a “safety net” of subsistence benefits for those with “true need,” in other words, deserving of support.⁷

But rather than a result of bad character, laziness, or poor personal choices, as the prevailing stereotype holds in some circles, poverty, we found, is too often a policy choice made by politicians, an implementation challenge, and is made worse by historical and systemic discrimination along race, class, and gender lines. As some advocates say, poverty is more about chances rather than choices.

“As some advocates say, poverty is more about chances rather than choices.”

To gain a fuller picture of poverty and poverty narratives, the Better Life Lab reported deeply on the impact of pandemic aid and a more expansive social system of support on the lives of 11 families of varied backgrounds. These families lived in different parts of the country, had children under 18 during the pandemic, and were living in poverty, defined by the Supplemental Poverty Rate⁸ or on wages low enough to qualify for public benefits. We also extensively profiled a child care provider and the financially insecure community she serves. Those who agreed to participate in our study included people who identified as white, Black, Latin, and Native American. About half were partnered, and half were raising children on their own. About half were U.S. born and half had immigrated to the United States.

The Better Life Lab researched ethical storytelling and worked with our New Practice Lab colleagues to develop a human-centered narrative framework to guide our interactions with families. We developed a series of trauma-informed prompts aimed at capturing the day-to-day experiences of families with the overarching goal of answering key questions:

• How do we design and implement better public policies that enable families to thrive and flourish?
• How do we create an economy that works for all families?
• How do we shift harmful and false narratives around poverty and people living in poverty to focus on the root cause: the need for systemic change?

The Better Life Lab team spent more than two years capturing the stories and experiences of these families during this extraordinary time through four deeply reported ethnographic case studies with three families and one child care provider’s community, eight facilitated “As Told To” stories, and a series of reported journalism, multimedia, and opinion pieces published in a variety of media outlets to reach diverse audiences. A key goal of the facilitated work was to give narrators the power to share what they want people and policymakers to understand about their lives. The Better Life Lab’s work was also informed by our New America colleagues at the New Practice Lab (NPL). NPL facilitated five in-person co-design workshops in English and Spanish in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, recruiting more than 30 families from both rural and urban communities and engaging with them for an 18-month remote digital diary study. The Better Life Lab team recruited some narrators for our facilitated storytelling series through NPL’s focus groups, as well as through a number of community-based groups.

While preparing these written pieces, we prioritized centering the authentic voices and perspectives of our contributors, who are storytellers in their own right and experts on their lived experiences. We found that translation—between distinct written languages or more fluid cultural contexts—is an art rather than a science. We chose to avoid it when possible, in line with our organizational commitment to uplifting the voices of underrepresented storytellers. Therefore, one of our four in-depth case studies was reported and written in Spanish, with an English-language summary timeline, and all of our transcribed facilitated stories preserve the natural speech of the narrators.

In this project, we captured the day-to-day experience of families reporting less stress as a result of the pandemic aid. Many were able to pay down debt and buy groceries, diapers, and clothes for their children without forgoing paying other bills for the first time. More had the medical care they and their children needed as the pandemic raged. A family with one car avoided disaster when the $1,400 bill for a new transmission coincided with a stimulus payment from the federal government.

Some, like Philipa Nwadike-Laster, a home care aide, were able to hold onto stable housing through the government’s mortgage forbearance and eviction moratorium programs, even when their job and paychecks disappeared during the pandemic shutdowns. But others fell through the cracks. One study participant was evicted with her children four times between 2020 and 2024, even when the federal moratorium was in place. Another still owes thousands in back rent. Still, Nwadike-Laster’s positive experience reflects that of millions, due in part to a policy designed to provide immediate relief for families and a simplified enrollment form that made applying for it much easier.⁹

Pandemic aid was also available to a wider swath of people who struggle economically, not just those with extremely low incomes, as most U.S. subsistence programs have been traditionally. For example, Glynnis Johnson and her husband worked full-time to support themselves and their teenage son. The Johnsons are among the 40 million families in the United States who make too much to qualify for traditional public assistance but don’t make enough to survive.¹⁰ The pandemic aid was a lifesaver for the family, especially once Johnson was diagnosed with cancer at the height of the pandemic, and her treatments left her with no feeling in her hands and feet and unable to work. People don’t understand that outside the pandemic, there is little help available for families like hers, she said. Most federal social assistance programs are means-tested, meaning that people have to show they have no means to help themselves before they qualify for programs like housing assistance and health care. (Social insurance programs, like Social Security, are not.) “It’s like I have to be homeless, then they’ll give me everything,” she said. “But why let it get to that point?”

Our reporting found that when families’ basic physical needs for food, shelter, and health care are met, they are more likely to have expanded emotional, psychological, and mental bandwidth not only to better manage daily struggles, but also plan for the future, and, in some cases, begin to take active steps toward a better one. That’s very much in line with what behavioral scientists Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan found in their study of poverty and scarcity, which is that the constant financial worries of those in poverty erode cognitive performance even more than being sleep deprived.¹¹

“When families’ basic physical needs for food, shelter, and health care are met, they are more likely to have expanded emotional, psychological, and mental bandwidth not only to better manage daily struggles, but also plan for the future.”

For instance, with a subsidy for affordable child care, stimulus payments, access to Medicaid, rental assistance, and the expanded Child Tax Credit, study participant Ruaa Sabek had the time and bandwidth to find and devote herself to a banking training program. That enabled her to move from a part-time, poorly paid job as a cashier in a fast food restaurant to a full-time personal banking position, earning a living wage with benefits like a retirement plan, health insurance, and life insurance for the first time in her life. “This is a good opportunity for my family,” she said.

Many families told us that the pandemic aid not only eased financial hardship but also their “time poverty.” Living in economic poverty takes up a lot of time: commutes on public transportation can take hours, especially in economically segregated areas where housing may be more affordable, but the economic center and the jobs are miles away.¹² The administrative burden¹³ of finding out about and going through complicated multistep applications and interviews for different public benefit programs is time-consuming, bureaucratic, and often demoralizing, as one mistake can lead to a rejection, which requires starting the whole process over again. Research has found that some benefits processes are designed to be punitive and dissuade people from applying for benefits in the first place.¹⁴ With a bit more financial breathing room, some participating families told us they relished simply having time to eat meals together or enjoy life rather than feeling exhausted or rushing just to scrape by. Some families reported some surprising firsts: taking their children to the park, giving their children dance lessons or art classes, or taking them on short trips to the beach or other tourist destinations. As one participant in our project, Latoya Dyer, told us, “I finally felt human.”

In our reporting, we found, just as a number of economic research studies have, that of the myriad pandemic investments, four, in particular, materially improved struggling families’ lives: (1) the expanded, refundable Child Tax Credit; (2) enhanced unemployment insurance benefits; (3) the expansion of Medicaid; and (4) a moratorium on evictions, coupled with rental and mortgage payment assistance.

Those investments, along with three rounds of stimulus payments that put cash directly into the hands of low- and middle-income families without strings attached, trusting them to make the best decisions for their families, eased the debilitating, time-sucking, day-to-day battle just to survive that is a common feature of living in poverty in the United States.

Rather than head over a financial cliff during the pandemic, as some economists feared, a large number of economically struggling families reported better financial well-being as a result of the unprecedented federal investments and simplified rules in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). Unemployment, child poverty, food insecurity, and the share of those evicted or unable to qualify or pay for lifesaving health insurance temporarily dropped to historic lows.

The investments were imperfect and often unevenly applied, and many relied on states to implement them. Some states responded swiftly and creatively, while others delayed or even returned unused funds despite community protest. Congress passed an emergency paid child care and paid sick leave policy that was in effect for eight months, from April to December 2020. But the policy offered exemptions to small businesses and employers of health care workers and first responders and excluded workers in businesses with more than 500 workers.²⁶ None of the participants in our study, like many other hourly, service, care, and low-wage workers,²⁷ had access to paid sick or child care leave. And though Congress did eventually provide funding to shore up the nation’s child care system and did work to make it easier to retain child care subsidies, the funding still wasn’t nearly enough to shore up an already patchwork and precarious child care system.²⁸ Millions of workers with care responsibilities, primarily women, were forced out of work because of the lack of adequate child care, and the number of child care workers plummeted as facilities around the country closed or cut back.²⁹

Still, despite the limitations, the pandemic-era investments were extraordinarily successful in keeping families out of dire financial straits: The American welfare state, historically one of stingiest and worst functioning among wealthy democracies, performed on par with Belgium and Norway,³⁰ two such countries with among the lowest poverty rates.³¹

Finally, Americans had a chance to see what a better social support system, or a bouncier “safety net,” could look like and how they could choose to create an equitable economy that works for all people. We learned that giving cash works and that families use the money wisely to improve the welfare of their households.³² We learned that giving communities the flexibility to creatively address the needs of their residents can powerfully respond to local needs. We learned that paying attention to how benefits are delivered, streamlining and simplifying access to aid, makes that aid more effective by reaching the people it’s meant to serve.³³ We learned that investing in child care and other family supports can have an enormous impact on family stability and healthy child development and growth. And that, just as research shows, when a nation improves economic equality, everyone benefits.³⁴

“Just as research shows, when a nation improves economic equality, everyone benefits.”

The pandemic also brought new attention to the once near-invisible fact that 44 percent of the U.S. workforce works in low-wage jobs, often with unpredictable schedules and few, if any, benefits like paid time off to care for themselves or loved ones.³⁵ Public support for unions, strikes, and workers, including care workers, demanding better working conditions and a fairer economy for more shared prosperity also grew to historic highs.³⁶ People began to see that they could demand an equitable economy that works for all people, not just reward a handful of corporate shareholders with most of the profits.

For the first time, popular political rhetoric that people live in poverty as a result of poor individual choices or because they don’t work hard enough or are lazy began to be more clearly exposed as untrue. Millions of Americans isolating at home realized they had to rely on the low-wage “essential” workforce, risking their lives to make deliveries, stock shelves, and care for their loved ones. One 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that 70 percent of those who earn low enough wages to qualify for public assistance like Medicaid or food and nutrition support actually work full time.³⁷ The reality began to sink in: If people are struggling financially, it’s not because they’re all lazy. It’s because public policymakers have enabled business leaders to create jobs that don’t pay enough to support human life, diverting profits to outsize CEO salaries and shareholder returns. Meanwhile, they have chosen not to design a social support system that guarantees minimum baselines for wages, food, housing, and health care that give families the stability and security they need to provide and care for themselves and loved ones and ensure a basic standard of living.³⁸

For years, until her children started school, Blessing Aghayedo, a licensed practical nurse, didn’t sleep more than a few hours a day. She worked the night shift and cared for the children during the day because the family couldn’t afford child care. “If our jobs paid us enough money, we wouldn’t need any help at all. If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills,” she told us. She wants policymakers to know that hard work simply isn’t enough anymore. “The jobs need to pay more. Because, if you see now, everything in the store is so expensive. Water? Juice? Everything is more expensive. But they did not increase our salary. So how do they want us to cope?”

In the end, the unprecedented pandemic boost to financial and emotional well-being was temporary: It didn’t solve poverty in America. In 2022, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences reported that “poverty rates increased nearly 5 percent and rates of child poverty nearly doubled, as government programs and tax credits enacted during the pandemic expired.”³⁹

In many ways, we’ve returned to 2019, said Scott Fulford, a senior economist with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and author of The Pandemic Paradox: How the COVID Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure. Just like in 2019, “there are still about 40 percent of people who have difficulty paying bills and don’t have a lot of savings. Delinquencies are rising again. Credit card debt is about as high in real terms as it was in 2019. People, on average, are back to the kind of financial stress they were facing in 2019, which was pretty high for lots of people,” Fulford told us.

And economic inequality is still high: The wealthiest 10 percent of all households hold about 70 percent of all U.S. household wealth.⁴⁰ The bottom 50 percent of the population has zero net wealth, Fulford said.

“What that means is that lots and lots of people are exposed to expense shocks that can be really devastating in their lives, like losing your job. Or your car breaks down, and you can’t get to your job. And because you don’t have very much wealth, because maybe you don’t have a family with wealth to draw on, you can’t fix your car, so you can’t get to your job. And that can create just this negative spiral, which keeps a lot of people at that zero wealth point because it’s just really hard to accumulate enough given all the demands,” he said.

More than anything, the experience with pandemic aid showed how poverty is a preexisting condition that can leave deep scars that last a lifetime: Those who entered the pandemic having spent any time in poverty suffered more, Parolin’s research has found. Many participants had internalized the harmful prevailing narrative that their poverty was their own fault. One participant blamed her current impoverished circumstances on one bad decision she made as a teenager to drop out of school and marry her first boyfriend, who turned out to be abusive and left her on her own to raise two children and care for an ill and aging mother.

“The experience with pandemic aid showed how poverty is a preexisting condition that can leave deep scars that last a lifetime.”

One case study participant, Kiarica Schields, grew up in poverty and worked her way through college to become a nurse while also parenting alone. After fleeing an abusive marriage, she worked and saved to provide for her four children. But once the pandemic closed schools and child care facilities, Schields had no family support network and had no one else to care for her young children, and she had to quit her job. Unemployment benefits, the stimulus payment, and the Child Tax Credit helped for a short while. But once those benefits expired, the lack of child care and a steady job sent her and her family on a downward spiral, including four evictions, from which they have yet to recover. “My whole life, what I’ve wanted was a stable home for my kids so they don’t have to go through the things I did,” she told us. “My biggest thing now, I have kids who have to heal from the childhood trauma I put them through.”

We also saw that when pandemic aid disappeared, some people, like child care provider Tiffany Gale, began to advocate to make pandemic-era investments permanent. They’d given her a taste of how the government and the economy could work better, allowing her to pay higher wages to her child care workers, serve more nutritious foods, and plan more enriching activities for the children. Some local jurisdictions began using their own funds to continue creative pandemic-era policies. These include having the right to counsel in eviction hearings, which cut evictions by as much as 99 percent in places like Kansas City⁴¹ and investing in child care or in guaranteed basic income pilots. Vilma Cabrera, a single mother of two, was close to losing everything when she was chosen by lottery to participate in a guaranteed basic income pilot in Alexandria, Virginia. The aid “was a blessing. I feel I had angels help me,” she told us. “It’s changed my life.”

Others reported that the pandemic aid not only helped them survive, but made them feel as if they belonged—that the government cared about them and their fate. Mariam Dewi, a certified nursing assistant who was forced to stop working during the pandemic because of the health risk to her pregnancy, worried about paying bills, feeding her children, and getting evicted. “The stimulus payments [and the Child Tax Credit payments] came right on time,” she said. “That was very nice of the government to do that, to think about families, and think, ‘Oh, they’re going to need help,’ because people were going through a lot.”

Our research also found that people feel a deep sense of betrayal in areas where pandemic aid expired and local jurisdictions haven’t continued investing in families. Many, like millions of others,⁴² were dropped from the Medicaid rolls once the pandemic ended and have put off necessary medical care. “It makes you even more sad when you think of the time you did get help, how it saved you lots of money,” one study participant said. Said another: “The government came through so big for so many of us during the pandemic, then they just let everyone down. Now, you’re on your own again.”

“People feel a deep sense of betrayal in areas where pandemic aid expired and local jurisdictions haven’t continued investing in families.”

The rollback of benefits coincided with an inflation surge,⁴³ which made it more difficult for people to make ends meet. Despite the immediate financial boost of the three stimulus payments, the Child Tax Credit, and other forms of direct cash assistance, families still didn’t have enough time to build up their savings. Direct cash works, but three years isn’t enough time for it to undo years, or generations, of poverty or to make long-lasting investments in work, education, training, or finances that build wealth and security over the long term. Latoya Dyer spoke to us about this: “It felt like they gave it, and then they just took it away so quickly without waiting for people to get back to normalization.… We were so sure that we were getting those funds, and we were putting them in places that were beneficial to us. When it stopped, it kind of hindered us. It wasn’t a gradual way for us to reach financial stability.”

Another facilitated story participant and single parent of four who asked that we use only their first name, Kel, said the end of the pandemic aid was “bittersweet.” Kel said, “There was a sense before [the pandemic] that [government support] is just not doable because the country is so big and we have so much divisiveness and there’s so many things in the checks and balances of the way our government works, that it creates this gridlock that we can’t really do much of anything. So we’re just going to limp along, doing the very bare minimum to support families. [The pandemic] really opened my eyes to the fact that there is actually a way for this to happen,” they told us.

Kel and many other participants in this project said they most wanted policymakers to know that ensuring good jobs and providing the social support system families need to enable them to thrive and dream of a future would benefit not just their own families but everyone. “I want them to know that lifting me and people like me up will have a cascading effect on so many lives in a positive way. Not just for me and for my four kids, but we will give back to our communities tenfold, a hundredfold. It’s not that much that needs to be invested to help me and others out of this trench. And it will come back in incredible ways. The dividends will pay back to society,” Kel told us. “But I can’t contribute right now the way I would [like to] because I’m having to spend so much of my energy and my life in the struggle to survive. It’s worth that investment in us. We’re a really good investment.”

By Haley Swenson

Participants in the study consistently described policies passed during the COVID-19 pandemic as having a significant and overwhelmingly positive impact on their lives and the lives of their families.

Participants described numerous material benefits from these policies, including the ability to stay in their current housing arrangement or to find a better one, access to medical insurance for themselves or their children, financial security despite pandemic job loss, and additional access to cash that allowed them to pay for their families’ basic needs or created access to enriching activities or experiences they would not otherwise have been able to afford. Participants described feelings of temporary security and possibility as a result of these benefits. They also expressed positive attitudes toward these government interventions and what they enabled.

Delivery of the benefits was far from perfect. The structure of most social programs in the United States meant that many benefits funded by the federal government were ultimately designed, administered, and distributed by state officials under systems and regulations that vary wildly not only from state to state but also county by county and city by city. In the case of unemployment insurance, for example, each state sets its own standards for who qualifies and how much money they receive. Some states were set up better than others to process the surge in applications for benefits at the outset of the pandemic. The Pandemic Oversight Committee, an independent organization created in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to oversee the $5 trillion government pandemic relief spending, found it took the state of Ohio 70 days to process half of its initial unemployment insurance payments, despite a federal goal of 14 days.⁴⁴

Other inequities grew due to pre-pandemic racial inequalities that shaped access to benefits and the magnitude of the damage wrought by the pandemic.

A study by the Urban Institute found that there were major disparities across race and income in who received federal stimulus checks in a timely manner.⁴⁵ For instance, people who earned too little to be required to file income taxes were not visible to the Internal Revenue Service when it sent the checks, requiring them to take the extra step of registering online. Study authors Janet Holtzblatt and Michael Karpman wrote, “Nearly three-quarters (73.7 percent) of non-Hispanic white adults reported receiving the payment, compared with 68.6 percent of non-Hispanic Black adults and 63.7 percent of Hispanic adults.” They also found that citizenship and immigration status were factors in who received the benefits: “Only 54.1 percent of Hispanic adults in families with noncitizens reported receiving the payment.”

Yet people of color and low-income people were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. An Urban Institute analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey found that Black and Latin people faced higher rates of hardship when it came to the loss of income due to the pandemic, food insecurity, worries about rent, and worries about mortgages.⁴⁶

One participant, Chantel Valdez, a Navajo woman from Utah, said the difference between her Native community’s experience of the pandemic and the local white population’s experience was staggering. She cried one day as a white community member argued with her online that masks were a ridiculous imposition while her grandmother was in the hospital dying from COVID-19. In Utah in 2020, less than 1 percent of the population was American Indian, and yet they accounted for 3 percent of deaths from COVID in that first year of the pandemic. The case/death rate from COVID was nearly three times as high for American Indians as for the population as a whole, with just six deaths per thousand cases of COVID for all state residents but almost 16 deaths per thousand cases among American Indians.⁴⁷

Racial disparities meant that people of color needed these government interventions more urgently than others and faced additional barriers to receiving them. However, pandemic reforms to these existing programs represented such vast improvements in both the magnitude of assistance and the simplification of qualification that they reached far more families and in more profound ways.

“The post-pandemic environment has returned to one of patchwork, piecemeal programs that are difficult to understand, time-consuming, and confusing to apply for.”

The brief duration of these expanded benefits also impacted these families in ways they are still grappling with today. The end of the benefits brought frustrations and material losses, as well as magnified hardship for those who had not fully recovered from the pandemic or were in similar or more difficult financial positions than before the pandemic. Unlike the context of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) declaration in which multiple family-supportive policies were expanded and made more accessible to families who needed them all at once, the post-pandemic environment has returned to one of patchwork, piecemeal programs that are difficult to understand, time-consuming, and confusing to apply for. These programs often give too little help for too short a time to families struggling to get by.

Below are descriptions of key pandemic-era interventions that impacted participants and their families, as well as summaries of the impact of receiving and then losing the benefits.

On March 25, 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, creating the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program, which gave individuals receiving state unemployment benefits a weekly supplemental $600 on top of their existing payment. That supplement was lowered to $300 in December 2020 and lasted through March 14, 2021.⁴⁸ Pandemic unemployment assistance expanded the types of workers who could qualify for unemployment benefits to include self-employed workers and independent contract and gig workers for the first time. The FPUC program also extended the amount of time a person could receive unemployment insurance from 26 weeks to up to 79 weeks.⁴⁹

When the pandemic started, one study participant, Chantel Valdez, kept her job as an after-school program grant coordinator even though the public schools she served had shut down. She continued to report to the elementary school where she worked most days, coordinating after-school programming online and helping with other tasks at the school as needed. But when summer came, her boss advised her and the other employees of the program to apply for expanded unemployment since the grant would not continue the following year. Valdez began receiving expanded unemployment benefits that, when combined with the initial stimulus checks she received, actually improved her financial position. She and her children were able to support local businesses struggling to survive the pandemic and take a few road trips to enjoy hikes and destinations like the Four Corners Monument, a landmark administered by the Navajo Nation just 70 miles away from home that they had never seen.

Case study participant Ivonne Valadez Solano worked in a coffee shop when the pandemic began, but she became unemployed when California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a “stay at home” order on March 19, 2020.⁵⁰ Her partner, a pastry chef, also lost his job at that time. They were relieved that unemployment insurance allowed them to stay home rather than risk contracting COVID-19 or bringing it home to their children. However, her partner took a job in a cupcake business starting in the summer of 2020, ending his benefits. With the high cost of living in the Los Angeles area, Valadez Solano and her family struggled to pay their bills throughout the pandemic.

Kiarica Schields knows she received unemployment insurance in Georgia for a few months in 2020 after she lost her job as a hospice nurse for lack of child care. But she doesn’t remember the temporary $600 additional monthly payment, known as a “top up.” The state later denied her unemployment benefits after just a few months for reasons that were unclear and denied her subsequent appeals. That prompted her to become active for a time in a national advocacy group, Unemployed Action, with other workers like her whose applications or appeals for unemployment insurance were rejected without explanation.

Ruaa Sabek’s husband worked in restaurants in Philadelphia when the pandemic began. His hours were cut from 40 to 24 hours a week, which meant the family’s income took a massive hit. Yet, because he was still earning, he did not receive unemployment.

As a result of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), passed in March 2021, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for U.S. citizens only increased from $1,200 per child to $3,000 per child between ages six and 17 and to $3,600 per child for those under age six. The full benefit was available to single parents making less than $112,500 and married couples earning less than $150,000 and phased out for single parents making over $200,000 and married couples making more than $400,000.⁵¹

ARPA also made the expanded credit fully refundable, meaning a person did not need to earn income or owe income taxes to qualify. Rather than receiving one lump sum at tax payment time, up to half of it was paid in advance in monthly payments sent directly to children’s households from July to December 2021.⁵²

Nearly every participant in our research mentioned the positive impact of this tax credit on their lives. Though one immigrant parent, Blessing Aghayedo, was under so much strain during the pandemic that she did not remember receiving the expanded advanced payments.

Another participant in our facilitated stories series, Ruaa Sabek, said of the CTC: “I remember they sent us $300 or $400 a month three or four times, and it was really helpful. We used it for expenses—the bills, the food, everything at home. The kids were growing up, and they need more stuff. Diapers. Milk. More clothes.”

Philipa Nwadike-Laster, a widow and mother of a disabled young adult son she cares for and a 14-year-old daughter, used the money she received through the CTC to enroll her daughter in music and dance classes she could not otherwise have afforded. She also used some of it for her son’s care. Because he is over 17, he did not qualify for the expanded CTC.

The CTC was helpful not only because of the increased income it provided families temporarily but also because it came every month instead of once a year with their tax returns. Nwadike-Laster could not understand why this was not the norm but an exception. She said, “I still don’t understand why [the Child Tax Credit] only comes once in a year with my tax refund. The kids are not growing once in a year. They grow every day. When you give the money to the parents every month, we use it for the kids because it’s the kids’ money. But when you give it to us at the end of the year, when there’s a lot of debts to be covered and everything, sometimes it’s like, ‘Heck, how do I manage these funds?’”

Kiarica Schields, a single mother of four children in Georgia who lost her hospice nursing job early in the pandemic, was so cash-poor when she received the monthly expanded tax credits that she used them to cover her family’s rent.

With the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) in 2020, Congress provided a 6.8 percent increase in funding to states and territories that gave those qualified for Medicaid continuing coverage through the end of the public health emergency. In effect, this law lowered requirements for Medicaid and automated re-enrollments so that most people who qualified for unemployment insurance in their state, as well as their immediate family members, automatically qualified for Medicaid through March 2023 rather than having to go through the complicated re-enrollment process every year. More than 21 million people were added to Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) rolls between 2020 and 2022, giving access to affordable health care to millions who either previously did not have health insurance or lost their employer-provided health insurance when they lost their jobs. Enrollments to Medicaid and CHIP rose by 32 percent between February 2020 and March 2023.⁵³

Chantel Valdez enrolled herself and her two children in Medicaid in June 2020, when she became unemployed. Though she began working part time again in the fall of 2021, the continuous enrollment policy meant that she and her children continued to receive Medicaid coverage through 2023. This hassle-free, continuous enrollment allowed them to begin accessing mental health care, in addition to medical care, to help cope with the grief of losing family members to COVID-19.

Kel, a Michigan single parent who uses she/they pronouns and asked that her last name not be included in the study, was able to enroll herself and her four children in Medicaid during the pandemic. With their company closing as a result of the pandemic and the stress of managing bills, they were grateful that the requirement to re-enroll every year was lifted during that period. “During the pandemic, the process of Medicaid renewal was really nice because they suspended needing to do an annual renewal,” said Kel. Both Kel and her children have complex medical needs, and Medicaid coverage allowed them much-needed care even during the Public Health Emergency.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, February and March 2020, several state and local leaders noted that stable housing was critical to containing the spread of COVID-19, and they issued bans on eviction in their jurisdictions. As millions of Americans lost their jobs and the means to pay their rent or mortgage, the federal government began to take note of the alarming rising eviction rates where there were no bans. With the Consolidated Appropriations Act⁵⁴ and ARPA, Congress approved $46.5 billion in rental assistance to help households cover the cost of rent and to prevent people from being evicted. This was the first time in U.S. history that the federal government offered help to people behind on rent. The funds were administered by the U.S. Treasury Department to state and local governments.

As evictions continued unabated in locations without eviction moratoria in place, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a federal moratorium on evictions between September 2020 and August 2021.⁵⁵ Though national and many local moratoria were temporary, some jurisdictions used the pandemic-era funds to build robust diversion programs that can be just as effective at keeping people housed. As the Better Life Lab has reported previously about one city, for example⁠:

“Philadelphia’s Eviction Diversion Program (EDP) requires landlords to participate in a 30-day mediation with tenants who owe less than $3,000 in back rent before pursuing a formal eviction. It began as a city pilot initiative and was bolstered by federal COVID-19 relief funding into a national exemplar of eviction prevention, with 85 percent of cases reaching a settlement or an agreement to continue negotiations beyond the mandated 30 days. The program has been incredibly beneficial to Black women raising children in Philadelphia, where, according to city data, 74 percent of evictions involved a Black tenant, 70 percent involved a woman, and 50 percent involved a parent or caretaker. Philly’s EDP is bolstered by being coupled with rental assistance. Between May 2020 and January 2023, Philadelphia’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program distributed almost $300 million in federal, state, and local emergency COVID-19 relief funds to more than 46,500 households, according to city data.”⁵⁶

For homeowners who became unemployed or lost income during the pandemic, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) extended mortgage forbearance options to borrowers whose mortgages were insured by the FHA, beginning October 1, 2021, and ending May 31, 2023.

Mariam Dewi was unable to pay her rent for several early months of the pandemic. She worked as a certified nursing assistant in a memory care unit, which, like many other long-term care facilities, had high rates of COVID-19. She herself contracted the virus, and, fearing for her pregnancy, her doctor advised her to stop working. She and her family live in Minnesota, where the governor issued an executive order banning evictions in March 2020 and extended it through August 2021. The experience of working with her landlord to figure out how to get the rent paid by the state represented the best of the communal spirit that emerged in the early days of the pandemic. She said, “Where I live, [the landlords] were very nice and very gracious. They worked with us. This epidemic, everybody came together and worked as a team. Everyone was helping each other. Everybody was trying to make sure that their neighbor or their neighborhood, that everyone was good. People were doing so many things—dropping off food for people, dropping off clothes. It was just beautiful just watching how everybody came together and worked as a team. It was just so beautiful.”

Chantel Valdez used emergency rental assistance twice in late 2021 when she lost her unemployment benefits and needed help to cover her $720 per month rent in Blanding, Utah. That helped ensure that she and her children and their dog could remain in their two-bedroom apartment at a time when they were experiencing profound grief from the loss of two close family members to COVID-19.

In Philadelphia, Philipa Nwadike-Laster got 18 months of mortgage forbearance after she lost all her work as a certified nursing assistant so she and her two children could stay in their home.

Eviction moratoria policies across the United States prevented millions of evictions, but application was uneven and benefits were often difficult to apply for and receive.⁵⁷ According to data analysis by the Eviction Lab, “These policies cut eviction filings over the first two years of the pandemic by more than half.”⁵⁸ Still, it says, “Evictions never fully stopped,” and it estimates that hundreds of thousands of renters were threatened with eviction even while these policies stood.⁵⁹ Case study participant Ivonne Valadez Solano, for example, found the application process for rental assistance in California too overwhelming. In the end, she did not complete her application. And study participant Kiarica Schields was evicted with her four children four times between 2020 and 2024.

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, child care in the United States was already unaffordable and difficult to find for the vast majority of parents. The only public funding for child care was the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which allocates funding to states that can spend the money as they choose, within certain federal guidelines, to provide subsidies to help those with very low incomes pay for child care. States face the impossible task of distributing their federal grants, with far more families and providers in need of support than they can possibly cover. Only 15 percent of low-income families eligible for support (earning less than 85 percent of the median state income) actually receive it.⁶⁰

The pandemic closure of schools, workplaces, and many child care centers across the country further fractured the already patchwork child care sector in the United States. The child care workforce plummeted, and the price of care began to skyrocket. In the first year of the pandemic, as lock-down orders shuttered schools and businesses, an estimated 63 percent of child care centers and nearly one-third of family child care homes closed down.⁶¹

“The pandemic closure of schools, workplaces, and many child care centers across the country further fractured the already patchwork child care sector in the United States.”

Congress first took action to support the child care sector in the 2020 CARES Act, authorizing $3.5 billion to help keep open child care facilities experiencing a drastic revenue loss. These funds also helped low-income workers and essential workers pay for child care. By comparison, the same law allotted the airline industry up to $32 billion in direct grants to support employee salaries and benefits.⁶² Child care advocates quickly recognized that child care needed far more funding to maintain the already dire status quo and asked for an additional $90 billion.

As many workplaces began to open again with the introduction of vaccines against COVID-19 in late 2020 and early 2021, demand for child care grew while the child care supply continued to shrink. With the passage of ARPA in March 2021, Congress dedicated an additional $39 billion to child care, with $24 billion in stabilization grants to child care providers and $15 billion in CCDBG discretionary funding, much of which states used to increase child care assistance payments to low-income families.

Tiffany Gale opened a child care center in her Weirton, West Virginia, home in late 2019. She had a long waitlist for her child care slots when the pandemic began. As schools and workplaces closed in early March 2020, Gale decided to remain open. She primarily served the children of essential workers—teachers, mill workers, and nurses—who needed care. She even worked 12-hour shifts to accommodate their schedules. Some of these workers received between $30 and $34 a day from federal aid to help them afford care.

In 2021, Gale became one of the 220,000 child care programs to receive ARPA stabilization funds. For the first time since she opened, she finally felt breathing room. She used the funds for a down payment on a new commercial building for her business so she could serve even more children. The funds enabled her to hire teachers to come into the centers for dance, music, and social-emotional lessons. The State of West Virginia also raised its income eligibility limit for child care assistance from 53 to 85 percent of the state median income, enabling more working-class families to qualify for the help.

Other participants in the study benefited in other ways from this injection of funding into child care. Chantel Valdez lost her job as an after-school program grant coordinator when the grant that supported her work ended in the summer of 2021. The American Rescue Plan Act provided money for new after-school programs, in part to help students who had fallen behind during remote schooling catch up with their grade levels. Beginning in January 2022, Valdez was hired as a site coordinator for a 4-H after-school program at her local elementary school funded through ARPA.

Most participants, however, continued to handle child care on their own throughout the pandemic. Child care is expensive for parents. One analysis by the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau found that annual child care costs range from more than $5,000 to $17,000 per child, depending on the type of care, a child’s age, and the population size of a county.⁶³ For single parents like case study participant Kiarica Schields, infant care costs can eat up anywhere from 24 to 75 percent of family income. At one point during the pandemic, Schields did find child care, although she was not able to receive a subsidy. So she paid more than $600 a week in child care costs for her four children. She was earning $800 a week at the time. She couldn’t sustain it. “Child care. That’s my issue,” Schields said.

Like Schields, Mariam Dewi, a certified nursing assistant, didn’t have access to child care subsidies. But she did have extended family nearby to help:

“What I’ve noticed about the child care [subsidy] is it’s a long waiting list. Once you apply, you wait for forever. We’ve applied, but we’re still on the waiting list, and I cannot sit and wait to get approved. I have to go back to work. My husband cannot be the only one working. Both of us have to provide,” she said. “So right now, I have my mom and my dad who help watch the kids. Mostly my mom. We take turns. If I work in the morning, then my mom works in the afternoon. We work with each other’s schedule. And my husband, the days that he’s off, if I have to work a double that day, he would take my younger one. We try to make it work for each other. I’m blessed to have my mom and dad watch the kids. I know it’s not the case for everybody. It’s hard if you don’t have anyone.”

As part of the March 2020 Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), Congress raised all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits by 15 percent and boosted every eligible household’s benefit to the maximum possible for their household size. The FFCRA also gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture the authority to grant waivers to give schools and community organizations flexibility to distribute food and food assistance due to school closures.

Chantel Valdez and her children qualified for SNAP benefits for the first time during the pandemic because she qualified for unemployment benefits. Her children each received a pandemic electronic benefit (P-EBT) amounting to just over $7 a day because they qualified for reduced-cost school lunches due to her low income prior to the pandemic. Valdez described this additional money for food as a major benefit to her family’s diet, happiness, and well-being. When she and her kids caught COVID-19 in late 2020, for example, she was able to cook a big pot of chicken noodle soup from scratch, something she normally could not afford to do. She was able to purchase and prepare fresh foods for her children for a few months.

Latoya Dyer’s children also qualified for P-EBT for the summer of 2020, allowing Dyer to have additional food on hand. She said, “My kids love vegetables and food. I don’t have a problem with them with that, but I think it’s more along the lines of they’re so accustomed to mommy cooking. ‘Mom, did you make the spaghetti? Mom? Where’s the chicken and the rice?’ They’re always looking for food.” She said, “The summer with the P-EBT, I was able to have food for the kids and not have to worry about them in my ears, [with] ‘Mom, I’m hungry.’”

Child care center owner Tiffany Gale used expanded child care subsidies provided to child care providers through ARPA to improve the food and nutrition she provided the children in her center’s care. Extra pandemic funding meant Gale could serve the children fresh foods, including fruit, vegetables, and meat. Breakfasts started to include sliced peaches, apples, tomatoes, and scrambled eggs. Lunches included chicken stir fry, chicken enchiladas, roast beef, or broccoli quiche, among other options. For an afternoon snack, children had sliced apples with peanut butter.

“There’s a powerful sense of vertigo you feel from having financial security suddenly taken away. And I’ve learned how quickly a family who is doing well can slide right off the tracks and get stuck. Our social safety net has a whole lot of holes in it.”—Kel, Michigan

Between 2021 and March 2023, nearly all these pandemic-era benefits came to an end, and many participants felt the suddenness of these changes both in their material circumstances and in their relationship to the government and government programs. In interviews conducted with participants in 2024, they described feelings of stress with making ends meet and frustrations with what they could give their children. After having so recently been able to give their children healthier food, better health care, and stable housing, the post-pandemic period has brought with it a vivid awareness of the things their children go without, even as they work hard to provide and care for them.

With the end of child care subsidy expansions under ARPA, Tiffany Gale contemplates closing the doors of her child care centers. She has shifted away from serving fresh fruits and vegetables and is back to peanut butter and jelly, hot dogs, mac and cheese, and breakfast cereal. Instead of fresh produce, teachers now serve canned beans, meats, fruits, and vegetables. Snacks are graham or saltine crackers instead of apples. In 2023, as ARPA funds were dwindling, child care spots in West Virginia had already declined by 700.⁶⁴

As of June 2024, 14 million people had been removed from Medicaid and CHIP rolls, a 15 percent drop from its peak at approximately 94 million in March 2023.⁶⁵ Chantel Valdez and her children were disenrolled from Medicaid in 2024. She was waiting to hear from the State of Utah about whether her children qualified for CHIP. As a Navajo woman, Valdez now receives health care through the Indian Health Service, though in the spring of 2024, she was contemplating paying for a root canal out of pocket because the surgery was not covered through her tribal affiliation.

Valdez and her children lost two close family members—an uncle who was her father figure and a grandmother—to COVID-19 in 2020. The entire family has suffered from anxiety and depression as a result of these losses and finding and affording therapy for them has been difficult without Medicaid. She is also saving her paychecks to pay for a grave marker for her uncle and grandmother. Valdez observed that “before the pandemic, [Congress] used to say they didn’t have the money to do more. Then the pandemic happened, and they somehow found it.” But “now they say they don’t have the money anymore. Why can they find the money when they want to?” She added, “There have to be better ways to support families in a more gradual way, maybe with reduced benefits as their income goes up. But it can’t be all or nothing.”

Although Blessing Aghayedo and her family qualified for Medicaid prior to the pandemic, the temporary easing of re-enrollment made it significantly less stressful for them during the pandemic. When the pandemic Medicaid policies expired, however, Aghayedo and her husband were disenrolled and no longer qualified, likely because Aghayedo was working again as a licensed practical nurse. Only her children now qualify for Medicaid. Aghayedo has been suffering from a bladder prolapse that requires surgery, but without insurance, she cannot afford it. For now, she is treating the symptoms with a stool softener.

Aghayedo observed that when she was unemployed during the pandemic, she and her family were more comfortable financially. When she was not working, they all had health insurance and could afford healthy and nutritious food. Now that she is working, they do not qualify for these benefits because they earn too much. But, she and her husband do not earn nearly enough at their jobs to make up for their losses. “Sometimes you are working, and you are not okay,” she said. “If our jobs paid us enough money, we wouldn’t need any help at all. If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills.”

Aghayedo feels unable to give her children what she would like, even though she and her husband are both working. “These children, they grow so fast. By the time you buy the winter clothes the next winter, it doesn’t fit them anymore. You buy the summer clothes this year. The next summer, it doesn’t fit them anymore. So it goes with shoes,” she said. “And the food they are going to eat, what they are going to drink. They need to eat fruits and vegetables. They need to eat healthy. And the healthy food is much expensive. That’s why a lot of people eat junk. It’s not like they want to eat junk. They don’t want to. But they don’t have a choice.”

The end of the emergency allotments of SNAP resulted in an average benefit cut of $86 per person, or $163 per household.⁶⁶ As Chantel Valdez put it, her family is back to “eating out of a box.”

Mariam Dewi felt she still needed the kind of help she had been receiving during the pandemic:

“I would love for the government to do more and help still. I think they’re still helping; it’s just it might not be as much as when the epidemic was happening. I believe they could do better. I mean, help a little more. I don’t know where the economy is at right now, but they could do better to help families, because we still need help. Even though we’re working…sometimes you feel like you’re living from paycheck to paycheck. You gotta make ends meet. It’s hard for a lot of us. You try to pay your mortgage, pay your bills, and stuff. It’s hard.”

Kel and her children were able to enroll in Medicaid in the State of Michigan during the pandemic and enjoyed not having to re-enroll every year during that period. But that ended in 2023, and they found themselves having to go through the complex, multistep process of renewal once again. “When [renewals] came back, it was a nightmare to deal with,” Kel said.

Struggling to get by as a single parent after divorcing her husband after domestic violence, Kel feels the strain emotionally as well as financially. “I didn’t realize how much shame was involved in struggling financially. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me as something that would be so painful,” they said. “There were so many instances where, on the days when my mental health was not as good as it can be, I would throw up my hands and say, ‘I just can’t even cope with this. This is so stressful and so impossible.’ And I don’t feel like there’s anyone here to help me figure this out. Or cares to help me figure it out.”

Latoya Dyer feels she is in an impossible predicament as a low-wage worker and a parent. She and her husband are working but not earning enough money to cover all of her family’s basic needs. But they also earn too much to qualify for the programs that helped them the most during the pandemic, like Medicaid and SNAP:

“We’re the working class, and we’re trying our best to be sustainable, pay our taxes, be a proper citizen, do all the things that we’re supposed to. Sometimes, you just feel like you’re being punished just for doing those simple things. You have inflation, and then there’s no ease to the inflation.” “The government,” she continued, “should think about other ways that they can help people. I felt like they gave it, and then they just took it away so quickly without waiting for people to get back to normalization because I felt like we were so—I don’t want to say dependent, but we were so sure that we were getting those funds and we were putting them in places that were beneficial to us. And when it stopped, it kind of hindered us. It wasn’t a gradual way for us to reach financial stability.”

To Philipa Nwadike-Laster, the math of caring for two children as a widow simply does not add up. “For two parents with kids that have no special needs or no therapy, most of the time, they still have to work two jobs. And now, I am a single parent with a special needs child,” she said. Despite once again working as a certified nursing assistant and running a small business selling herbal supplements, she is struggling to cover her bills. She has to decide which bills to prioritize:

“I have been able to pay my mortgage for two months and put food on the table. I’ve not paid any other bills for two months now.” But “No parent should be deciding between paying the mortgage, bills, or buying food,” she said. “This is what poverty does. This is what I mean by earning nothing doing an important job [as a mother.] I decided to pay my mortgage and buy food for these children, so other bills will need to wait.”

In 2023, Ruaa Sabek was earning just $16 an hour as a cashier at a fast food restaurant where she had worked for over three years. She heard about a job training program at the Opportunities Industrialization Center in Philadelphia, preparing workers to apply for jobs at banks. She completed the program and now earns $45,000 a year as a bank teller. Still, between her job and her husband’s, they are struggling to afford basic necessities. She finds it difficult to balance parenting and working full-time work hours with her commute. “I need to work a full-time job. My husband needs to work a full-time job if we want a better life for our kids. But before, I picked the kids up at three from school, then spent all afternoon with them, all the evening. I was more engaged. We do all the homework together. We talk,” said Sabek. Now, she has just one or two hours with her children each day.

The post-pandemic policy environment has been more dire for many of those who were poor at the pandemic’s outset. Kiarica Schields is now facing so many competing demands for her time and limited income as a single mother to four children, and with so few supports, she is flailing. She needs to work but has no access to a car. She needs to make sure her children are looked after, but getting them safely to and from their schools and care interferes with the time she could be at a job. The need to pick up her son from school when he acts out and is suspended has led to her dismissal from jobs she badly needs. Without a job, she cannot maintain her housing and that means her children are constantly in and out of their care and school situations. Her immediate family, which has at times been a support system for her and her children, is now less able to offer help. She has had and lost multiple jobs and been evicted multiple times since 2020.

By Brigid Schulte and Jasmine Heyward, with Julia Craven and Haley Swenson

The unprecedented federal response to support families during the pandemic showed just how quickly the government can act to improve health, well-being, and quality of life for people, particularly those living in poverty and most disadvantaged by the status quo. Yet once the pandemic aid expired, most of those gains to alleviate poverty were lost, and many of the families who had most relied on the support felt abandoned, left to struggle on their own with limited opportunities once again.

What became so clear in our qualitative study is just how powerful poverty narratives are: What policymakers, business leaders, and others who don’t live in poverty or on low incomes believe to be true about why people are in poverty shapes U.S. institutions, public policies, and ways of living. To make the changes to public family-supportive policies that would make a real difference in the lives of all families, new, more truthful stories are needed. These should move beyond harmful stereotypes and uninformed beliefs and embrace the data about how discriminatory systems, not individual choices, drive disadvantage. The new narratives should be grounded in the reality of people’s lived experiences and, alongside data, form the basis for equitable policy design and economic systems of shared prosperity that enable all families to thrive.

Here are some of the harmful poverty narratives shaping public policies and individual attitudes that surfaced during the research and reporting phase of our work, paired with the alternatives that surfaced during interviews with our collaborators.

The pandemic aid brought child poverty, total poverty rates, evictions, and hunger to historic lows and gave millions more people access to health care through Medicaid expansion during a frightening global pandemic. It wasn’t as if, all at once, people in poverty began making better individual choices. The system itself is what changed. As a result, many people for the first time benefitted from a more stable, middle-class way of life, with less financial stress, more peace of mind, and the bandwidth to think, plan, and even dream about a future.

Unfortunately, some policymakers’ rhetoric during the pandemic reinforced the outdated narrative. Some policymakers who typically characterize public benefits as “handouts” justified pandemic aid like expanded unemployment benefits with statements about people being out of work “through no fault of their own”—as if people in poverty or earning low wages outside of the pandemic are somehow at fault, or not “deserving” enough of aid.

The pandemic investments, while imperfect and often unevenly applied, were extraordinarily successful at lifting families above the poverty line: The American welfare state, historically one of stingiest and worst functioning among wealthy democracies, was, for the first time, performing on par with Belgium and Norway, two wealthy countries with among the lowest poverty rates.⁶⁷ The pandemic showed clearly that the government really can work to provide opportunity and make people’s lives better, when policymakers—and the voters who put them in power—choose to. As some advocates say, poverty is about chances, rather than choices.

“The pandemic investments, while imperfect and often unevenly applied, were extraordinarily successful at lifting families above the poverty line.”

One facilitated story collaborator, a mother of two who works as a home care aide, wanted policymakers to know that poverty is a trap that they’ve created. “Some people are not just choosing to be poor. The system makes some people poor. The way it is set up, it’s like a trap. It’s like a maze,” Philipa Nwadike-Laster said. “You get out of debt in one place, and you turn and find yourself in debt in another place,” she said. “So, I want policymakers to know that they’ve made bad laws. They’re like a noose, too tight on the neck of the people.”

“Most people are not asking for too much,” she continued. “If anybody is asking for too much, it’s all the corporate rich folks who just want the whole world. Most people just want a means of livelihood, to not be put into some kind of stressful condition. I would like to see an economy that considers people based on their abilities and contribution. An economy that is trying to increase the middle class, giving conscious efforts to help people climb up to that ladder.”

Racial discrimination shaped many study participants’ work paths and their health and ability to access health care. Ivonne Valadez Solano immigrated from Guerrero, Mexico, in 2010. Once in the United States, Solano left a job prior to the pandemic because she experienced ongoing racist harassment as well as complaints about her accent and English proficiency. These disruptions impacted her ability to attend English classes and her ability to save money, and they delayed a return to university to finish a degree in engineering that she began in Mexico.

People of color were far likelier to work in jobs deemed essential during the pandemic (in care, grocery and food service, as personal care aides and public transit workers, etc.), which meant they were disproportionately exposed to COVID-19.⁶⁸ Many of the participants of color in our study were care workers and deemed essential. That left them more exposed to health risks, like Mariam Dewi and her high-risk pregnancy, as well as furloughs and job cutbacks or losses rather than telework. An Urban Institute analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Pulse Survey found that Black and Latin people faced higher rates of hardship when it came to loss of income, food insecurity, worries about rent, and worries about mortgages due to the pandemic.⁶⁹

A 2021 study found that, “Black, Latinx, and American Indian persons have been hospitalized and died at a higher rate than white persons consistently from the start of the pandemic.” The study says the pandemic worsened “the gaps in wealth, employment, housing, and access to health care: the social determinants of health that caused the disparities in the first place.”⁷⁰

People of color were far more likely to lose a loved one during the pandemic, adding grief and the loss of valued sources of support to their experience of COVID-19 and its aftermath. Chantel Valdez, a participant of Navajo descent, lost three relatives in just a few months in 2020, including one Native aunt who lived on the nearby Navajo reservation, a close uncle, and grandmother. Death rates among Native Utahns were far higher than the population overall. “I couldn’t believe just how bad it was on the reservation compared to in town,” said Valdez. “I heard Navajos asking, like, ‘Are we being targeted?’ Almost conspiracy theories. ‘We heard crop dusters flying low over the reservations at night. Are they spreading something?’ That’s how low the trust was. How did we get hit so bad, and for some people in the same town it was like it never happened?”

Research summarized in the case study of Chantel Valdez suggests that the stark differences in early COVID-19 deaths were the result of long histories of infrastructural neglect by government officials.

“As for the local government and the town, I don’t want to call it racism,” said Valdez, “but discrimination. There’s so much discrimination.”

Additionally, people of color faced disproportionate barriers in accessing pandemic resources. A study by the Urban Institute found that there were major disparities across race and income in who received federal stimulus checks in a timely manner.⁷¹ People who earned too little to be required to file income taxes, for instance, were not visible to the Internal Revenue Service when it sent the checks, so low earners had to take the extra step of registering online. The Urban Institute also found that citizenship and immigration status were factors in who received the benefits: “Only 54.1 percent of Hispanic adults in families with noncitizens reported receiving the payment.”

Analysis by the Eviction Lab also suggests that Black and Latin communities faced higher rates of eviction during the pandemic, despite numerous bans on eviction at the local, state, and federal levels, and that eviction is both a result of and a cause of poverty. In December 2020 they found that “Black individuals made up 19.9 percent of all adult renters in the counties for which we had data, but 32.7 percent of all eviction filing defendants.” Furthermore, one in every five adult renters in our sample was Black, yet one in every three eviction filings were served to a Black renter. By contrast, [white renters] made up over half the population of adult renters (51.5 percent) but received only 42.7 percent of eviction filings.”⁷²

Racism is not just an attitude expressed by people and culture, but one that is built into the systems and structures that shape people’s opportunities and the barriers in their way. While the COVID-19 pandemic was seen by some as a “great equalizer,” because no person or group was immune from the virus, it in fact amplified racial inequalities that already existed. These disparities are not only pervasive and persistent but also generate returns to dominant groups since it promotes methodological individualism, which prioritizes individual agency and choice over systems and other structural forms of discrimination.⁷³

Many jobs are precarious, with unpredictable schedules, and come with none of the benefits, like health care, paid leave, or retirement savings, that help families survive. As much as 44 percent of the U.S. workforce is considered low-wage, with jobs paying $10 an hour or less, at a time when cost of living estimates made by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Living Wage calculator shows that the typical wage is not livable for a single-parent family with two children in nearly every American county.⁷⁴

In fact, U.S. taxpayers have been subsidizing these low-wage jobs, at a time when CEO salaries and shareholder profits have been soaring.⁷⁵ One 2020 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that 70 percent of those living on low-enough incomes to qualify for public benefits like Medicaid and food nutrition aid actually work full time. So it’s not that people in poverty are lazy and need to work harder. The jobs don’t pay high enough wages to support human life.

Many of the collaborators in our study worked long hours, often juggling several part-time jobs and side gigs. Vilma Cabrera, for instance, worked 80 hours a week for years, juggling two full-time jobs as a front desk concierge at two different office buildings until she needed more time to care for her increasingly ailing mother. Then she was robbed at gunpoint and became too afraid to venture out of her apartment. Philipa Nwadike-Laster juggles six different jobs and side hustles, including work as a home care aide, running an herbal supplements business, and taking in sewing. She also grows her own vegetables in her front yard because her jobs can’t keep up with the rising cost of living.

Blessing Aghayedo, a licensed practical nurse, didn’t sleep more than a few hours a day when she worked the night shift. She spent her days caring for her children because the family couldn’t afford child care. “If our jobs paid us enough money, we wouldn’t need any help at all. If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills,” she told us. Indeed, wages for frontline workers across the country have barely budged since the late 1970s, even as productivity and profits have continued to rise.⁷⁶

Some of our participants used the pandemic support to access training and education opportunities to obtain a better job. Ruaa Sabek was able to get training to move from a part-time cashier job in a fast food restaurant to a position as a personal banker earning a better salary with critical benefits like health insurance. But others, like Kiarica Schields, found themselves stuck. Schields, a college-educated nurse who lost her job when she lost child care during the pandemic, has gone to near herculean efforts to find work to support her family, including driving DoorDash with the baby in the backseat, catering, taking in laundry, working in a call center, and coordinating volunteers at a homeless shelter—a place very much like the one where she herself would need to seek refuge a few months later, when care responsibilities and illness pushed her out of work.

“The road out of poverty requires systemic solutions that…include providing vital public goods and services, better jobs, higher wages, universal access to life-sustaining benefits, stable housing, and better supports for workers.”

Far more than expecting individuals to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, willpower, or grit, our research shows that the road out of poverty requires systemic solutions that, in addition to better functioning poverty-prevention initiatives, include providing vital public goods and services, better jobs, higher wages, universal access to life-sustaining benefits, stable housing, and better supports for workers, working conditions, and worker power.

The federal response helped families not only survive during the global pandemic, but it improved their financial well-being. During the pandemic, many reported feeling far less stress with a taste of middle-class life and the ability to pay bills, pay down debt, save, and even provide their children with art classes, music lessons, and short family trips for the first time.

But the reprieve from poverty, while lifesaving during the pandemic, was short-lived and did nothing to solve the structural problems that foster poverty and lack of opportunity in the first place. In 2021, federal investments brought the U.S. poverty rate to a historic low of almost 8 percent, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure.⁷⁷ Child poverty rates fell, as did eviction rates, hunger, and the share of people lacking health insurance. But one year later, as relief programs began to expire, the poverty rate was back to 12.4 percent.⁷⁸ Child poverty rates returned to pre-pandemic levels. The number of people living in poverty dropped by 14.5 million from 2019 to 2021 but surged again by the same amount in 2022.⁷⁹ The United States still has among the highest rates of poverty, and child poverty in particular, among wealthy democracies.⁸⁰

“The United States still has among the highest rates of poverty, and child poverty in particular, among wealthy democracies.”

Many of the collaborators in our study felt acutely just how temporary the aid was, as their day-to-day experience returned to the mode of scrape-and-struggle once pandemic aid expired. Blessing Aghayedo is one of millions of people who no longer have access to health care through Medicaid. She has had to put off needed surgery for a painful prolapsed bladder.⁸¹ “You just feel helpless, especially when you know this person can help you, and this person don’t want to help you, and you can’t help yourself,” she said. “It makes you even more sad when you think of the time you did get help, how it saved you lots of money.”

The pandemic experience showed how poverty is often a preexisting condition. As poverty researcher Zach Parolin has noted, “U.S. counties with the highest poverty rates had twice the per capita COVID death rate relative to U.S. counties with the lowest poverty. That gap that we see among U.S. counties is the same as the gap between low-income Romania and high-income Luxembourg in the European Union.”⁸² He continued, “At the individual level, we also see that if you entered the pandemic with lower income, you were more likely to have died as a result of COVID-19. If you went into the pandemic in poverty, you were about twice as likely to lose your job relative to someone with a higher income. Poverty was a preexisting risk factor in the context of the pandemic.”

Just as in 2019, many people are once again just one shock away from spiraling from a tenuous hold on the working or middle class into poverty. Vilma Cabrera, for instance, was struggling to juggle work and care for her ailing mother and two children when her car was hit by someone without insurance. Paying $2,700 for a new car meant she fell behind on her rent. Then, her apartment flooded and she was robbed at gunpoint at her job as a concierge in an office building. She quit her job and nearly lost everything.

Participants reported having to navigate the complicated bureaucracy of public benefits. They risk falling off the benefits “cliff” and having their aid cut dramatically when they get a slightly better-paying job. One collaborator, Kel, for instance, is desperately seeking a better paying job to support themselves and their four children, but can’t afford for her children to lose access to Medicaid. “I’m really hoping that I can find [work] that’s flexible and mainly remote. I need enough income to support us, but not too much to make the kids lose their qualification for Medicaid, because I would have to have three times my salary in order to afford the private insurance that would actually cover them,” she said. “That’s been like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

And Congress has yet to solve the care crisis. Without accessible, affordable, high-quality, and stable care, many families, single parents in particular, are unable to work or get the education they want, so they remain trapped in poverty. Care educators like study collaborator Tiffany Gale, who has run a successful child care facility in West Virginia, can’t get the support they need to pay themselves and their employees living wages; a 2024 report shows that child care workers earn a median wage of $13 an hour and nearly half qualify for public benefits.⁸³ Many have ultimately decided to leave the field for a better paying job with more stability.

These factors—low-paying jobs with poor working conditions, exclusionary and inadequate social assistance programs, and a lack of public goods and services—reflect the structural challenges that get in the way of sustained poverty alleviation.

Being poor in America drains people of the energy and the ability to think about or act to change one’s circumstances, dream about or plan for a better future, or spend time with family and enjoy their life. People in poverty or living on low wages often have to juggle multiple jobs or side hustles to survive. Finding out about, applying for, and maintaining public benefits is time-consuming, complicated, and often fraught. One small mistake on an application or one missing document can lead to rejection. The federal government is recognizing this, too. In an executive order on making the delivery of benefits more efficient, President Joe Biden said:

“When a disaster survivor, single parent, immigrant, small business owner, or veteran waits months for the Government to process benefits to which they are entitled, that lost time is a significant cost not only for that individual, but in the aggregate, for our Nation as a whole. This lost time operates as a kind of tax—a “time tax”—and it imposes a serious burden on our people as they interact with the Government. Improving Government services should also make our Government more efficient and effective overall.”⁸⁴

Commuting can require inordinate amounts of time—especially in areas where people are clustered, and in regions of the country with poor provisions of public goods and services, such as transportation. To get to one job, collaborator Kiarica Schields left her apartment at 5:30 a.m. Her car had been repossessed, so she had to take two buses and two trains to arrive at work by 7:26 a.m. The return commute was equally long. Some nights she’d get home at 8 p.m, all for $18 an hour, which didn’t come close to covering the family’s bills. With her mother living with them, Schields knew her four children were well cared for, “but I didn’t want to keep missing out on my children’s lives to make it work,” she said.

One study found that the commute time for low-income workers in Washington, DC, for instance, is 120 minutes longer per week than for higher-income workers, both because low-income workers have a greater reliance on public transportation and because affordable housing is often miles away from where the jobs are. Longer commute times squeeze out time that could be spent searching for better employment, as well as spending time with family. They’re also associated with lower levels of social capital, physical health, and life satisfaction.⁸⁵

Living without adequate economic resources also forces those in poverty to spend inordinate amounts of time just to find and access the help they need. Because she and her mother lacked health insurance at the time, study collaborator Vilma Cabrera would drop her young children off at a neighbor’s apartment to leave Alexandria, Virginia, at 5 a.m. and drive two and a half hours to Charlottesville to be at a free clinic by 8 a.m., where her mother, who’d been diagnosed with colon cancer, among other illnesses, could get the treatment she needed. After the return drive home, Cabrera would then head to an afternoon shift at work. Cabrera made the exhausting trip with her mother sometimes two or three times a week.

The pandemic aid, our study collaborators said, eased some of that time constraint. With more stable economic support, some said they were able to spend more time with family. Some took their children to the park for the first time, shared regular meals, or even took short family trips to experience something new: distress-free, guilt-free joy. For Cabrera, the Medicaid expansion meant she could find local care for her mother. The pandemic aid, and participating in a pandemic-related guaranteed basic income pilot program, gave her family the most precious things, she said: “care and time.”

In contrast to single-incident traumas, complex trauma occurs when someone is repeatedly victimized in an environment or circumstance that is difficult or impossible to escape.⁸⁶ It’s commonly associated with intimate partner violence, war, and childhood abuse,⁸⁷ but any situation that regularly threatens someone’s basic safety and livelihood can create complex trauma. This includes poverty, which often threatens access to food, housing, and other basic needs.⁸⁸

The psychological and relational consequences of complex trauma often disrupt how families function and reduce the likelihood that families can climb out of poverty. Complex trauma and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) often disrupt cognition and executive functioning at a biological level,⁸⁹ making it more difficult to understand complex systems, initiate tasks, respond to setbacks with agility, and regulate emotions.⁹⁰

Some of our collaborators had internalized prevailing poverty narratives and blamed themselves, or one “bad decision”⁹¹ they’d made for their current situation. This self-blame compounded both the trauma and their feelings of fatalism—that they somehow deserved their difficult circumstances or could do little to change them. Vilma Cabrera, for instance, points to the day she decided to turn down a college scholarship because her boyfriend threatened to leave her. She dropped out of high school, married him, had a child, and struggled to survive in a relationship that became increasingly abusive. “I regret it,” she told us. “I tell my daughter, ‘You’re so smart. I’m asking you to be better than me.’” Likewise, Kel, another study participant, was often consumed by shame, which left her paralyzed and unable to function. She said:

“There’s this need for dignity, you know? And there’s a lot of hiding that I do, to try to pretend like we’re all okay. And embarrassment—I feel I need to hide from people that we were at one point living in this house with inadequate heating and that the kids often have clothes with holes in them and that we shop in thrift stores. I don’t want people to see that. I drive a super old car. I want them to think that I’m doing okay and I’m a normal person. There’s all this social shaming that comes with not having enough money. And this pressure to be accepted and not treated as someone who’s less than, or in need of pity. There was a real tangible fear of having my children taken away at multiple points, that someone could call Child Protective Services.”

In our interviews, one collaborator also described persistent and overwhelming exhaustion and sinking depression that made it difficult to manage processes like applying for jobs or navigating legal paperwork to access benefits. Several felt that their mental health struggles were likely visible to their children, and they worried about how their situation impacted their children. This concern is validated by science; poverty, and complex trauma can disrupt parents’ ability to connect with and care for their kids, leading to insecure attachment.⁹² Attachment difficulties increase the risk that these children will become both victims and perpetrators of interpersonal dysfunction or violence, which can create cycles of intergenerational trauma that run parallel to cycles of intergenerational poverty.⁹³

This intergenerational transmission is one of many ways that poverty can intersect with dysfunctional family systems. Several of our interviewees had separated from or fled abusive partners, which created or worsened their financial instability. Abusers often intentionally isolate their partners, centralizing their control and reducing the likelihood that their partners will have the support system they need.⁹⁴ When abused partners find ways to leave despite this isolation, they often have to expend additional effort to rebuild social networks that can not only provide emotional support but also help with housing, food, work, and other necessities.

Some of the now-single parents we interviewed maintain solid connections with family members who can provide support through child care, temporary housing, and shared resources. Others have parents who need care themselves due to complex health problems, so a sense of isolation remains as they struggle to build support networks from scratch. Sometimes these networks are lost again through unstable housing or forced evictions.

Poverty is a traumatic experience that can easily become intertwined with family and relational dynamics. To best serve families, our social safety net must be trauma-informed, not because some people living in poverty are also traumatized but because poverty is traumatic.

Living in poverty has a complex influence on health and well-being, often exacerbated by systemic inequities such as racism, gender inequality, queerphobia, ageism, and xenophobia, since class status touches every facet of life in the United States. “Poverty is much more than just a low-income household. It reflects economic well-being, the ability to negotiate society relative to education of an individual, socioeconomic or health status, as well as social exclusion based on institutional policies, practices, and behaviors,” wrote researchers in a 2021 paper addressing the role of poverty narratives and racism on health.⁹⁵

This aligns with what we found in our case studies, facilitated stories, and reporting. Chantel Valdez was unable to afford grave markers for family members who died from COVID-19 due to a lack of funds, which caused stress for her and her children. Tiffany Gale and Durel Miller⁹⁶ used American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to combat food insecurity in their communities since health can suffer for families that don’t have access to nutritious foods.

Housing instability was another destabilizing event we found repeatedly in our work. Kirarca Schields was evicted four times. Vilma Cabrera sustained water damage to her apartment that caused her asthma to flair. Facing eviction upends a family’s sense of stability and predictability, and stable housing is critical to healthy childhood development. All of these outcomes are physical consequences of living in poverty and under exclusionary systems.

Another trend we found in our project, which aligns with the research literature, was the extreme and chronic stress collaborators were under, much of it due to the constant demands on their time. Living in poverty requires unmatched levels of creativity, flexibility, and time management to navigate daily life. Philipa Nwadike-Laster spoke in depth about the chaos of being a low-income widow raising an autistic son and teenage daughter. On top of managing the family’s finances, she spends a significant amount of time researching and assessing therapies to help her son, fulfilling orders for a wellness supplement business, and bouncing between patients as a care worker. Latoya Dyer went as far as to say that she “felt more human” when her family was receiving pandemic-era benefits because they alleviated the stress of worrying about how she would adequately feed four children and handle their medical care.

The effects of poverty on physical health become more obvious when we consider how an estimated 25 million Americans were purged from Medicaid rolls following the end of pandemic-era protections in 2023.⁹⁷ Lower socioeconomic status has been associated with higher baseline levels of cortisol,⁹⁸ a stress hormone that can cause a medley of health issues—including high blood pressure, insulin resistance, weakening of the immune system, and muscle loss—when levels are too elevated for too long. This is especially concerning for Black women, the demographic to which the majority of the narrators in our facilitated stories belong, due to weathering, which describes how the relentless stress of racism can lead to premature biological aging and adverse health outcomes.⁹⁹

American poverty-prevention and subsistence programs are a complex system of bureaucratic programs, many of which are actually administered by states or municipalities. Administrative burden, which refers to the red tape, paperwork, and time required to receive benefits, prevents people from receiving their benefits on time or accessing them at all. Americans spend approximately 11.5 billion hours annually on paperwork for federal benefits.¹⁰⁰ Family members capable of doing the paperwork often take on this additional labor, including navigating language barriers, which can impede the process. Sometimes these systems are designed to be confusing.

Accessing benefits in the U.S. demands “navigational capital”—the skills used to “maneuver through social institutions.”¹⁰¹ Education scholar Tara Yosso initially defined this term in her cultural wealth model, explaining that students with navigational capital had developed strategies to navigate through institutions that weren’t designed with them in mind, allowing them to achieve their desired outcomes at school despite the presence of “stressful events and conditions” tied to racism and marginalization.

Our reporting found that some study participants had developed navigational capital around community resources. Ruaa Sabek, for instance, found out about child care subsidies through her child’s preschool director. And through her church, she was connected to a visiting nurse who helped her apply for food benefits. “The director was very helpful,” she told us. “In the community, we need some people just to make things simple. I am here for eight years now. I am an American citizen. But everything is new for me. You don’t know about any laws or community resources.” While Sabek, through community connections, found a job training program on her Instagram feed, that often didn’t extend to the complex bureaucracy of applying for state and federal benefits programs. Several participants explained that they hadn’t applied for resources such as child support from ex partners, child care subsidies, welfare, or housing assistance because it was unclear how to do so and unclear if the resources would be worth the trouble.

Yosso directly connects navigational capital to social networks, since families, friends, and peers often teach each other how to best engage with these systems.¹⁰² In tight-knit communities, a family that successfully applies for specific benefits can share information with others about what to expect and how to best navigate the process. Without such networks, this becomes more challenging, unless there are formal supports.

In some localities, community members can seek the support of navigational specialists with formal training to help people access resources. One of our collaborators emphasized the value of a navigator who helped her understand and apply for child care benefits. These services even the playing field, allowing people to develop more navigational capital even if they don’t know anyone who can help; however, there is rarely enough support available to support everyone.

People who live in poverty are regularly punished for not escaping by the same systems that ensnare them. We saw this throughout our research. Kiarica Schields lost her driver’s license and was arrested on a drunk driving charge after she fell asleep at a stoplight while working late at night for DoorDash to make ends meet. She failed the roadside sobriety test not because she’d been drinking, she said, but because she was overweight, which research bears out.¹⁰³ After missing several notices to appear in court, which were sent to old addresses she’d been evicted from, Schields was advised by a public defender to plead guilty to the charge. She did. In the meantime, not having a car and not being able to drive limited her ability to find and commute to a decent job. Ali lost her housing after she was incarcerated following a domestic dispute. Vilma Cabrera moved out of her apartment when her landlord refused to repair the extensive mold and water damage caused by a flood. But because she technically broke her lease, a collections agency has been after her for what it says is nearly $10,000 she owes in back rent.

Benefits fraud and other “poverty-related crimes”¹⁰⁴ are top of mind for many policymakers and voters,¹⁰⁵ leading to systems that are hypervigilant and overinclusive in their approach to combating misuse.¹⁰⁶ Proponents of these systems often acknowledge that they assume the worst about people living in poverty, but argue that there are always options to seek remedy.¹⁰⁷ This philosophy fails to acknowledge that many of these processes require a good understanding of legal communication and strategy, and there aren’t nearly enough free or low-cost legal services to go around.¹⁰⁸

In our research, several collaborators mentioned accepting a benefits denial despite being sure they qualified, or pleading guilty to a misdemeanor because they were advised that the likelihood of beating a charge without a high-priced lawyer was too low. These encounters with the government exacerbated learned helplessness—a sense that someone’s behavior can’t influence environmental events or outcomes, resulting in a lack of motivation to act to avoid negative outcomes.¹⁰⁹ Collaborators’ financial insecurity also increased as they continued to live on unsustainable incomes or paid fines as penalties for policy violations or misdemeanor citations.

This cynical policy design approach creates additional and unnecessary hardship, because the options for seeking remedy aren’t truly accessible to many living in poverty. Creating equity requires a shift in the assumptions that underlie our policy decisions.

While federal legislation often mandates that public benefits programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unemployment insurance, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), share certain key features, the full implementation of these programs and others is left up to states and even municipalities. This creates widespread variation in how public benefits work across the country.

States like Minnesota and cities like Philadelphia were praised for how quickly they could integrate federal funds into the budgets of programs that served their citizens during the pandemic, from providing premium pay to hourly hospitality workers to providing effective rental assistance and eviction diversion programs. Elsewhere, funds from 2020 and 2021 legislative packages weren’t allocated in a timely fashion or went unused. And some states chose not to comply with the changes to benefits programs mandated by Congress to make them easier to obtain.

Even when jurisdictions implement the same policies, geographic considerations play a large role in shaping the impact. Because study participant Chantel Valdez lives in a rural and remote part of Utah, she has to have a car to survive, and she spends significant time driving to care for family members spread out across hundreds of miles and to pick up supplies in different towns. Similarly, Valadez Solano, another study participant, must contend with urban sprawl and traffic in Los Angeles to manage work and care. A family living a 10-minute walk from their child’s elementary school will experience free public school meals differently than one driving 20 minutes to their child’s school. Municipalities often have the opportunity to customize community offerings, but it’s essential to consider how a policy will inevitably function differently in different areas.

The case study focusing on study participant Kiarica Schields illustrates a number of complex and overlapping factors related to geography, race, and public benefit provisions across a range of issues. The fact that Schields lives and works in Georgia, a state with a long history of racism dating from before the Civil War and the South’s fight to preserve an economy built on slave labor, shapes her story as a Black woman, single mother, and sole family breadwinner in profound ways. Before the pandemic, Georgia, which has one of the highest shares of Black residents¹¹⁰ of any state, also had one of the highest rates of poverty of any state, with Black residents hit particularly hard.¹¹¹

Georgia also has one of the highest rates of housing loss, evictions, and mortgage foreclosures in the country, one analysis found.¹¹² Georgia is also among the least affordable states for housing¹¹³ options or subsidized housing vouchers.¹¹⁴ The state allots housing vouchers by lottery, but the waiting list is so long it’s often closed. In 2023, the state opened the waiting list to new applicants for just three days.¹¹⁵ By 2023, the eviction rate in Atlanta exceeded pre-pandemic levels.¹¹⁶ Between 2020 and 2024, Schields and her four children were evicted four times.

Though she desperately needs child care in order to work, Schields has had difficulty obtaining a subsidy. The state’s child care subsidies typically reach only about 18 percent of those eligible.¹¹⁷ Nearly half of all families in Georgia live in child care deserts. One state survey found that child care struggles directly impact the financial security of most parents, more than eight in 10.¹¹⁸ Nearly half said they’d had to turn down job opportunities because of a lack of adequate child care, and one-third had to leave the labor force, like Schields did.

Georgia, like many southern states, has among the lowest dollar amounts available for public benefits. It is one of about 20 states that do not have a state Earned Income Tax Credit to bolster low-wage and working-class workers.¹¹⁹ It is one of 14 states, mostly in the South, that reach fewer than 10 of every 100 families with children living in poverty with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program.¹²⁰ In 2020, Georgia’s TANF program reached just five out of 100 needy families. The benefit levels are the lowest in the country—$280 a month for a family of three—and haven’t budged in 30 years.¹²¹ Most struggling families don’t even bother to apply. That was the case with Schields. “Georgia makes it so difficult,” she said. “That never seemed something that was worth it.”

And instead of helping needy families out of poverty, about 70 percent of the federal funds that come to the state for the TANF program go instead to the state’s Child Protective Services and to paying foster parents.¹²²

Georgia has also historically been miserly with unemployment benefits. In 2020, a mere 15 percent of unemployed workers actually received unemployment benefits, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, putting Georgia among the bottom 10 states for reaching the fewest number of unemployed workers in need of help.¹²³ The state cut off Schields’s unemployment unexpectedly and denied her appeals. She doesn’t understand why. Georgia also ranks toward the bottom for what it pays out, reimbursing just 29 percent of an unemployed person’s wage, compared to states like North Dakota, Vermont, and Massachusetts, which reimburse at a rate closer to 50 percent.¹²⁴

The long legacy of racism that has shaped work, care, and public policy in the state has led to extreme economic inequality.¹²⁵ In the United States, white households have about six times as much wealth as Black households. In Georgia, white households have eight times the wealth of Black households. In Atlanta, where Schields lives, white households have 46 times the wealth of Black households, a gap as wide as it was when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, according to the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund.¹²⁶

Throughout the pandemic, the federal government response gave states and local jurisdictions flexibility to use funds to address family hardships. Some local leaders sought community input and responded with enormous creativity to support families, especially those living in poverty. Some communities used federal funds to start guaranteed basic income pilots. Others used funds to train workers to recognize when they’re not being paid for overtime work in Missouri; to run a subsidized employment program to help put underemployed workers into better jobs in Alexandria, Virginia; to build a grocery co-op in a food desert in West Virginia; and to expand digital literacy in low-income neighborhoods in Colorado.

Kansas City was one of several jurisdictions to use federal funds to give tenants facing evictions a right to counsel. Advocates said that, prior to the pandemic, more than 90 percent of landlords had legal representation during eviction proceedings, while fewer than 1 percent of tenants did.¹²⁷ But once the right to counsel law went into effect, the eviction rate dropped dramatically, as counsel forced landlords to negotiate with tenants to find solutions, rather than evict them.¹²⁸ The program proved so successful that the city decided to continue funding the program on its own once federal pandemic aid expired. The same is true in other jurisdictions and for other programs, with some states, including some states with more conservative politics, continuing to use local funds to invest in child care infrastructure.¹²⁹

Yet other notably states and jurisdictions with more conservative politics, which tend to be led by those ideologically opposed to government support for families or those in poverty, delayed using federal funds, restricted their use, or returned funds early. State leaders in Idaho, for instance, returned unused child care funds to the federal government, despite widespread community opposition.¹³⁰

Many child care providers struggle to stay in business and serve the families in their communities. Because child care costs are so high¹³¹ and many families cannot afford to pay more than they already do for care, child care providers operate at slim margins to pay staff and buy supplies.

We found that efforts from federal, state, and local groups to provide additional funding for child care centers meant that providers were better able to serve families, could serve more families, and could invest in their businesses. With the additional financial support through ARPA, our study participant Tiffany Gale expanded her child care center’s physical location so she could enroll more kids and offer staff higher pay and more benefits.

Primary caregivers like Rick Poling, a 59-year-old metal worker in Weirton also benefited greatly. Poling, who has custody of two of his grandchildren, Leona and Tyler, then ages five and six, was deemed “essential” and had to keep working. But because the state of West Virginia decided to use ARPA funds to provide free child care to essential workers, regardless of income, Poling was able to send the children to Gale’s child care. Gale also accommodated his shift work schedule. “The kids loved going there,” he said. “Miss Tiffany was really great with them.” But once the subsidies were no longer available, child care became unaffordable. Poling had to cobble together a patchwork arrangement of care through a friend and his girlfriend that disrupts the children’s days and is difficult for him to organize and manage.

We also found that despite having demand for spots and a willingness to serve the population, providers cannot make the economics of care work without additional state and federal funding. This is something that Gale lamented, and she feels that there is a perception that child care companies—because they charge so much money—are also bringing in big profits. The reality is that many child care providers work as Gale does—as a local small business owner dedicated to serving the people in her community, and working out of their homes where the child care business is their sole income.

Based on our interviews and research, we found that subsidies may help families get the care they need, but as administered they are a burden for the providers. Without a legislative fix, they do not reimburse at an appropriate market rate.¹³² In addition, many family child care providers are reimbursed at lower rates than traditional child care centers.¹³³ Some states are using funding through APRA to correct for this discrepancy, but it does mean that family child cares, like Gale’s, must work additional hours and take on additional children just to make the same amount of money that a child care center does.¹³⁴

Through our reporting, we found that West Virginia, particularly the northern part of the state near Pittsburgh and Morgantown, has valuable job opportunities coming to the population.¹³⁵ But without reliable child care, many of these are off-limits to families with young kids.

Language and how someone speaks it can create, inform, or validate someone’s biases. “Linguistic bias is part of our basic cultural fabric. It is so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it,” writes Katherine D. Kinzler, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, in her book How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You. “It’s sanctioned by the law, it’s allowed by culture, and it’s practiced so frequently that people do not even realize when it is happening. Linguistic discrimination is seen as normal and typical, and because of this, it flies beneath the radar.”¹³⁶ One typical example of this is the way people with a Southern accent¹³⁷ or the “Valley Girl”¹³⁸ accent, any non-native English speaking accent, or Black people who speak AAVE¹³⁹ are portrayed in mass media as having a lower intelligence than someone from the northern regions of the United States. The discrimination experienced by those who speak with these accents or dialects reflects the legacies and histories of xenophobia, sexism, and racism in the United States—systemic discriminations that routinely bar those on the receiving end from increasing their social, financial, and educational capital.

This subtle form of discrimination is more attuned toward people of color and immigrants—two demographics that are more likely to experience poverty in the United States and two groups in which the majority of our participants fall. During the writing and editing process, we noticed language’s role in the stories. At times, the role was subtle, such as when Nwadike-Laster said that one of her dreams for the future was for her daughter “to relax that her brother’s in a good place,” meaning Nwadike-Laster wanted her youngest child to have peace of mind about her autistic brother’s well-being. At others, it was more direct, like Sabek’s assurance that understanding the SAE on the application forms for food aid wasn’t what prevented her from applying alone. She was pregnant, under a lot of stress, and relied on the support of a visiting nurse her church community helped her find. “She helped me a lot with resources. They helped me with WIC [Women, Infants, and Children supplemental nutrition program]. She actually go with me, I was pregnant with my second baby, and she helped me with all the paperwork to do the application for food stamps. To do that on my own, it will be too much. It’s not that the language is the problem, just I don’t know what I have to put there. I just need some instructions to make sure I don’t put in the wrong information. She was with me step by step. She was very patient. We were there between one and two hours.”

“To preserve the integrity and authenticity of our narrators’ voices, we made a conscious decision to limit edits to their vernacular speech.”

The more we reported, the more we became reluctant to edit these narratives to fit into SAE. Doing so would have diminished the power of these narrators telling their own stories. To remain true to the goal of this project, which is to explore and subvert harmful yet pervasive narratives about people who live in poverty, the Better Life Lab refrained from fitting how narrators tell their stories into the confines of privileged language. To preserve the integrity and authenticity of our narrators’ voices, we made a conscious decision to limit edits to their vernacular speech.

As we say in our introduction to the facilitated stories accompanying this report: “Our narrators were courageous enough to speak freely about their experiences, and out of respect, we chose not to mold their dialects to fit within the confines of standard American English. With this in mind, we understand they may say things that are not considered politically correct or culturally sensitive. While we at the Better Life Lab may not have chosen the same language to describe certain situations as our narrators, we acknowledge that we have the time, space, and privilege to devote mental bandwidth toward how we choose to describe experiences.”

By Brigid Schulte, Haley Swenson, and Julia Craven

In March 2020, the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic marked a stark departure from politics and policy as usual in the United States. The truly global nature of the threat posed by this novel virus and its potential impact on people in the United States from all walks of life created a palpable, if temporary, feeling that “we are all in this together.” For that short period, keeping people out of poverty became a bipartisan and collective goal that resulted in the unprecedented pandemic aid described in the previous sections of this report.

Yet a failure to adequately understand how poverty worked prior to COVID-19 and what families truly need to survive and thrive led to unequal outcomes, both in terms of who suffered most from COVID-19 and whose worries were alleviated and needs fully met by pandemic aid. This report has sought to contribute unique and authentic narratives of the lives of people living in poverty—or those struggling financially—and their experiences of this extraordinary pandemic aid. While lifesaving during the pandemic for many, the aid did not prove to be a panacea against poverty.

Today, the United States is deeply divided over both the role of government and the importance of public policy support for families in poverty.¹⁴⁰ Because of the pandemic, we now have numerous recent data points showing the power and efficacy of temporary public aid, as uneven and imperfect as it was.¹⁴¹ Yet pessimism about government intervention and the deservingness of poor people continues to hamper better policymaking. Changing the poverty narratives that have proven to be the most pervasive—and are enmeshed in our collective common sense about poverty because of it—is critical to creating the political will to change. Psychologist and social theorist Barry Schwartz wrote:

“If you think your poverty is God’s will, you pray. If you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy, you shrink into despair. If you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up and revolt. Whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty. This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings.”¹⁴²

To truly understand what families need to thrive, our report makes clear that designing better solutions depends on asking families themselves, listening to their stories and ideas, telling truer, fuller, more respectful narratives, and, with a better understanding of the roots of the problem, push for action. Only when we change the kinds of narratives we listen to, produce, and circulate, when we expand the circle of narrators we deem worthy of listening to and the language we are open to hearing and learning from, will we understand what truly causes and perpetuates poverty, how we can solve it, and how economic equality benefits everyone in a society.

• Listen to and work from fuller stories of poverty. Too often, the stories we hear about poverty are snapshots of a person struggling at a moment in time. This study has sought to understand people’s experiences of poverty within the fullest context possible. To that end, it was important that we not limit the study to the pandemic itself but include an understanding of study participants’ lives before and after. Traditional journalistic reporting on these policy issues or temporary policy measures does not often allow the time or space for such nuanced understandings. The narratives in this report are longer than mainstream media news stories, and they go deeper than traditional policy research in understanding the lives of people who experience engaging with socially supportive policies. This context is vital for understanding why even the most generous policy response in U.S. history could not help these families overcome the social and economic barriers they face.
• Listen to diverse narrators, including those from groups most acutely impacted by the policy and poverty issues we seek to investigate. This is especially critical for those with the power to create substantial change. It is critical that policymakers incorporate the voices of women of color into their processes and follow a race-conscious policy framework.¹⁴³ Taking a conscious approach to policymaking rather than a neutral one will promote much-needed justice for those long harmed by systemic ills in the United States. Neutral policy does not account for historic or systemic racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination and supposes that everyone is equal under the law. Centuries of quantitative and qualitative research have shown that that is not true. Addressing racism, discrimination, and other forms of bias—including, but not limited to, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, linguistic racism, and misogynoir¹⁴⁴—in the U.S. requires a multifaceted approach that tackles these constructs as root causes for the inequities seen in our society.
• Uplift languages that have historically been deemed unworthy. In this study, we have attempted to preserve participants’ diverse use of language and to include a Spanish-language case study so one immigrant study participant could tell her story in the language with which she was most comfortable. In a 2005 article, education scholar Tara J. Yosso identified six types of cultural wealth that students from historically underserved communities possess. One is linguistic capital, which refers to skills developed through communication in multiple languages, cultural styles, and dialects,¹⁴⁵ as well as someone’s ability to express themselves. Yosso directly challenges the presumption that Standard American English (SAE), mass media, and U.S. popular culture tend to promote, which is that there is a singular “proper” way of speaking or writing. Instead, Yosso uplifts multilingualism and code-switching, expressiveness, and the literary and communication skills involved in translation as a form of social capital that allows those with these skills to move through various scenarios. Linguistic diversity is not an obstacle to overcome. We must view accents and non-standard English and the use of languages other than English, like the language of many of our study participants, as assets that enrich collective knowledge and broaden perspectives. Taking a collective point of view provides decision-makers with new tools and insights to better understand what communities need.¹⁴⁶ This, in turn, shifts institutional and social perspectives toward inclusivity and equity.¹⁴⁷ It can also lead to more inclusive and empathetic societies.¹⁴⁸ Policies crafted with this awareness foster a more accessible and representative framework since multiple ways of knowing and communicating are validated.
• Reject overly simplistic narratives about who suffers from poverty and understand the many ways we are all ultimately vulnerable and the connections between what those in poverty experience and the fate of all members of society. In their groundbreaking book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, epidemiologists Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson draw on 30 years of data to show that when societies have more income equality, everyone benefits, regardless of socioeconomic level. Their data show that when poverty levels rise and economic inequality gets worse, so does a nation’s health and well-being, with shortened lifespans, more chronic disease, less trust in institutions, and increased levels of violence and imprisonment. Children in the most unequal societies, they found, do less well in school, are more likely to be bullied, and have higher levels of mental distress and fewer opportunities for social mobility. “Part of the reason is because inequality puts us in a hierarchy, one above the other,” they write. “It reinforces the idea that some people are worth much more than others.”¹⁴⁹ Our narratives must reflect the full humanity of the people and families living in poverty—not just their hardship but their strengths, hopes, dreams, and everyday joys. Without more truthful narratives, we run the risk of thinking people living in poverty and those not living in poverty are profoundly different and that these differences explain the gaps that currently exist between them. Instead, fuller, respectful narratives grounded in our shared humanity can shorten distances, bridge gaps, and foster connection and will to action.

Through these strategies, this study represents an effort to tell better and truer stories about people living in poverty. From these fuller, richer narratives, we were able to glean direct insights from families themselves about what they need to thrive.

Here’s what families told us that they need to thrive.

Every single participant in our study talked about how critical it is for them and their families to have access to good medical, dental, and mental health care. The current private insurance system in the United States requires people to rely on their employers to provide health insurance, seek coverage through Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchanges, or, if they qualify because of their low incomes, Medicaid. Study participants talked about the high stress that comes with losing a job or being furloughed, as often happened during the first two years of the pandemic because losing a job also often means losing health insurance. Some, particularly those who worked in care professions, expressed frustration that their employers didn’t offer health insurance or kept their hours below the 30-hour-a-week minimum to skirt federal requirements for providing health insurance to full-time employees.

Our participants expressed enormous relief when lawmakers expanded Medicaid during the pandemic, enabling more people to qualify for it. They spoke of a huge weight being lifted when lawmakers removed onerous rules that require people to recertify for Medicaid every year and instead allowed continuous enrollment.

Having health insurance during the pandemic was a life changer for participants in our study. Latoya Dyer was able to get her daughter new, much-needed glasses. Kel, a single parent of four, and their children used Medicaid to address several health needs, including connecting with mental health therapists to address abuse and accessing gender-affirming care. Still, the application process was difficult for them and other study participants. When continuous renewals ended, Kel had a difficult time reapplying. While the benefits were still active, Dyer struggled to find a provider who took Medicaid because their state’s provider information wasn’t up to date.

Since March 31, 2023, when the continuous enrollment provision ended, over 20 million people have been removed from the Medicaid rolls,¹⁵⁰ and 23 percent of those who were disenrolled lacked insurance.¹⁵¹ Automatic renewals prevented the churn that happens when enrollees are disenrolled and re-enrolled within a short time frame. Churn creates real challenges for people trying to access health care by disrupting their coverage; the continuous enrollment provision during the pandemic, an example of simplifying the enrollment process, helped prevent these disruptions.¹⁵² To address these issues, seven states have received or are seeking waivers to ensure continuous enrollment beyond current law.¹⁵³

Research shows that expanding Medicaid reduces uninsured rates, closes health inequity gaps, makes it easier to access care, improves health outcomes for historically underrepresented people and communities, and reduces poverty.¹⁵⁴ In 2024, single people with an approximate annual income of $20,780 and above and families of three with a yearly income of $35,630 and above are ineligible for coverage.¹⁵⁵

One lasting benefit of Medicaid expansions was the help provided to pregnant people. Fifty-three percent of pregnancy-related deaths occur within the first year postpartum. Gaps in postpartum health coverage, especially for Medicaid enrollees, often prevent people from accessing essential care during this critical period. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 introduced a provision allowing states to extend Medicaid postpartum coverage from 60 days to 12 months through a state plan amendment. Initially set for five years starting April 1, 2022, the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act made this extension permanent.¹⁵⁶

As of May 10, 2024, 46 states and Washington, DC, have adopted 12-month Medicaid postpartum coverage. Two additional states are in the process of implementing the extension, while Wisconsin offers limited coverage for up to 90 days. Another boost for families is the coverage of doula care under Medicaid. As of May 2024, 13 states and Washington, DC, provide Medicaid coverage for doula services, according to the National Health Law Program’s Doula Medicaid Project.

Both Medicaid expansions and doula care coverage have direct correlations to improved maternal and child health outcomes.¹⁵⁷

Eviction moratoriums were one of the most impactful initiatives instituted during the pandemic. The national eviction moratorium prevented more than 1.5 million evictions, while state and local protections stopped an additional 900,000 eviction filings.⁠¹⁵⁸ People lost their homes when the programs failed, allowing people to slip through the cracks. One participant, Kirarica Schields, and her three children were evicted three times between 2020 and 2023 despite active eviction moratoriums at the time. She was evicted for a fourth time in August 2024.

A report from the Urban Institute highlights the fact that financial assistance plays a crucial role in the success of eviction diversion efforts⁠.¹⁵⁹ Another participant, Chantel Valdez, relied on emergency rental assistance twice in late 2021 to cover her $720 monthly rent. Emergency rental assistance programs distributed $46 billion during the pandemic to keep more than 10 million renters housed.⁠¹⁶⁰ The majority of these programs have now shut down due to insufficient funding⁠,¹⁶¹ causing evictions to return to pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the country⁠.¹⁶² The link between rental assistance and eviction diversion is vital, and Philadelphia’s approach shows just how transformative it can be. By pairing the two, the city has shifted the dynamics in landlord-tenant negotiations. Simply put, the chance for landlords to recover back rent motivates them to participate in the diversion program. But most importantly, it helps keep tenants in their homes.

Study participant, widow, and home care aide Philipa Nwadike-Laster was able to keep her family in their home, even after she lost her job in the pandemic, through the mortgage forbearance program: Though she wasn’t able to pay her mortgage for 18 months, the program enabled her to tack those months on to the end of her 30-year mortgage. Now that she’s working again and trying to build up more income through several side jobs, Nwadike-Laster said the ability to provide a stable home for her two children, including a son diagnosed with autism, has been a lifesaver for the family.

Right-to-counsel programs, providing legal representation for those facing eviction, helped relatives of some study participants. Tenants with legal representation have a higher chance of remaining in their homes. In Kansas City, legislators used funds from the American Rescue Plan to establish a right-to-counsel ordinance. This move, driven by local advocacy groups, led to an 86 percent reduction in evictions. Given the program’s success, Kansas City is now using city funds to continue it. Currently, only 16 other major cities, one county, and four states have similar right-to-counsel laws.¹⁶³

These programs drastically decreased eviction rates and prevented many families from spiraling deeper into poverty.

A 2024 study published in Public Health Nutrition showed that the 15 percent boost in benefits issued during the pandemic led to decreased anxiety symptoms among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients and made it easier for them to cover other household expenses.¹⁶⁴ The boost in benefits, which came through emergency allotments, provided a buffer against poverty.¹⁶⁵ We saw this reflected in the stories our study participants shared as well.

When the emergency allotments ended, our participants felt the hit, and their stress levels rose. Blessing Aghayedo said she and her husband are working harder now to make up the difference in monthly income. Latoya Dyer has returned to figuring out how to feed a family of six on $200 a week, which is all she and her partner can afford. Though Ruaa Sabek still qualifies for SNAP, the amount no longer goes as far, particularly when the benefit was reduced just as inflation drove prices up.

All of the participants in our study worked incredibly hard. Many worked long hours or combined several jobs, gigs, and side hustles just to make ends meet. What they wanted more than anything were jobs that paid them a living wage and enabled them to pay their bills and support their families. In our conversations, all of our study participants, many of whom work in care professions, called for higher wages, better working conditions, benefits like paid leave and retirement plans, and equitable economic and tax policies that promote equity and opportunity. “Look at the economy we have right now. Everything increased in price except income,” said one. “That’s why I call it a maze. Why not first increase the income?”

Many didn’t understand why their wages were so low. Many didn’t realize that Congress hasn’t raised the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour since 2009—an amount that isn’t sufficient to pay the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in any U.S. city.¹⁶⁶ Many struggled with unpredictable schedules or shifts that made it difficult to find child care. “If we have a very good job. If we are well paid and able to pay our bills and able to take care of everything. If we are not struggling. We are not living paycheck to paycheck. That will be huge for us,” participant Blessing Aghayedo told us. “If our jobs paid us enough money, we wouldn’t need any help at all. If I earn good money, I’m not going to be looking for benefits. I’ll take care of my bills.”

In addition to calling for good jobs, the participants in our study said they needed a better system for when they lost jobs—more time and help to propel them to the next job, rather than trapping them, as one participant described it, in a never-ending cycle of struggle and poverty.

During the pandemic, federal lawmakers, for a time, expanded the amount of money out-of-work workers could receive. They expanded the number of weeks someone could claim unemployment insurance benefits. And they expanded the type of workers eligible for unemployment benefits. For the first time, pandemic-era reforms opened eligibility to the self-employed, independent contractors, freelancers, and gig workers—the type of nontraditional, precarious work that is becoming increasingly common.

As many as 46 million people received unemployment benefits in 2020, about one in every four workers. Without the payments, 4.7 million more people, including 1.4 million children, would have fallen into poverty, reported the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.¹⁶⁷ That data and the experiences of our study participants make clear that, for many families in the United States, the expanded unemployment insurance during the pandemic made an enormous difference in helping them survive.

Chantel Valdez, who lives in Utah, began receiving expanded unemployment benefits after losing her job that, when combined with the initial stimulus checks she received, actually improved her financial position. Unemployment benefits enabled study participant Ivonne Valadez Solano and her partner to stay home when they lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic in 2020 rather than seek work and risk contracting COVID-19 or bringing it home to their children.

But the benefit was short-lived. One participant, Kiarica Schields, who lives in Georgia, found her expanded unemployment insurance cut off just a few months after she lost her hospice nursing job at the start of the pandemic. She doesn’t understand why, nor why her appeal was rejected.

Although the reforms did help many families during the pandemic, the impact was muted because the programs have been chronically underfunded for years. The current program, first designed in 1935, is funded by the federal government but left to the states to run. That has led to wild variations for unemployed workers, which has led many advocates to push for federalizing the program and ensuring it operates more like the federal Social Security system. Unemployment insurance rules vary state-to-state, creating dramatically different benefit levels; technological modernization in some states but not others leads to vastly different user experiences and claims processing times. For example, before the pandemic, barely one-third of unemployed workers in the United States received unemployment insurance benefits. But the share varied dramatically by state. In New Jersey, nearly 60 percent of unemployed workers received benefits in 2019. In North Carolina, 9 percent did. And the replacement rate, too, varies by state: Washington State replaces 51 percent of a worker’s earnings. Louisiana replaces 36 percent.¹⁶⁸

Child care, or rather the lack of it, impacted our study participants in profound ways. Many are care workers themselves, and, though they love their work, can’t survive on the low wages.

One participant didn’t sleep for years as she juggled working a night shift and caring for her children during the day because the family couldn’t afford child care and didn’t qualify for a child care subsidy. Another, Mariam Dewi, a certified nursing assistant and mother of three, was daunted by the long waiting list for underfunded child care subsidies, so she never applied. She can only work because she has extended family nearby to help her. She coordinates her shift schedule with her mother so that both women and Dewi’s husband can manage work and child care. And for Schields, a single mother of four who was once able to provide a stable life for her family as a hospice nurse, losing child care during the pandemic sent her spiraling into poverty and instability. Without child care, Schields wasn’t able to work. Another participant quit two full-time jobs to care for her increasingly ailing mother. Though she’s now paid through Medicaid to be her mother’s full-time caregiver, she’s earning a fraction of what she earned before, and the family is struggling. While family caregiving benefits for the elderly and disabled through Medicaid are beneficial for all involved, there is still very little structural support or tax benefits for people who take time off paid work to care for young children.

The federal government did allocate funds to keep the child care system afloat during the pandemic, an effort that helped more than 200,000 child care facilities stay open, pay for cleaning supplies, and even pay living wages or give bonuses to staff for the first time. Study participant Tiffany Gale, who runs a child care facility in West Virginia, said the funds gave her and her staff just a brief glimpse of what a better functioning child care system could look like. When the funding ended in 2022, Gale found herself and her staff struggling once again, cutting activities, shrinking staff and salaries, and replacing healthy snacks of fresh fruit and vegetables with cheaper, less nutritious packaged food.

The United States is the only wealthy democracy without a national guarantee of paid family and medical leave and currently invests among the least in early care and education¹⁶⁹ and in home and community-based care for the disabled, ill, and elderly who rely on it.¹⁷⁰ The need will become even more pressing as Americans age; home care workers are projected to be the largest professional group in the economy in the 2030s.

The pandemic showed clearly that the current underfunded, patchwork child care system in the United States doesn’t work for many families, particularly those living on low or precarious incomes. Yet more research is showing that stable, accessible, affordable, high-quality child care, starting with paid family and medical leave for infants through early care and education, after care, summer care, and home and community-based care, have long-lasting and far-reaching benefits.¹⁷¹

Some research has found that increased investment in care infrastructure will ultimately pay for itself. Stable child care enables parents, particularly single parents, to work rather than be forced out of a job or into precarious gig work. Research on Quebec’s universal child care program, where parents pay less than $10 a day, found that the investment more than paid for itself.¹⁷² When child care enabled parents to stay employed, not only did family economic security and well-being improve, but their income supported local businesses and helped increase the local tax base.

The families in our studies’ experiences highlight the importance of direct cash assistance in helping families reach a stable financial baseline. Rather than tying families up in a tangle of bureaucracy or complicated spending rules, direct cash assistance, like the three stimulus payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), and some experiments using federal funds to start guaranteed basic income programs, gives families the power to decide how best to use the cash to meet their needs or improve their circumstances.

Participants said that, unlike other government programs that are restrictive and designed with preventing fraud in mind, the cash they received gave them the power to decide how best to use it. For instance, SNAP for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) only allows families to buy certain brands. And SNAP will only cover food, not diapers or other necessities. Our study and other research show that parents used the CTC to pay bills like rent, food, and child-related expenses; pay down debt; and begin to save or cover big expenses, like car repairs, that could have disrupted their economic stability.

The expanded CTC, a policy that just about every other high-income country already had in place prior to the pandemic, was one of the most powerful pandemic-era policies that lifted nearly three million children in the United States out of poverty, reduced food insecurity, and improved family economic security and well-being, as well as family mental and emotional health. Instead of coming once a year when families file their taxes, families received monthly payments deposited directly into their bank accounts. And the payments were available for the first time to families who earn so little that they don’t typically receive tax refunds.

Some participants, like Mariam Dewi, said the direct cash payments increased their trust in government institutions and their belief that their government could work to make their lives better. “People were going through a lot,” she said. “It was just so beautiful.”

Philipa Nwadike-Laster used the money she received through the CTC to enroll her daughter in music and dance classes she could not otherwise have afforded.

Some states and municipalities, seeing how well direct cash assistance helped struggling families, chose to continue some pandemic-era policies. The City of Alexandria, Virginia, for example, voted to continue a guaranteed basic income program that was started using federal pandemic funds. The $500 monthly payment is what Vilma Cabrera, a family caregiver, uses to pay the rent and keep her family housed. “It’s changed my life,” she told us.

Guaranteed income initiatives take a more targeted and equitable approach by providing cash payments to those living in poverty or without a reliable income.⁠¹⁷³ A guaranteed income policy provides every community member whose income falls below a certain threshold with an unconditional payment, ensuring their income is raised above the income floor in their area. This approach can prevent people from falling deeper into poverty, promote financial stability, and support overall well-being by giving people the means to meet their basic needs. Researchers from Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that a $250 per month payment would drop poverty by 40 percent⁠.¹⁷⁴

When the cash payments ended, study participant families told us they again struggled. Once the Child Tax Credit expired, the total poverty rate increased, and the child poverty rate nearly doubled.¹⁷⁵

During the pandemic, several efforts were made to implement leading practices for service design and digital service delivery, including simplified forms, streamlined processes, and data sharing across silos to determine eligibility. The families who participated in our study spoke enthusiastically about how much easier it became to apply for some of the benefits they needed to meet a minimum standard of living. Many felt a greater peace of mind and less stress at keeping their health care, for instance, through the simplified Medicaid continuous enrollment, rather than going through the annual recertification process that is often overly complicated. One found the application for a guaranteed basic income pilot so easy she forgot she’d applied.

Some of those streamlining changes, long in the works, are sticking: More child care programs, for example, are using enrollment rather than attendance to designate subsidies. That move no longer penalizes families earning low wages who may not be able to get their child to a child care facility if they have an illness, transportation issues, or a job loss. Many participants described the process of seeking benefits as so complicated they often felt punitive, as if it were designed to dissuade people from applying for benefits in the first place.¹⁷⁶ Some study participants said applying for benefits was so complicated it wasn’t worth trying. Others were angry that the process itself was part of the problem.

Other participants felt their low-wage jobs came without benefits to help their families survive, so they needed public assistance. But if they received more training or education to get better jobs, they’d risk losing those life-sustaining benefits and drop off the so-called “benefits cliff.” They felt trapped.

Study participants like Schields and Kel spoke about narrowing their job searches or setting their sights low. They worried that if they found jobs that paid over a certain amount, they’d lose their benefits, but the new job wouldn’t pay enough to cover their bills, leaving them worse off than before.

It’s a situation that people like Glynnis Johnson find themselves in. Like others considered Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE), Johnson and her husband worked full time and qualified for no benefits, even though they were barely scraping by, supporting themselves and their teenage son. Because the pandemic aid gave local jurisdictions more flexibility than usual to respond to community needs, Johnson was chosen by lottery to participate in her city’s $500 a month guaranteed basic income pilot, which, once Johnson’s cancer treatments left her no longer able to work, has meant the family can continue to eat and pay their rent. “It’s like I have to be homeless, then they’ll give me everything,” Johnson said. “But why let it get to that point?”

Social and economic barriers in the United States are rooted in historical, ongoing, systemic barriers by race, gender, ability, and other factors. Several study participants explained either explicit instances of discrimination to us or instances where internalized systemic ills were affecting their mental or emotional well-being. Study participant Ivonne Valadez Solano switched jobs just before the pandemic due to racism. When she reported a white store manager for making racist comments about a Black leader at the district level, the report was ignored, and the working environment became increasingly hostile.

Study participant Kiarica Schields worried that her hair not being done was causing employers not to offer her employment—a common concern for Black women in the U.S. workforce.¹⁷⁷ Schields also expressed concern that people judged her for wearing long, acrylic nails, a gift from a friend, while she was out of work. Both instances are familiar to Black women, who are 83 percent more likely to report being discriminated against because of the way they look compared to women of other racial or ethnic backgrounds.¹⁷⁸

Historical divisions set the stage for how differently COVID-19 and the pandemic aid impacted Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents of Blanding, Utah, where participant Chantel Valdez lives with her family. During the first two years of the Public Health Emergency, what Valdez experienced interpersonally mirrored national trends—particularly regarding masking. “I remember my grandma was in the hospital dying, and I was arguing with someone online about masks, about whether they were worthwhile,” she said. “And I started crying because it was like they just did not care.” Studies have shown that white Americans became less vigilant about following safety protocols during the pandemic once it became publicized that people of color were dying disproportionately from complications of the virus.¹⁷⁹ These behaviors and assumptions based on race and other identities have bled over into policy for centuries. Addressing racism, discrimination, and other forms of bias—including, but not limited to, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, linguistic racism, and misogynoir—in the United States requires a multifaceted approach that tackles these constructs as root causes for the inequities seen in our society. By implementing evidence-based policies, investing in community-driven initiatives, and centering people and communities whose voices are underrepresented, meaningful progress can be made toward building a society where everyone can thrive.

Participants’ experiences also show the need for policymakers to follow a race-conscious framework when shaping policies and programs aimed at helping underserved communities.¹⁸⁰ Researchers Shekinah A. Fashaw-Walters and Cydney M. McGuire, who work in health equity, break down the process as such:

1. Analyze existing inequities;
2. Review policies related to these inequities to determine whether they worsen or reduce the disparities identified;
3. Break down policy mechanisms and outcomes to understand how each policy operates and the consequences it produces;
4. Highlight the impact of racism, or another form of discrimination, to explore its influence on the inequities observed and how it operates through the identified policy mechanisms to create these disparities; and
5. Develop new policies that address racism or other forms of discrimination and incorporate strategies for effective implementation.¹⁸¹

Taking a conscious approach to policymaking rather than a neutral one will promote much-needed justice for those long harmed by systemic ills in the United States. Neutral policy doesn’t account for historical or systemic racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination and supposes that everyone is equal under the law. Centuries of quantitative and qualitative research have shown that that is a lie. Our research and the recommendations born from it face that fact head-on because it is the first of many steps toward creating a better life for all. Policymakers should do the same.

In her 2005 article, “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth,” education scholar Tara J. Yosso identified six types of cultural wealth that marginalized students possess. One is linguistic capital, which refers to skills developed through communication in multiple languages, cultural styles, and dialects,¹⁸² as well as someone’s ability to express themselves using them. Yosso directly challenges the presumption that Standard American English (SAE), mass media, and U.S. popular culture tend to promote, which is that there is a singular “proper” way of speaking or writing. Instead, Yosso uplifts multilingualism and code-switching, expressiveness, and the literary and communication skills involved in translation as a form of social capital that allows those with these skills to move through various scenarios.

Linguistic diversity is not an obstacle to overcome. (It’s worth noting that such thinking promotes assimilation.) In educational settings and the workplace, recognizing linguistic capital encourages a shift from viewing language diversity—which includes accents or speaking in “broken English”—as a challenge to seeing it as an asset that enriches collective knowledge and broadens perspectives. Taking a collective point of view provides decision-makers with new tools and insights to better understand what communities need.¹⁸³ This, in turn, shifts institutional and social perspectives toward inclusivity and equity.¹⁸⁴ It can also lead to more inclusive and empathetic societies.¹⁸⁵ Policies crafted with this awareness foster a more accessible and representative framework since multiple ways of knowing and communicating are validated.

In our writing and editing process, we observed how language impacts the stories our collaborators shared. Sometimes, the linguistic nuances were subtle—for example, one collaborator wished her daughter “to relax that her brother’s in a good place,” illustrating her hope for her child’s peace of mind. Other times, it was more direct, like a collaborator’s assurance that understanding SAE isn’t what stopped her from applying for WIC alone. Valadez Solano explained that prejudice in the working environment is why she left a second customer service job in late 2023. She remembers hearing one coworker ask another why she didn’t speak English. Valadez Solano cracked a joke—it was because they all lived in Los Ángeles, a city bearing a Spanish name—but the comment still stuck with her. It’s an example of the racist and xenophobic undertones that dominate common narratives about people living in the United States with limited English fluency.

Preserving language choices gave us a window into their experiences that would have been lost if edited into SAE. It also would have stripped away their authenticity, undermining our project’s goal of subverting stereotypes about those who live in poverty. To honor the integrity and verismo of each narrator, we refrained from altering their dialects or expressions to fit within privileged language norms. As we state in our New Key Narratives and introduction to facilitated storytelling, we allowed narrators to use their own words, recognizing that while their language may not always fit into SAE, it is genuine and deeply connected to their experiences.

Their voices deserve respect. And to be heard.

By Haley Swenson

The COVID-19 Shutdown Reaches Navajo Country

In March 2020, Chantel Valdez and her two children, then six and eight years old, along with her Uncle George, were on their way home from a spring break trip to Magna, Utah, to see family. It was a nearly six-hour drive back home to Blanding, Utah, the largest town in the state’s rural San Juan County, near Four Corners (where the borders of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona meet).¹⁸⁷ On the drive home, Valdez decided to stop off for groceries before they entered Blanding’s city limits. They’d been away from home a week and would need to restock their refrigerator for the coming school week.

There is a grocery store in Blanding—just one. But, as anyone on a tight budget like Valdez would have noticed, it was a “resort town” grocery store. Its other locations were in places popular with well-heeled vacationers like Aspen and Sedona. Though Blanding sees its share of tourists—it has dubbed itself “the base camp for adventure”¹⁸⁸ due to its relatively close proximity to natural destinations like Moab, Glen Canyon, and Canyonlands National Park—economic opportunity is scarce outside a few retail stores (Valdez can list them all), a mining operation, and government.¹⁸⁹

Blanding, Utah, is home to just over 3,000 residents, about 20 percent of whom live in poverty. That’s more than twice the poverty rate of the rest of the state (8.1 percent).¹⁹⁰ The median household income is just $61,833, compared with $89,168 in the state as a whole. And Valdez’s family relied on her income alone to make ends meet. The prices at Blanding’s market were so much higher they just couldn’t compete with what Valdez could pick up on the road on her way back to town.

“Have you heard about this coronavirus?” her Uncle George had asked before they’d left for their trip. He’d always been one to follow the news. “Let’s bring plenty of groceries home with us. People are acting crazy. They are stockpiling toilet paper,” he warned as they drove home that day.

Valdez hadn’t given much thought to the virus at the time. She wouldn’t give it much thought until that Sunday, when she stopped off for groceries en route home and discovered multiple stores had been wiped out of their entire supplies of meat, in addition to other important household items. It took several stops to find what they needed. As George drove the car through the town of Price, Utah, Valdez saw something weird as she scrolled through Facebook on her phone. The governor was closing the schools. She texted her supervisor, who told her he did not know much more than she did but that she should still come into work the next day.

Valdez was the grant coordinator for the after-school programs at five elementary schools in the area, including at her children’s school in Blanding and schools on the nearby Navajo and Ute reservations. What was going to happen with the schools? What was she supposed to tell her staff? Was it safe for them to be around each other, around the children? The supervisor didn’t know any more than she did, but answers soon came.

The kids would attend school online from home—a two-bedroom, publicly subsidized, low-income apartment Chantel and the kids shared with their dog, Tank. For employees, the school district instituted a sort of hybrid model at Blanding Elementary, with some staff continuing to report to their school buildings to perform essential services, like program planning and packaging school lunches that parents would pick up for their kids each day.

Within two weeks of the schools closing, the after-school programs were suspended. Valdez and her team were laid off for the rest of the school year. Her supervisor advised them to apply for unemployment, which they did.

When asked what they remember about those early days, the kids, having been much younger at the time, are less sure. “I was being homeschooled when it started,” says Zoey, now age 11. “No,” her mom corrects her, “the homeschooling started because of the pandemic.”

“It was like a zombie apocalypse!” offers Jaxxon, now age nine.

“I wish it would have been a zombie apocalypse!” said Zoe. “I would be prepared. I have a zombie kit ready to go.” She isn’t joking, said Valdez. Since COVID, she likes to plan for worst-case scenarios.

“It felt like the world was ending,” added Jaxxon.

“When we saw footage of the bigger cities closed down,” Valdez clarified, “it looked like a horror movie.”

In Blanding, however, things seemed less apocalyptic. Because Valdez’s kids had already qualified for reduced-price school lunches due to her low income, they immediately also qualified for P-EBT, or Pandemic-Electronic Benefit Transfer. This meant the family had an extra $7.10 per child per day to spend on groceries since they were no longer eating lunch at school.¹⁹¹

That same month, March of 2020, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which approved the creation of Economic Impact Payments, or stimulus checks of $1,200 for every adult and up to $500 for every child under 17¹⁹² for households with adjusted gross incomes of up to $75,000 for individuals and up to $150,000 for married couples. Since Valdez qualified for unemployment benefits, she also qualified for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to cover food costs, and the whole family qualified for Medicaid health insurance coverage.

As reports of local COVID-19 cases and the first deaths in Utah rolled in, the entire extended family quickly adopted a series of protocols to keep them safe. Uncle George began making supply runs to stores in Cortes, Colorado, about an hour from Blanding, where grocery costs were cheaper. He bought groceries and household items for both his household and Valdez’s and began masking every time he left the house.

Before the pandemic, if the kids had school and Valdez had to work, she took the kids over to “the grandmas’ house”—a house in Blanding where Valdez’s mother Esther, her mother’s brother George, and the two aging aunts who raised her mother and George and whom Valdez had always called Grandma Mary and Grandma Marie, all lived together. These were Valdez’s Navajo family. She’s Mexican on her father’s side and Navajo on her mother’s side, though she only has a relationship with her mother’s family. This family includes cousins who live on the nearby Navajo reservation. This extended family network was a lifesaver to a single mom long before the pandemic.

Grandma Mary suffered from kidney disease and was on dialysis, and George was her main caregiver, as well as a major source of child care help for Valdez. In the early days of the pandemic, George continued to leave the house for work and then came to Valdez’s house to look after the kids while she was assigned to the school building. The kids at least had basic supervision while she was at work, although school was a struggle for them. Online schooling came with a mountain of homework, and neither George nor Valdez was able to help them with it.

Blanding’s local economy was dependent on passing tourists, but with the pandemic, everything was shut down, and tourists were scant. So the family made a point of supporting their favorite local businesses when they could. The local steakhouse, one of just two sit-down restaurants in town, started selling takeout boxes. The local movie theater sold popcorn and snacks for families to take home for their own movie nights. Valdez and her kids made stops around town to support these businesses and their friends and neighbors who ran them.

“In a way, the first few weeks were kind of fun. We had P-EBT, and the stimulus checks helped, so we weren’t worried about money. We tried to make the most of it, even though everything was so weird. But it felt like everyone was in it together,” said Valdez.

Two Different Worlds in One Town

They’d been so careful. For weeks, only George had come and gone from the house, to his job at the local youth detention center, where he sat almost exclusively by himself, and always masked, in the center’s control room. Still, in May, Grandma Mary contracted COVID-19. The only outing her grandma made was to the dialysis center in town, and that’s where they assumed she must’ve been exposed to the virus.

Grandma Mary was one of about 500,000 people in the United States experiencing kidney failure who typically have to go to a dialysis center three times a week for four-hour treatments to stay alive.¹⁹³ There, wearing a mask, she would be seated next to others receiving treatments, who may not be socially distancing or taking other precautions. As in much of Blanding outside the Native community, said Valdez, people did not take the threat as seriously, rarely masking, and, as she heard some boasting, even going out in public after testing positive for COVID.

Grandma Mary tested positive for COVID-19 in early May when she had an elevated temperature during a vitals check at the dialysis center. She was immediately taken to an isolation room at the emergency room located in the same building. Later that same morning, she was moved to University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City. At the time of that transport, Valdez says the only symptom Mary had was a fever.

It soon felt to Valdez that she was living in a different world from the white population. Even years later, she uses a hushed voice as she describes the local tensions emerging over COVID precautions. “I remember my grandma was in the hospital dying, and I was arguing with someone online about masks, about whether they were worthwhile. And I started crying because it was like they just did not care,” she said.

Even prior to the pandemic, the lines between Native and non-Native people in the area were stark. In 2016, President Obama announced the creation of the Bears Ears National Monument, putting 1.34 million acres of desert land—including land sacred to the surrounding tribes and dense with ancient artifacts and fossils still used for grazing and hunting—under federal protection from artifact looting and exploitation of its natural resources.¹⁹⁴

Valdez and her uncle had become activists opposed to the creation of the monument because it would turn what was both sacred and functional land to the Native people into a tourist destination and put it under federal, rather than local control.

That fight, as well as a battle over gerrymandering that led the federal government to intervene against an all-white county commission that had drawn political lines to minimize the impact of Native voters, have drawn national attention to the area.¹⁹⁵ The San Juan County Commission pledged to fight the Bears Ears National Monument, arguing that the local population could be better stewards of the land than faraway DC bureaucrats, and it devoted millions of dollars to its legal battle against the designation in federal court.¹⁹⁶

Across the United States, Native American or American Indian communities were hit much harder by COVID-19 than the white population.¹⁹⁷ In 2020, just less than 1 percent of Utah’s population was American Indian, and yet this group accounted for 3 percent of deaths from COVID in that first year of the pandemic. The case/death rate from COVID was nearly three times as high for American Indians as for the population as a whole, with just six deaths per 1,000 cases of COVID for the state as a whole, but almost 16 deaths per 1,000 cases among American Indians.¹⁹⁸

Native communities responded by instituting strict masking, handwashing, and social distancing protocols, which did lessen these disparities as the pandemic went on.¹⁹⁹

The lack of formal health infrastructure throughout Navajo Nation was a likely cause of higher mortality rates from infection among Native people.²⁰⁰ Lack of access to ambulances, hospitals, and even testing sites made it take longer for infected patients to seek help. Long-term scarcity of health infrastructure also left many Native people with chronic health conditions known to make COVID more deadly. Even before the pandemic, the Native community in San Juan County had agitated for faster access to emergency medical services—like an ambulance to be stationed on the reservation²⁰¹—and had been left to fend for itself, despite a legal obligation for the federal government to provide health services.²⁰²

“As for the local government and the town, I don’t want to call it racism,” said Valdez, “but discrimination. There’s so much discrimination. I remember when Zoe started school, she came home to me and said, ‘Mom, why can’t I play with the Navajos?’ And I said, ‘What? Baby, you are Navajo!’ And she said, ‘Then why did the girls in my class say we don’t play with Navajos?’”

The unequal toll COVID took on the Native and white communities only emphasized these lines in the sand further. “I couldn’t believe just how bad it was on the reservation compared to in town,” said Valdez. “I heard Navajos asking, like, ‘Are we being targeted?’ Almost conspiracy theories. ‘We heard crop dusters flying low over the reservations at night. Are they spreading something?’ That’s how low the trust was. How did we get hit so bad, and for some people in the same town it was like it never happened?”

How COVID Wrecked a Family’s Support System

In the hospital, nurses and doctors themselves were fearful of contracting this still new and little-understood virus, so no one was allowed to visit patients. Nurses monitored Mary mostly from afar, even skipping her initial dialysis treatments for fear she might pass the virus to them. According to the National Kidney Foundation, COVID-19 caused the first drop in dialysis treatments in 50 years due to shortages in staff and supplies.²⁰³ Still, Chantel says Grandma Mary seemed to be doing well at the hospital, where they were able to text her and talk on the phone with her.

Two weeks after Grandma Mary went to the hospital, Uncle George tested positive for COVID-19. He immediately began isolating within the grandmas’ house, eager to stop the spread.

On May 24, 2020, Valdez received the news that her grandma Mary had died. Ultimately, the family suspects she died not from COVID-19 but from a lack of dialysis treatments due to fears of COVID-19. The pandemic had taken the first member of Valdez’s family.

Then came the news that one of Valdez’s aunts on the reservation had died of COVID. They weren’t particularly close—Valdez had just gotten to know this particular side of her mom’s family in the last couple of years. But suddenly, it seemed like COVID was tearing her family apart.

After work, Valdez left her kids at home and brought food for her mom, her aunt, and George, who was still isolated in the basement. Each night, she left a plate at George’s bedroom door. She’d ask how he was doing and what he needed. She couldn’t believe how sick he sounded. And then, one day, she arrived with food to discover the last meal she’d brought was still sitting beside the door. He hadn’t retrieved the tray for yesterday’s meal. Panicked, she knocked and yelled for George. He answered back softly that he hadn’t had the energy to eat.

“George, we have to get you to the hospital,” she told him through the door. She heard him struggle to get himself out of bed. He said he wanted to shower before going to the hospital. She waited outside the room, feeling tortured. George needed help, and she couldn’t provide it. The last thing either of them wanted was for the illness to spread further within the family.

“George,” she said, “I’m going to wait outside. If you can’t get outside in the next 10 minutes, I’m calling an ambulance.”

She waited outside, feeling each minute tick by so slowly it felt like an hour. She held her cell phone close, watching the clock and standing ready to dial 911. Finally, the backdoor opened, and her uncle made his way out of the house. She’d never seen him look so sick, so weak. He walked toward his truck. She wanted to hug him. It felt so wrong not to hug him and help him to his truck.

“I’m going to follow you to make sure you get there safely,” she said. She got in her car and followed him as he drove to the hospital. She watched from her car as a paramedic took George’s vitals in his car, then brought a wheelchair out and moved him into the hospital. It was the last time she would see him.

That night, concerned about George’s oxygen levels, the hospital in Blanding flew him to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colorado. She texted him and called him a few times over the coming days to see how he was. She could think of little else. At home, her kids, who had just lost Grandma Mary, were worried sick over George, whom they called “Papa.” They were incredibly anxious as they waded through their work and homework each day. George was a father figure to Valdez and the only grandfather-figure her kids had ever known. She tried to reassure them. And though he was nearby, a short drive away in a tiny town, they couldn’t go near him, visit him, or hug him.

Both kids started becoming fearful. They’d gone from being active, confident, outgoing kids to being afraid of almost everything, from unexpected noises to unexpected phone calls. They started sleeping with Valdez in her bed.

Ordinarily, it was George who would handle the funeral arrangements for a family member, but he was in the hospital, and his condition was not improving. Valdez and her Aunt Judy, Mary’s daughter who lives in Salt Lake, took over planning for Grandma Mary’s burial.

The last time Chantel and the kids would speak to George was a phone call the night before Grandma Mary’s funeral. The next morning she got a call from the hospital. George’s oxygen levels had gotten so low he had been put into a coma, then intubated and put on a ventilator. He would remain unconscious for the duration of his intubation..

He passed away on June 27, 2020. Valdez worked with San Juan Mortuary to drive to Grand Junction and transport George’s body back to Blanding. When the mortician, Danny Palmer, arrived to collect the body, he was horrified to find that the company tasked with preserving the body until it was picked up had not done anything to begin the embalming process. Even worse, it had not even removed the ports and tubes the hospital had used to intubate him, something Palmer had never seen.

“There were fluids and smells,” Valdez said. “They were afraid to embalm him because of COVID. I guess there was a lot of fear then still.” Palmer, however, felt that this did not do George and his family justice, and he agreed to embalm him as quickly as possible. “He said, ‘I don’t care what he died from, he’s still a person, and he deserves better than this.’’’

Palmer and his wife Amanda, who helps run San Juan Mortuary, remember the case well even four years later. They were shocked and angry to see George treated this way. “It was dehumanizing, and Chantel’s family had already been through so much,” said Amanda Palmer. Danny Palmer said the mortician in Colorado had been fearful of COVID and didn’t want to handle the body. But he suspects George’s body had also been low on the company’s priority list since it wasn’t connected to a funeral they would perform. He said he’s seen too much greed from large funeral corporations like the one that handled George’s body in Colorado and not enough humanity.

Valdez remembers the Palmers’ kindness years later. But the problem of paying for their services still remained. Having just paid for their grandma’s funeral and with little in savings left, she knew it was time to ask for help. Valdez’s mom and the rest of the family were reluctant to ask for charity, but what was the alternative? Valdez felt confident that George would have wanted them to lean on their community to get it done.

So Valdez wrote a Facebook post announcing her uncle’s death. He was well loved in the community and known by many for his cooking. George and the rest of the family ran a food stand selling Navajo tacos all around town and at tourist destinations in the nearby area. “Everyone knew George,” said Valdez.

Payments came pouring in over Venmo from both Native and non-Native acquaintances. Within a day, they’d raised $5,300, enough to give George the burial he deserved.

“That’s the thing about living here, and why I say I couldn’t see living anywhere else, despite everything. People know us and our family—and we help each other when someone needs it. It isn’t perfect, but it is our home. I was so touched by how many people gave. It took a day. And most of them don’t have a lot to give, so it meant a lot,” said Valdez.

She managed to give her uncle a traditional Navajo burial, which she thinks he would have liked. “We put him in fresh, new clothes. Our tradition is we get them new jewelry—I got him a watch and a ring. And then before you bury them, you have to break the jewelry and the watch. We did all that.” They buried George beside Mary.

The family couldn’t gather in the way it normally would have to send someone off. A traditional big family dinner to remember George and Grandma Mary would have to wait until it was safe to gather again. A headstone to mark George and Mary’s graves was not in the budget, so for now, their graves are unmarked. Valdez has begun making payments for a memorial bench that will eventually mark both graves.

From “So Much” to “Nothing Left”

The summer of 2020, the family was wrecked by grief after George’s death. Jaxxon’s anxiety was almost unbearable. Valdez consulted a Navajo medicine man who recommended a Native tea to be ingested each night to treat the anxiety. “My aunt was so low and so anxious. But she said Jaxxon brought her back. He’d remind her, ‘Hey, we get to have our tea tonight, and it’s gonna make us feel better,’ and say, ‘It’s going to be okay,’ and just hold her hand.”

“He’s always been like that. He just lifts your spirits,” said Valdez. “I don’t think she would have made it through if it weren’t for him. But he was so young, and it’s so much to ask of a little kid. It takes a toll.” She said, “He had been so outgoing before the pandemic. Zoe too. Then there was no dance class. No friends. And then we lost our support system.” She continued, “We were really afraid and wanted to be cautious. And this was still before the vaccines. I didn’t know what would happen if we got sick.”

In the fall of 2020, Blanding Elementary was the only one of the schools Chantel worked in to re-open. She rejoined the after-school team at her previous $22 per hour, full-time and benefitted rate. Blanding Elementary also happened to be the school Jaxxon and Zoe attended. But fear of experiencing further loss from a still-mysterious illness, one which few people in town seemed to take seriously, caused Valdez to keep the kids in virtual learning for the year. They began alternating weeks spent at Aunt Judy’s in Salt Lake and visits to the grandmas’ while their mom worked. The schools on the Navajo and Ute reservations remained closed.

The devastation the pandemic wrought on the Navajo population was acute, not just due to the increased rates of infection and deaths from COVID but also its impact on families’ finances. Navajo Nation issued two rounds of stimulus checks to enrolled tribal members, amounting to a few thousand dollars. The first, in 2021, was funded through the CARES Act, and the second, which came in 2022, was funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, which was passed by Congress in 2021.²⁰⁴ To qualify for the checks, Navajo people must have CIB status, a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. Valdez and her children received these checks, though she faced unexpectedly long delays in receiving Zoe’s checks for reasons she still doesn’t understand.

In her first months without unemployment insurance, Valdez was not sure how she would pay her rent. Her landlady told her there might still be rental assistance available in the state of Utah and gave her the phone number of someone to call at the state’s housing assistance. She called just in time. They were nearly out of funds and close to closing down the assistance process, but they took Valdez’s application and paid her $700 per month rent for two months.

The 2020–21 school year was the final year of the grant that funded Valdez’s after-school programming. She would have to start her job search anew. The principal in Blanding asked if she might want to teach computers at the school, a paraeducator role available to someone without a teaching license. The job would also be part time but would involve managing her own classroom each school day. In the course of a week, every class in the school would stop by her computer classroom and receive an hour of instruction while their regular teachers were given a chance to prepare their next lessons. Though she was intimidated by the idea of teaching a full classroom of students multiple times a day, she jumped at the opportunity. For the fall of the 2021 school year, Valdez earned just $14 per hour in this role.

Then Valdez heard about the opportunity to lead a new after-school program. The American Rescue Plan Act provided funding for after-school programming throughout the country, with the intention of helping students who’d fallen behind with remote schooling to catch up.²⁰⁵ The youth development organization 4-H²⁰⁶ applied for funding to conduct programming throughout the state through its affiliation with land grant institution Utah State University.²⁰⁷ She applied for a role coordinating the grant in Blanding and quickly got an interview.

“Tell us what you know about 4-H,” said her interviewer. The truth was Valdez knew very little, she admitted. But she had experience running after-school programs that would function similarly, and that was important to her interviewers. They were happy to introduce her to 4-H. “I learned so much about the program’s goals just in that interview,” she said. She was hired, but the role paid much less than her position as the grant coordinator for all the schools in the district, $14 per hour instead of $22, and it was part time. The new grant covered just one school, Blanding Elementary, so her role would be more limited than her pre-pandemic job, yet having two part-time jobs meant she was now busier than ever.

“There are so many kids who are so far behind because of the pandemic. One of the most important things we offer in this program is homework help,” said Valdez. The job began in January 2022 and would run through the summer of 2024, when ARPA funding for it would end. Then the search for a new grant, or a new job, would begin again.

Healing Without Support

Jaxxon still struggles with being separated from his mom, facing new environments, and with change in general. He wants to stay in Blanding, where he feels more confident that nothing bad can happen to him or his family. At times, he still climbs in bed with his mom. “If I’m not in my bed in the morning,” said Valdez, “he assumes something really bad has happened.”

He started seeing a counselor in the school system to help him cope with his anxiety and fears, which he and Valdez think have helped him immensely.

Zoe has also tried therapy, though there are few options in their small, rural town. The therapist she tried first, when she returned to school in person, wanted to see her during school hours when Valdez was working and unable to get away for appointments. Beyond that, Valdez felt the therapist was strangely suspicious of her and her parenting and not great at listening to Zoe. Finding a good fit has been a challenge. The biggest change Valdez has noticed is that Zoe has become painfully shy, feeling great anxiety over basic social interactions. She wasn’t like that before the pandemic.

“I think they’re still grappling with the fact that they could lose everything just like that,” she said.

She, too, has been affected by the toll of their COVID losses. In early 2024, she realized she was depressed. She felt like she was getting through her days in a cloud. Her bedroom was a disorganized mess. She was losing patience with her kids over small things. She knew she wasn’t herself and hadn’t been, really, since she lost George.

She went to the local health clinic and got a prescription for an antidepressant.

She noticed changes within just a couple of weeks. She sat down on her bed one day and looked around at the mess. Then she started picking up. She folded clothes and threw away trash. She put things where they belonged. Soon, her room was clean—just like that. “Why did that seem so impossible before?” she wondered.

At work, she sat down at her desk in the computer classroom and started to tidy that too. A colleague came in and noted the change. “You’ve got more energy! Your face even looks different. Happier,” the coworker said.

In March 2024, nearly four years to the day the COVID-19 pandemic started to change their lives forever, the family debated what to do with their Saturday. It was March and still cold out, so many tourist destinations nearby were still closed for the season. And their family budget was as tight as ever.

“We could go to the skate park,” suggested Zoe.

“Only you like to skate,” said Valdez. “We could go bowling?”

Jaxxon lit up immediately. “Please,” he said, “I haven’t been in, like, two or three weeks!” Bowling it was.

Blanding’s only bowling alley is nestled inside a combination gas station, convenience store, and A&W fast food restaurant. The kids bowled while Valdez watched. She’d woken up with a toothache and couldn’t move around much without it hurting even more.

“I went to the dentist last week. They told me I need a root canal and that it would cost me $400 out of pocket. I was like, shouldn’t the UNHS [United Navajo Health System] cover this? When I had Medicaid, it was nice. I could just get everything taken care of. Now I’m not sure what to do.”

“We went from having so much help to having nothing.” She worried about how she’d pay the bills. They also no longer qualified for SNAP benefits. “We can’t buy good food to make real meals anymore. We’re back to dinner out of a box.”

This has left Valdez feeling abandoned by the government, whose help she could use more than ever since losing her support network, her family’s safety net. “Before the pandemic, [people in Congress] used to say they didn’t have the money to do more. Then the pandemic happened and they somehow found it. Now they say they don’t have the money anymore. Why can they find the money when they want to? It doesn’t make sense to me,” said Valdez.

Valdez is aware of the usual arguments against government spending to aid families. “And I know there are people who abuse the system,” she said, mentioning relatives on the reservation who pay no rent, subsist on SNAP benefits for food, and live on a combination of federal and Tribal welfare benefits. This kind of living frustrated her since she was working full time, paying rent, barely getting by, and no longer receiving any kind of government assistance at all. It was important to her that she live off the reservation so she might be able to own her own house and land someday. But now she earned too much to receive assistance and too little to save to buy a home. “There have to be better ways to support families in a more gradual way, maybe with reduced benefits as their income goes up. But it can’t be all or nothing,” she said.

The only remaining benefit they received as of the spring of 2024 is Medicaid for the kids. But that, too, would be going away soon. The March 2020 Families First Coronavirus Response Act declared a public health emergency and required that states provide continuous coverage to those who applied. Because Valdez qualified for unemployment insurance, she and her kids qualified. But over the last two years, states have been unwinding that coverage. Because she works two part-time jobs for two different employers—Blanding School District as a paraeducator and Utah State University as site coordinator—she doesn’t qualify for health insurance under either. Utah has done worse than other states at retaining coverage for children since the unwinding of pandemic-era benefits began, largely due to what one advocate called “state-induced red tape.” Valdez is hopeful they’ll qualify for CHIP, the federally funded Children’s Health Insurance Program, that covers children in families with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid.²⁰⁸

Earlier in the school year, Valdez’s boss announced that researchers from the University of Utah would be coming in to observe her and other paraeducators in their classrooms. Valdez, who’d received almost no training and had been left to figure out how to manage a classroom herself, was immediately terrified. She was assured this was just an observation and there would be no negative consequences associated with it, no matter the outcome.

On the day of the observations, she did her best, and she was relieved when all her classroom management techniques and her computer lessons went smoothly as a team of professors and graduate students watched and took notes. At the end of the day, one of the observers approached her. “That was great,” he said. “Where did you get your teaching degree?”

“Oh, I only have an associate’s degree,” Valdez explained. “I don’t have a teaching degree.”

“Well,” said the man, “Would you like to get one? You’re a natural.”

She was flattered. The whole experience gave her more confidence. Now she sometimes thinks about going back to school and getting a bachelor’s degree so that she could teach full time. “I love working with kids. I used to think I wouldn’t. I didn’t love kids other than my own. But I really do love it.”

“But for now,” she said, “with these two?” She gestured to Zoe and Jaxxon, who were showing off a fun technique they’d honed for eating the lunch they’d bought at the A&W: stacking fries under the bun of a cheeseburger, then impaling the burger over the straw of their sodas, so it sat stably on the soda’s lid. Then they’d alternately bite the cheeseburger from the sides and drink their soda from the burger’s center. “All-in-one,” said Jaxxon, holding his cheeseburger-cup proudly.

Since the pandemic, the kids have spent a lot of time eating in the back seat of the car, whether going back and forth to Salt Lake; making supply runs to Cortes, Colorado, or to the Sam’s Club in Farmington, New Mexico; or getting supplies for Valdez’s after-school program. One day she looked in the rearview mirror, and this was how they were eating. “It’s very creative,” she said, shaking her head and laughing with them, then wincing as the tooth pain came back.

She’s got two kids who need her and two jobs that wouldn’t cover even a semester’s tuition. The teaching degree is a someday goal. As for her immediate goals? Therapy for both kids; getting Zoe’s confidence back up again; helping Jaxxon to feel more secure; and keeping up with her own health needs so she can be there for them. And, if she can save enough by the end of the year, finally buying that bench to mark Mary’s and George’s graves. “In some ways, we’re still grieving what we lost,” said Valdez. “But we are moving through it.”

By Brigid Schulte

The day starts early for Kiarica Schields. On this chilly morning in March 2024, Schields, 33, wakes at 4 a.m. as usual and, after a few hits to the snooze button, quietly drags herself out of bed, careful not to disturb her four-year-old son, Kash, who had crawled into bed with her in the night. She tiptoes into the living room of the one-bedroom apartment in the suburbs of Atlanta that she shares with her four children. Two are asleep on the blow-up mattress that takes up most of the floor space. At 4:30, she gently shakes her eldest, Khalia, 14, who is stretched out on the couch, deeply asleep. “It’s time,” she whispers.

Groggy, Schields spreads a sheet on the floor and irons Khalia’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) uniform while the sleepy teen maneuvers through the dark apartment to wash her face with cold water, dress, pack her bag, and get ready to catch the 5:38 a.m. bus to the high school in the next county. She usually arrives at 6:12 a.m. for a 7 a.m. school start. She’ll find something to eat for breakfast at school.

There are high schools in DeKalb County closer to their apartment that wouldn’t require such a long and early commute. But this is the school where Khalia started as a freshman and wants to at least finish out the year there. She longs for stability. And life for this family has been anything but that, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020.

Back then, like many Black families headed by a single mother, the family was precariously hanging on to a middle-class rung of the socioeconomic ladder. Then the pandemic unleashed a cascade of events, starting with the loss of child care, that sent them tumbling towards the bottom. Although the unprecedented levels of federal pandemic aid slowed their slide, the family wound up falling through some of the already large holes in the frayed U.S. poverty-prevention and subsistence program offerings, known as the “safety net.” Schields has struggled to find a well-paying job in a country where 44 percent of the workforce is low-wage, earning about $10 an hour.²⁰⁹

On this March day, Schields is again out of work. She feels stuck. She loses sleep at night worrying about how—or if—she’ll ever make it back up the very steep ladder to stability. “I feel like my life is a big mess right now, and I don’t know what to do next. Every time I think I get ahead, something else comes up,” she says.

When schools and child care facilities closed down in 2020, there was no way Schields, a single mother living in rural Carnesville, far from her family in Atlanta, could both care for her children and get to her job as a hospice nurse. With no job, the college-educated registered nurse quickly ran through the savings she’d worked hard for years to build. She sought unemployment insurance benefits, but they stopped abruptly, and her appeal was denied. She still doesn’t understand why.

Throughout the pandemic, she had a hard time finding child care. In the first year of the pandemic, across the country, as lock-down orders shuttered schools and businesses, an estimated 63 percent of child care centers and nearly one-third of family child care homes closed down.²¹⁰ In Georgia, the share of licensed providers dropped 30 percent from March to April 2020 alone, one report found, and though the majority had reopened by December, the report didn’t track non-licensed family home care or the after care programs Schields had often relied upon for her four children, who, at the start of the pandemic were one, four, five and 10 years old.²¹¹

Even when she could find child care or after care programs, with no steady income, she could no longer afford them. She took on odd jobs that fit the schedule she needed to care for and supervise her children’s online schooling. She drove for DoorDash and worked as a driver for Walmart’s Sparks delivery service, sometimes with Kash, then a toddler, strapped into his car seat in the back. Sometimes, she made deliveries with the whole family tagging along, keeping each other company with trivia games. She took in laundry. She cooked and catered gigs. She prepared taxes. She worked the overnight shift at UPS until she became too afraid that a neighbor would report her to Child Protective Services for leaving the children alone with Khalia, then 12. She started a GoFundMe campaign. She worked low-wage temp jobs as a food runner, banquet server, and housekeeper. She worked as a virtual receptionist. She took low-wage staffing jobs. She earned $15 an hour in a human resources position at a prison. She earned $17 an hour as a volunteer coordinator at a homeless shelter, a flexible job she loved. In the fall of 2021, she tried to scrape together enough money to rent a second apartment and make income renting it out as an Airbnb. But she couldn’t keep the payments up and by November, she got an eviction notice. None of the jobs paid her enough to cover her bills.

Between 2020 and 2023, the family was evicted three times, despite an active Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium on evictions in 2020 and 2021. In one case, Schields feared she was on the verge of being evicted and left on her own. “I usually lose all my furniture each time,” Schields says matter-of-factly. Two different cars were repossessed when she couldn’t keep up with her car note payments. Schields moved the family from rural Carnesville back to the Atlanta suburbs in Gwinnett County at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to be near family so she would have more of a “village” to help her with child care. She and the children then moved in and out of crowded apartments with family members, some of them on the verge of being evicted themselves. “The only way to make it work is to bunch up,” Schields’s mother often says. Schields and her children drifted in and out of cheap motel rooms.

When the family was evicted from their apartment in Gwinnett County in the summer of 2023, Schields was out of resources and at the end of her rope. She sought refuge at a homeless shelter. The only openings for families were in Vidalia, Georgia, several hours away.

So Khalia longs for the stability she hasn’t had. Khalia figures she and her siblings have attended at least five or six different schools in four years. She’s lost count. “Every time we had to move, it made me so mad. Every time we had to go to another school. I didn’t like meeting new people,” she said. “It was just a lot.”

The family left the homeless shelter in the fall of 2023 and moved back to Atlanta. Though Schields moved the family into a cheaper apartment in DeKalb County, where they were living in March 2024, the federal McKenny-Vento Education Act, passed in 1987, enabled Khalia and her siblings to keep going to the schools in the Gwinnett County school district where they were enrolled before they became homeless.

Schields’s middle two children, Kailyn, nine, and Kinsgton, eight—Schields calls them, along with Kash, “the littles”—had also started the school year at their former elementary school in Gwinnett County. Schields’s mother, Rhonda, lived with them at the time and, because she had a car, she could drive the children to school throughout the fall. When Rhonda found her own place and moved out in January 2024, what had been a 12-minute drive became a two-hour bus ride for the children some days. They were often late. They hated it. In February 2024, the middle two switched to the elementary school just down the road from the DeKalb County apartment.

On this March day, after seeing Khalia off to the bus, Schields lets Kailyn and Kingston sleep in until 6 a.m., then supervises a quick breakfast, teeth brushing, and hair fixing and helps them dress (showers and baths were taken the night before). They pull clothes out of various plastic-colored bins and plastic bags where Schields tries to keep their clothes in some semblance of order.

That leaves Kash. Schields starts the same morning routine for the third time. By now, she’s tired, feeling an all-too-familiar anxiety and depression creeping back in like a heavy fog. It slows her down. Kash is cranky and, like many four-year-olds, uncooperative. Although she wants to get him to school in time for a healthy breakfast there, he insists on a quick meal of last night’s dinner leftovers. She gives in, dishes out some meat and rice on a Styrofoam plate, zaps it in the microwave, and hands it to him with a plastic fork. With just minutes to spare, the two make it out the door. Gripping Kash’s hand tightly, Schields rushes the two of them across a five-lane highway to the bus stop to catch the 7:58 bus that takes him to preschool. The bus is late. The two wait nearly 30 minutes as Kash wraps himself in his mother’s warm, heavy blue sweater while she checks job listings on her phone. By the time Kash makes it to pre-school, the breakfast service is already over.

After walking the half mile back, Schields cleans the small apartment. “If it’s too much of a mess, I can’t think straight.” She makes herself a juice smoothie of kale, spinach, ginger, pear, cucumber, and apple, hoping it will give her more energy. She yawns. Then she begins her own day looking for a job that will both fit with her kids’ schedules and pay the bills.

At this point, Schields has given up hope of finding a good nursing job. Most places have such serious nursing shortages that they require 10- and 12-hour shifts.²¹² That feels impossible for a single mother. She’s tried applying for flexible telehealth jobs or nursing jobs in doctors’ offices with regular hours, but none panned out. And after losing so many much-loved patients and family members in the pandemic, including her grandmother, she needs a break from the medical field, even if it means less pay and less steady work. “COVID just sucked the nursing out of me,” she says.

Still, she’s getting desperate. Her $1,330 monthly rent is coming due, plus late fees. She’s been out of work since December. The car financing call center where she’d worked for a few months let her go a few days before Christmas. The reason, they said, is that she had violated their attendance policy and was “unreliable.” She had had to leave work early twice when the school called to say Kingston was acting out, being violent, and was being suspended.

She’s been getting calls like these about Kingston’s behavior ever since the first eviction upended the family’s lives. The calls have become more frequent the more unstable the family’s circumstances have become. Back when Schields was still trying to find well-paying hospice nursing jobs, she lost one after another because of these calls to get Kingston. “They called me unreliable there, too,” she says. At the car financing call center job, she often called on a niece or another family member to get Kingston when he was acting out and suspended from school, regularly paying out $20 to $30 a trip for their ride shares.

By the time the financing company let her go, Schields was exhausted. “I was kind of hurt after all I did to make it to work on time.” With no car, the commute, which began at 5:30 a.m., took two buses, two trains, and two hours. She arrived every morning by 7:26 a.m. She was never late. The return commute was equally long. She’d get back to the apartment close to 8 p.m. some nights. All for $18 an hour, which didn’t come close to covering the family’s bills. With her mother living with them, Schields knew the children were well cared for. “But I didn’t want to keep missing out on my children’s lives to make it work.”

She pulls out her smartphone. In the previous 14 days, her Indeed job hunting app tells her she’s applied for over 100 jobs and has had 10 interviews. The news media is full of reports of a strong labor market, plentiful jobs, and workers now able to hold out for better positions. But nothing seems to be working for her. And with her mother now living on her own, Schields can no longer work the long hours that she had at the car financing company. “I’ll look at anything. I’m willing to humble myself if it will get my family what we need,” she says. “I’m constantly checking my email as if it’s going to change my luck.”

Today, she’s hoping she can find a flexible, work-from-home job at Apple. On the advice of a family member, she paid someone $40 who promised to secure an interview at Apple if she passed an assessment test. She failed once but thinks she’ll pay another $40 to try again. She begins to dream. With a work-from-home job, she could just walk up the street to get Kingston if he were having a difficult day at school and keep working with him at home. “I can’t afford to keep losing jobs because I have to go get him.”

Kingston’s teachers say he is doing well academically. The serious, slight, sensitive third grader already reading at the fifth grade level. But any change in routine can set him off. Schields worries that the child’s ADHD is making him prone to paranoia and violence, thinking people are laughing at him or out to get him, and she isn’t sure who to ask for help about it. She does know that the medicine amps him up so much that, if given too late in the day, he’ll be so wired he can’t get to sleep until well into the middle of the night. She’s hoping to get Kingston on a special education plan to give him specialized services but isn’t sure how to wade through the confusing bureaucracy necessary to create one for him.²¹³

She scrolls through job listings on her phone. She’s mindful that if she finds a job that pays more than about $21 an hour, she’ll lose Medicaid health care benefits for the kids and likely the child care subsidies that help her afford before- and after-school care and child care for the littles. Although she’d been applying for the child care subsidies for years, she was finally approved in the summer of 2023 after the family’s stint in the homeless shelter.

She sits at her kitchen table in front of her laptop and interviews for what turns out to be a multi-level marketing scheme. On the phone, she interviews for a part-time job as a children’s swim instructor. It pays $20 an hour. The pool is nearly two hours away by bus. She schedules an interview for an office assistant job. She almost signs up to take a typing test, then looks at her new, long, and sparkly acrylic lavender nails. Her boyfriend, David, who works the overnight shift at a refrigerated warehouse, had surprised her with a spa day not long before. Though she loves how the nails look in private, she’s embarrassed by them when she goes out in public. She sees how some people in the grocery store eye them as she pays for groceries with her Electronic Benefits Transfer card, signifying she’s poor enough to qualify for a public food nutrition subsidy. She tries not to wither under their judgmental stares.²¹⁴ She can guess what they’re thinking. She hears the politicians on TV who say that if people are struggling in poverty, they must not be working hard enough. Lazy even. Such people don’t deserve to have pretty nails. She shakes her head at the thought. “I can’t wait to get back to work,” she says.

As she considers each job that pops up on her phone app, she envisions how she would get there, whether she’d have time to get her children ready for the day, and if the hours are flexible. Then she looks at the numbers to see if pursuing the job would even be worth it. Often it’s not. Like the $18-an-hour manager position at a juice spot far from home she decided to take a pass on. Between interviews, she prepares taxes. Her clients, mostly friends and family, owe her hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. Only three of the 15 with completed tax forms have paid her. But many are themselves struggling, like her, so she’s had a hard time asking them for payment. She avoids conflict when she can. “It’s probably a trauma response. I try to be a people pleaser,” she says.

She worries that her appearance may be the reason she isn’t getting a job. She’d undergone gastric bypass surgery in the fall of 2023 to help her lose weight, thinking that would help with her energy, her depression, and her ability to find a stable job. “I’ve never been out of work for so long. What is it? Is it my hair? I haven’t had my hair done in so long. I’m looking so basic with my hair in a ponytail. Is it just me?” she asks. “Maybe I’m not giving off the right vibe.”²¹⁵

She pauses and looks out toward the winter light flooding in through the sliding glass doors by the air mattress on the living room floor. The light, she says, calms her. A black poster propped up on the floor against the opposite wall under the TV set proclaims, “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.” She misses going to church. Without a car, it’s been months. “Maybe that’s why things aren’t going so good for me.” She sighs. “I really don’t know. Some days, I just don’t even know who I am or what my purpose is anymore,” she says. “I used to trust that my purpose was to care for others. Now I don’t know what my purpose is. I can’t get ahead. I’m trying not to give up. I’ll do any little odd job to make sure money’s flowing in. It’s just really tough.”

Pandemic Aid Eased the Pain But Didn’t Stop the Slide Into Poverty

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, Schields first thought she could weather it. She had savings. She had a steady job. And, like most people, she had no idea it would last as long as it did. But losing child care, then losing her job, and then being evicted sent her on a rapid downward spiral.

The federal government’s unprecedented response to the pandemic helped keep millions of families housed and fed.²¹⁶ And it did help Schields and her family. Between March of 2020 and March of 2022, the U.S. government spent $5.2 trillion on pandemic aid, the largest share of gross domestic product outside wartime.²¹⁷ Analyses have shown that the aid made a significant difference in the lives of millions of people and in the health and economic stability of the nation.²¹⁸ What made the most difference in peoples’ lives, research has found, were the cash stimulus payments, expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), Medicaid, food and nutrition assistance, unemployment insurance, and the eviction moratorium and mortgage forbearance programs.²¹⁹ “The aid kept struggling families from being pulled over the financial cliff,” said Scott Fulford, an economist and author of The Pandemic Paradox, about how the federal investments actually improved financial well-being for many people and averted what could have been what he called a nationwide “financial apocalypse.”

Schields remembers getting the expanded CTC payments in 2021, $200 to $300 per month per child. “We used that for rent.” As for any other pandemic aid, she doesn’t really remember. The past few years have been too much of a blur of stress and the struggle to survive that she isn’t sure. She knows she received unemployment insurance for a few months in 2020 but doesn’t remember the $600 monthly top up the federal government provided to the millions of unemployed workers from March to July that year. When the state cut off her unemployment insurance benefits, she appealed and was rejected, though she still doesn’t understand why. She became active for a time in a national advocacy group, Unemployed Action, with other workers whose applications or appeals for unemployment insurance were rejected without explanation.

When it comes to child care, the issue that sparked so much of Schields’s troubles, one analysis found that two-thirds of child care centers across the country were closed in April 2020, and one-third remained closed in April 2021.²²⁰ As many as half the child care facilities in the Atlanta area where Schields lives were shuttered. Child care just wasn’t available during the pandemic, forcing millions of parents, primarily mothers like Schields, out of the workforce.²²¹

Schields also applied for state child care subsidies, but was repeatedly rejected until 2023, when her stay at a homeless shelter bumped her to the top of the list. During the pandemic, Georgia used some of the $24 billion child care stabilization dollars that the federal government sent to states to help shore up the shortage of child care workers. The state offered $1,000 bonuses to child care workers, who are typically paid poverty wages and can’t afford to stay in their jobs. The state also increased reimbursement rates to providers, and it expanded the number of subsidies to 73,000 children from 50,000. The additional investment was still nowhere near the need.

Georgia’s child care subsidies typically reach only about 18 percent of those eligible.²²² And though the federal government recommends that states reimburse providers who accept subsidies at the 75th percentile of market rates that providers typically charge, the state of Georgia reimburses providers only at the 25th percentile, far below what it truly costs to run a child care program.²²³ That leaves providers scrambling to cover bills and, without raising tuition that they know parents can’t afford to pay, scrape together enough funding to pay staff.²²⁴

Even with the meager boost in child care spending, nearly half of all families in Georgia live in child care deserts. One Georgia survey found that child care struggles directly impact the financial security of more than eight in 10 parents.²²⁵ Nearly half said they’d had to turn down job opportunities because of a lack of adequate child care, and one-third, like Schields, had to leave the labor force.

With such little state support, child care is expensive for parents. One analysis by the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau found that annual child care costs range from more than $5,000 to $17,000 per child, depending on the type of care, a child’s age, and the population size of a county.²²⁶ For single parents like Schields, infant care costs can eat up anywhere from 24 to 75 percent of family income. At one point, Schields did find child care, but she was paying more than $600 a week in child care costs and earning $800 a week. She couldn’t sustain it. “Child care. That’s my issue,” Schields says.

In the spring of 2022, one year before the federal government officially declared an end to the pandemic emergency, Georgia cut off federal emergency funds. By the fall of 2023, one report estimated that nearly 1,000 child care programs in the state were expected to close as a result.²²⁷

“We talk about these values of hard work, that if you work hard, you should have a life of stability—be able to save and take care of your kids. But the reality is, you cannot work if you do not have the proper and affordable care in place,” said Ife Finch Floyd, director of economic justice at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute (GBPI). “This not only harms families but local employers and it’s impacting our state economy as well. It’s not just families that hold the burden of this underinvestment in our care system,” she said.

As the pandemic raged, the unpredictable income swings from Schields’s various odd jobs prevented her from qualifying for some pandemic benefits. She remembers being rejected at least three times for health insurance for herself through Medicaid. But at least the children were covered. “I haven’t been to the dentist in so long,” she muses. Because of the swings in her income, she also found that the food and nutrition help provided through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) also varied. Sometimes, she was denied, or had her benefits reduced. But when she was out of work and out of money and needed it most, she says, SNAP was a lifeline.

But the eviction moratorium? “I don’t know why I didn’t get that,” she said. At the height of the pandemic, when local jurisdictions were using federal pandemic aid for eviction diversion programs and rental assistance, Schields’s mother, Rhonda, went to court when she was facing an eviction. A stranger approached her. “I was so scared,” Rhonda recalls. “Then he said they were going to help me. They worked out a payment with my landlord. They saved me once. Later, the second time, I did get evicted.” Schields remembers going to court every month for four months seeking the kind of rent relief that had helped her mother once. “Every time, they told me they were out of money,” she said. Instead, she ran into a barrage of scammers, promising help but wanting between $500 and $1,000 from her up front. “I never trusted that,” she says.

It makes Rhonda angry to see her daughter struggle. “The government came through so big for so many of us during the pandemic, then they just let everyone down,” she said. “Now, you’re on your own again.”

At Schields’s lowest point, in early June 2023, she was out driving DoorDash late at night and was so tired she fell asleep at a traffic light. She’d called Khalia to talk to her to help her stay awake. But the fatigue took over. A police officer knocked on her window and ordered her out of the car to stand on one foot and walk a straight line to test if she was drunk. “I told the officer, ‘I’m tired. I promise you, I’m not drunk. Breathalyze me.’ But he said, no, I had to do a field sobriety test. I said, ‘Sir, I’m so fat I could not do them.’”

She failed the field sobriety test, which is a flawed measure of inebriation, research has found, particularly for those overweight.²²⁸ The police took her license away, and she spent the night in jail. Although the court gave her a document stating she could drive to and from work and the children’s schools, Schields lost it in one of the family’s many moves, along with the number for the public defender fighting the DUI charge. Worried she’d be caught driving with a suspended license, she voluntarily turned her car back in to the dealer. With no car, she couldn’t keep up with the commute to work and lost another job.

Sometimes, when she felt hopeless, her mind went to dark places. “The only thing that saved me is thinking, ‘Who the heck is going to raise my kids if I do something crazy?’”

She remembers sitting with her children on their luggage in the middle of a desolate motel parking lot, surrounded by trash bags containing all their belongings. They’d just returned to Atlanta after a monthlong stay at the homeless shelter in Vidalia. She had no money, and literally nowhere to go. “I was crying. The kids were crying. Everybody was hungry,” she recalls. “Then Kash—he’s obsessed with YouTube gospel stuff and always looking for the positive—he said, ‘Why don’t we just go fishing and fry up some fish for dinner?’”

She begins to weep at the memory. “My whole life, what I’ve wanted was a stable home for my kids so they don’t have to go through the things I did,” she says. “My biggest thing now, I have kids who have to heal from the childhood trauma I put them through.”

Poverty Is a Preexisting Condition. Where You Live Can Make It Worse

Life has never been easy for Schields. She was born in 1991, she says, as a so-called “crack baby,” which refers to children exposed in utero to crack cocaine who were widely vilified during the crack epidemic in the 1980s and ‘90s. Though fears that these children were damaged and would never amount to much never materialized and were instead shown to be racist mythology, the stigma has followed her.²²⁹ Her father was shot and killed when she was seven. Her mother and stepfather, both military veterans, struggled with addiction. Family members cycled in and out of jail. Raised largely by an aunt who was often working long hours, Schields was left to fend for herself in an unsupervised house full of older siblings and cousins. Schields says that, for years, she blocked out memories of abuse and violence.

She quit school at 13 to care for a relative’s baby and worked in a restaurant. At 17, she became pregnant with Khalia. That’s the moment she says a lightbulb went off. She decided she wanted something better for her daughter. She got her GED. She found a spot in a group home for teen mothers started by Jane Fonda, then-wife of CNN founder Ted Turner, an Atlanta-based mogul. Schields enrolled in the nursing program at Columbus State University and studied diligently while working at the Waffle House and caring for both Khalia and her relative’s child. She graduated with a nursing degree and began working in 2011.

She later married Kailyn and Kingston’s father, a truck driver, and stayed even after the marriage became abusive. She suffered six miscarriages. That and the two pregnancies changed her body. “He would say how I was fat and unattractive, and he wanted my old body back from before I had kids. He told me I was hard on the eyes,” Schields says. But like Khalia now, she yearned for stability. “I just wanted stability. I stayed longer than I should have, because I know how heavy it is to do it all alone.” Still, she hates to admit that sometimes, in the back of her mind, she thinks, “Man, my life would have been easier if I’d stayed.”

After a particularly brutal fight in 2017, when Kingston was five months old, Schields left the Atlanta area and took the children to a domestic violence shelter in rural Carnesville, about an hour and a half away. The shelter helped her find affordable public housing, affordable child care, and connected the whole family to mental health services. Schields found good work as a hospice nurse. She met Kash’s father at a conference and surprised both of them when she found out she was pregnant. Her IUD birth control device had failed.

Still, Schields was able to manage. Khalia’s father sometimes sent money to his daughter. Kash’s father sometimes helped cover his expenses. She hung onto all the paperwork she needed to apply for child support from her ex-husband. That March morning, she pulls it out of a kitchen junk drawer. She leafs through page after complicated page, looking bewildered. “I’m not sure I understand what they want.” She puts it back in the drawer. She’s received no child support from her ex-husband since leaving him in 2017.

More than anything, Kiarica Schields’s story illustrates how the pandemic aid, for all the good that it did to help millions of families, did not solve poverty. The aid did, however, provide important lessons for how we as a nation can begin to do so. And that starts with understanding how poverty functions like a “preexisting” condition, with long-term costs and consequences to individuals, communities, businesses, and society.

“The pandemic aid, for all the good that it did to help millions of families, did not solve poverty.”

Zach Parolin, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, writes in his book, Poverty in the Pandemic: Policy Lessons from COVID-19, that while the unprecedented federal investments in safety net programs were, indeed, lifesaving, they proved a “fragile victory.”²³⁰

People who had experienced poverty at some point in their lifetimes, like Schields had growing up, were substantially more likely to face greater health challenges and financial struggles during the pandemic, Parolin explained. They were about twice as likely to lose a job compared to those with higher incomes. “U.S. counties with the highest poverty rates, for example, had twice the per capita COVID death rate relative to U.S. counties with the lowest poverty,” Parolin said.

The pandemic aid “didn't fix the structural and long-term challenges of poverty that this country has,” he said. “Poverty is not just a single point-in-time state. It’s a condition that lingers over your life once you’ve experienced it. There are health challenges associated with growing up in poverty. There are neighborhood conditions associated with higher poverty rates. The disadvantages accrue throughout someone’s life. The additional aid in 2020 and 2021 didn’t make those disappear for good. It just helped out quite a lot temporarily. Though the federal government’s interventions were extraordinary, they weren’t the antidote for fixing long-term poverty problems. There’s still a lot to do.”

To start, we can revive a broken social contract between government, business, and workers and build upon the powerful lessons of the unprecedented pandemic aid: that government, business, and workers can work together to alleviate poverty and suffering and make life better for everyone—when they choose to.

“Government, business, and workers can work together to alleviate poverty and suffering and make life better for everyone—when they choose to.”

The government investment and creative, flexible government response is a good place to work together to mend and strengthen the safety net. Workers can share their stories and demands. Lawmakers and business leaders must ensure that all jobs are good jobs, big enough to support lives and families, with flexible schedules that enable people to both work and care for loved ones. A renewed social contract, focused on equity and human well-being, would ensure that housing is affordable, health care is available, and that child care is high-quality, easy to find, and reasonably priced. And, perhaps most importantly, this new social contract would be dedicated to addressing the challenges of geography and structural racism.

Before the pandemic, Georgia, which has one of the highest shares of Black residents²³¹ of any state, also had one of the highest rates of poverty of any state in the nation, with Black residents hit particularly hard.²³² Georgia ranks lower on measures of economic security, economic opportunity, and overall well-being than most other states, especially for Black individuals and families.²³³ Georgia had one of the highest rates of childhood poverty, 15.1 percent, prior to the pandemic. The Biden administration’s expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) of 2021 opened up eligibility and boosted payments to families, bringing that rate down to 8.7 percent, an astounding 43 percent drop. But, like the national average, once the tax credit expired and Congress failed to renew it, poverty rates bounced right back up. Nationally, the expanded CTC cut the child poverty rate to 5.2 percent, the lowest ever recorded since measurements began in 1967. Once the credit expired, the rate more than doubled, to 12.4 percent in September 2023.²³⁴

Georgia also has one of the highest rates of housing loss, evictions, and mortgage foreclosures in the country, one analysis found.²³⁵ And among the least affordable housing²³⁶ options or subsidized housing vouchers.²³⁷ The state allots the housing vouchers by lottery to those on a waiting list. But the waiting list is so long it’s often closed. In 2023, the state opened the waiting list to new applicants for just three days.²³⁸ Schields knows some people who’ve been on the waiting list for 20 years. A lot of landlords won’t accept a voucher even if you get one, she says. Or if they do, landlords can barge in at any moment for a surprise “cleanliness” inspection, which Schields finds insulting. Or the housing is in dangerous neighborhoods. “I want my kids to be able to go out and play,” she says. Even if that means paying more. Even if that means risking eviction.

By 2023, the eviction rate in Atlanta exceeded pre-pandemic levels.²³⁹ Half of all renters in the state are “cost burdened,” spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent.²⁴⁰ One-fourth of all renters are “extremely low income,” and nearly 80 percent of that group are “severely” cost burdened, paying 50 percent or more of their income on rent.²⁴¹

Incomes are low because Georgia’s minimum wage is one of the lowest in the country. Although employers who fall under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act must pay the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—a level that hasn’t changed since 2009—Georgia’s state minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.²⁴²

Georgia, like many Southern states, is stingy when it comes to investing in subsistence programs, and anti-poverty and family-supportive policies. It is one of about 20 states that do not have a state Earned Income Tax Credit to bolster low-wage and working-class workers.²⁴³

Schields’s story is all too familiar to Amit Khanduri, director of programs for the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund (GRO), who focuses on its baby bonds pilot. “There’s not enough help,” he said. And what help there is, is cumbersome and confusing. “It underscores the deep failures across systems and the need for substantive policy solutions that address the root causes for the racial wealth income gap,” Khanduri said. “Some might argue these systems were designed to work in this way.” Instead of weaving a bouncier safety net to propel people up and forward, the systems can trap people.

“Our work at GRO is focused on thinking in new ways to help close this income divide now and for the future,” he said. That’s why Khanduri and GRO are part of a growing movement experimenting with cash and guaranteed basic income (GBI) pilots. GRO is running one of the largest GBI programs in the country focused on Black women. They’ve found that recipients use the funds to pay rent and bills, pay off debt, invest in education, and take time to care for themselves and others.

Experiments like this are seeking to address a root cause of poverty that keeps people stuck—namely, the lack of money. They also are trying to challenge deeply held stereotypes about poverty that have led to policymakers shaping ineffective and punitive safety net policies.

Poverty narratives aren’t based in reality, said poverty researcher Zach Parolin. The prevailing view among many policymakers and in the general public, he said, is that people are poor not because the system has been designed to favor the wealthy from the start, but because those in poverty haven’t worked hard enough or because they’ve made bad decisions. With this line of thinking, “Not only do [those in poverty] not deserve our support, but their way out of poverty is to overcome all the obstacles in their way and start making ‘better’ choices, and magically, things will be okay,” he said. “That’s really a false understanding of how disadvantage is generated in our society.”

Racism, and the false belief that Black people are the primary beneficiaries of safety net programs, work together to prevent policymakers from weaving more effective, and humane, ones. “The facts generally don’t bear out these false perceptions,” Parolin said. “But they’re strong in driving down political support for a more generous welfare state that works better for everyone.”

“I’m Just Tired”

In the early afternoon on that March day, the kids begin spilling back into the tiny apartment, flush with energy after long days at school. Khalia brightens as she tells her mother how she’s passed her midterms in Advanced Placement Human Geography, 11th grade language arts, and 10th grade math. Schields listens intently. Khalia’s in ninth grade, the very grade when Schields dropped out of school. She wants to make sure her daughter stays on track. As they prepare for her parent-teacher conference at the school the next evening—Schields hopes her mother Rhonda can drive them—Khalia shares that she’s happy to be back in a physical classroom. “Zoom school was so bad,” she says. She and her siblings all lined up with separate devices at the same table in whichever small apartment or room or shelter they were crammed into. The noise got to be too much. “I couldn’t focus,” she says. “I stopped learning. I’d just turn off my camera and sit looking at the computer screen.”

The only class she’s failing is culinary arts, which most people who know her can’t believe because Khalia has been helping her mother cook for the family for years. The two break open an economy pack of chicken wings that had been defrosting on the counter and begin to coat them in French’s mustard and hot sauce for dinner. Khalia talks about the flag football team she plays on and how much she loves being on the wrestling team. “I was going to run track, but I didn’t have a way to get home,” she says. Her mother bristles. Already, Schields is out $600 in the past three months paying for Uber rides to get Khalia home from wrestling practice. Kingston has been pestering her about playing football, which will mean paying for expensive equipment. With no steady income, and no car, she’s had to tell them that she just can’t afford either activity. The conversations make her literally sick to her stomach.

The littles burst in. Kailyn bubbles with excitement about reading Charlotte’s Web and the upcoming polka dot day. “Mom! Do I have anything with polka dots?” she asks, as she begins to paw through pink plastic tubs with her clothes.

“I don’t think so,” Schields says, turning toward her younger daughter.

“Could you make something?”

Schields turns back to the chicken and whispers to herself, “Yikes. Spirit Day always catches me off guard.” Schields knows her kids have been bullied for not having the right name-brand shoes, so tries to save up when she can. A bewildered Kingston, hoping to fit in at his new school, asked not long ago, “Mama, are we poor?”

Kailyn stops her search. “I miss my old clothes.” Like previous furniture sets and important paperwork, the family has lost clothes, shoes, and keepsakes with every move.

The afternoon is a busy jumble of kids playing with neighbor kids outside; searching for scant crayons inside; scattering homework packets on the couch, table, and bed while the show Bluey blares from the TV; and clamoring for $1 each when the ice cream truck tinkles through the apartment complex. Khalia curls up on the couch with her laptop, headphones on to help her focus on her homework assignments. Stray cats wander in and out of the sliding glass doors, which the children leave open in the sunny, warming afternoon. Rhonda stops by while taking her home care client out for a drive. A cousin who lives nearby drops in and tries to talk Schields into investing in cryptocurrency with her. The cousin isn’t quite sure how it works, but she’s heard you can quadruple your $800 investment in four weeks. Schields listens impassively, then moves into the kitchen to fry the chicken. Once it’s golden brown, she takes it out of the pan to drain on sheets of blank notebook paper. All the while, she keeps checking her phone for job prospects.

The 6:30 dinner goes quickly. The family eats on paper plates and uses plastic utensils. The children eat variously at the kitchen counter or small dining room table. Once the dirty plates are tossed in the trash and the leftovers wrapped up and stored in the fridge, the children take turns in the bath or shower and wrestle with Khalia on the blowup mattress in the living room.

“Why didn’t you win your last match?” Kingston demands angrily of Khalia.

“I lost my confidence,” Khalia shrugs. “She seemed so big.”

“Mommy! The water is cold!” Kash cries out from the tub.

By 8 p.m., Schields has turned on soothing spa music. She gives the children melatonin from the health food store to help them sleep. She leads them in their daily affirmations and prayers and the hope that tomorrow will somehow be better. They repeat in unison, “I love myself. I trust myself. I believe in myself. I have faith in myself. I have confidence in myself. I am a leader.”

As the children stretch out on the couch and the air mattress, Schields turns out the lights. She creeps back into her bedroom, knowing full well that in the nightly game of musical beds, someone, most often the littles, will end up sleeping with her. Her mind races as she lays in the dark. She worries that Kash’s child care hasn’t sent her a bill, and she isn’t sure how much she owes. She wonders if she should apply for Social Security disability benefits for Kingston. She frets that she isn’t paying enough attention to Kailyn, the middle child. All the while, she’s scrolling through her phone looking at job listings. She’s put herself on a “Facebook fast” because, she told a friend, she was on the site to escape the reality of her own life too often. The phone lights her face in the darkness as the jobs fly by. Juice joint manager. High-volume recruiter for a staffing company. Dunkin’ counter help. Scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling. She closes her eyes. “I’m just tired.”

Epilogue

By August 2024, Schields had found a good job as a nursing scheduler at a big hospital. But it wasn’t on a bus line, and without a car, she had no way to get there. She worked seven days a week as a dispatcher for a plumbing company for a while, earning $21 an hour. With that rate of pay, she lost all her public benefits—child care subsidies, Medicaid for the children, and SNAP. But when she passed out at work from exhaustion, she was fired.

Unable to pay the rent, the family was evicted for a fourth time. They were “bunching up” again with Schields’s mother, Rhonda, sleeping on her couch in another Atlanta suburb in Cobb County. Schields’s sister, a dental hygienist, who had also recently been evicted because she was unable to juggle rent and college tuition payments for her children, was also staying there.

The move from DeKalb to Cobb County meant that Schields had no way to get to the job as office manager for a home care company she’d lined up.

She’d also received a text from a public defender in May saying she’d missed three court dates on her DUI charge. All the notices had gone to one of her old addresses. Given the missed appearances, the defender counseled her to plead guilty, so she did. She spent the summer juggling community service hours, work, and caring for her kids. Once she pays $360 for a risk reduction class, $150 for a substance abuse evaluation, and $200 every time she sees a probation officer, she should get her license back.

The children have started the school year in new schools. And she starts a new job in a customer service call center in September. Kingston is on new medication that appears to be working much better for him.

Although Kash is now in kindergarten, without the child care subsidy that made care just $21 a week for the littles, she can no longer afford the $385 a week for before- and after-school care for them.

She plans to reapply for Medicaid for the children and hopes she’ll get health insurance herself through the new job. She wants to save enough to move the family out of her mother’s apartment as soon as she can. “I’m just hoping,” she said, “to start fresh.”

By Rebecca Gale

It’s 5 a.m. and Tiffany Gale is up, as she is every morning, and the first thing she does is check to see if any of her staff have called out sick.

“They each have kids of their own, and someone is always sick,” she explains. If, indeed, someone is out, Gale will be the one to step in and take over that classroom at the child care center she owns and runs. Until recently, she’d had enough money to hire a floating staff person to fill in the gaps or offer extra support, thanks to federal funds for child care providers under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

Across the country, ARPA stabilization dollars went to more than 220,000 child care programs, affecting 9.6 million children, with many child care providers claiming such funds kept their doors open at a time when they financially could not break even.²⁴⁵ But the funds ran out in September 2023. Since then, Gale—and thousands more child care providers just like her—have had to change the way they operate. The historic investment the ARPA funds provided revealed just how much child care could improve in this country with sustained federal support. Now, policymakers will have to decide whether to make that vision a long-lasting reality or accept the old status quo.

Tiffany Gale has known she wanted to work with young kids ever since she can remember. “I grew up going through many adverse childhood experiences, and I always had teachers who made a positive impact on my life and wanted the same,” she says.

In August 2019, she opened Miss Tiffany’s Early Childhood Education House, a child care center run in her home in Weirton, West Virginia. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit early the following year, Gale stayed open by accepting children whose parents were considered “essential workers”: teachers, nurses, and mill workers. She got up early and stayed open late to accommodate people who worked 12-hour shifts and needed to drop kids off as early as 5 a.m.

By serving these families, Gale got access to federal child care subsidies. Child care, Gale explains, was essential to allowing these workers to do their jobs, and during the emergency phase of the pandemic, the federal government seemed to agree, sending between $30 and $34 per day per child of each essential worker directly to the providers who cared for them. Leaders in Washington routed additional money through state agencies to child care centers like Miss Tiffany’s, which meant that these small businesses, accustomed to slim margins, finally had some financial breathing room.

Before the pandemic, many child care centers were already in precarious positions because of the low staff-to-child ratios legally required to run them and because so few providers and families received federal and state support.²⁴⁶ The health crisis pushed many centers over the edge, and they closed. But for the ones that could stay open and take advantage of federal investment, there was an opportunity to make substantial improvements, which Gale recognized. She immediately set to work to improve the child care experience at her center.

Renovations, Meals, and Activities

Before the pandemic, Gale had a waiting list “a mile long” for families who wanted a spot. More than 40 percent of children in West Virginia under age six who need child care can’t access it, she explains, pointing to data from Child Care Aware and TEAM for West Virginia Children.²⁴⁷ But she was constrained by the limited space in her home and couldn’t accommodate any additional kids.

Then Gale received money through the ARPA stabilization grants that she could use to expand. She put a down payment on a commercial space in downtown Weirton and then began the renovations needed to open a second location, which she named Miss Tiffany’s School for Young Children. She oversaw the renovation herself, which was primarily carried out by her husband and father-in-law, working on weekends and evenings. “Everyone spent all of our ‘free time’ renovating the space,” she says.

There was enough space—three units and one house—for four classrooms, and as soon as the renovation was completed on the first room, she enrolled 12 more kids. But then, the permitting and construction process grew complicated. Gale discovered she would have to move two HVAC systems, which could cost $12,000 apiece. The timeline for renovation grew longer. “The plan was to have all four [rooms] opened by the time funding ran out, but I only have one open right now,” she says.

Without the extension of the ARPA funds, she faces having to sell the unfinished units. “It’s a shame because there is such a demand for child care,” Gale says.

In Weirton, Form Energy is building a high-volume battery manufacturing facility at the site of the former Weirton Steel plant. The job fairs are already at capacity—the company has an attractive array of benefits, including a 401(k) and paid time off—and expects more than 750 new jobs to come to the area, including in manufacturing, operations, human resources, and administrative roles.²⁴⁸ “But we don’t have the child care infrastructure to support this,” Gale says. “If I have to sell the other two units, that’s going in the opposite direction of where we need to be.”

Each day, Miss Tiffany’s offers two meals and two snacks for each child. It’s food Gale shops for and her staff prepares on-site. Her child care facilities qualify for meal subsidies through the Child and Adult Care Food Program, which is administered by the West Virginia Department of Education. Because of the high poverty levels in the area, all children receive a subsidy for their meals: $1.65 for breakfast, $3.12 for lunch, and 93 cents for a snack.

Extra pandemic funding meant Gale could serve fresh foods, including fruit, vegetables, and meat. Breakfasts started to include sliced peaches, apples, tomatoes, and scrambled eggs. Lunches included chicken stir fry, chicken enchiladas, roast beef, or broccoli quiche, among other options. For an afternoon snack, the children had sliced apples with peanut butter.

But when that money dried up, Gale switched back to the more affordable food options for children that still fall well within state nutrition guidelines: peanut butter and jelly, hot dogs, mac and cheese, and breakfast cereal.²⁴⁹ Instead of fresh versions, teachers now serve canned beans, meats, fruits, and vegetables. Snacks are graham or saltine crackers instead of apples.

Gale laments the switch away from fresh food and knows that her kids do too. “Quality food access supports a child’s brain growth and development during one of the most critical points in their life,” Gale says. But the cost of groceries continues to rise, along with the price of nearly everything else, and Gale knows she can’t raise her rates higher than her families can afford to cover better food for the kids.²⁵⁰

ARPA funds allowed Gale to try new teaching activities. She used grant money to purchase raised garden beds and sunflower kits so that her kids could take on gardening projects. She purchased notebooks for the kids so they could document the growth of the sunflowers, soil, seeds, and water. She also received a Regional Outdoor Play Improvement grant through the West Virginia Early Childhood Training Connections and Resources program, which she used to purchase additional jungle gym climbers for the children to improve their gross motor skills.²⁵¹ She also purchased sensory tables, which can be filled with items like beans or sand for kids to play in.

The ARPA funds allowed her to bring in outside teachers to lead dance and music classes and teach social-emotional learning lessons, but those programs stopped when the funding was cut off. Now, she has “no more outside experts unless they can do it for free,” Gale says.

Instead of new notebooks and arts and crafts supplies, Gale now offers the kids more worksheets and crayons. “It’s stripping children of learning in a meaningful way,” she says.

Naptime also changed. With the new downtown location, Gale had sufficient funds to purchase cots for each kid with sheets, blankets, and pillows instead of the vinyl heavy-duty KinderMats she uses at her home location. Those mats had previously been the best option she could afford that complied with state regulations. They have since worn down, and rips are visible. “We are duct-taping them to keep them around as long as possible,” Gale says. At the home location of her center, it’s still up to families to bring in bedding for each kid, but not all of them can. “We see a lot of kids who are sleeping on a bare mat,” Gale says.

Revenue and Subsidies

Gale’s primary source of revenue is what she collects from the families who use her center, with some additional funding from the state for families who qualify for a subsidy. She has 12 kids at each location, between the ages of six weeks and 12 years, though she estimates that most kids are between the ages of two and five years old. She charges $45 per day or $165 per week, and though demand for spots remains high, Gale feels the need to cap her rates. “Parents can’t afford to pay any more,” she says. “I have to keep my rates at a certain level, or I am not going to be able to keep my doors open.”

Gale estimates that 50 to 75 percent of children who are in her care on a regular basis receive a state subsidy. The process of collecting reimbursement is complicated and cumbersome. Families are required to sign in and out with a black pen (blue pen doesn’t count, she explains, adding, “I don’t know why”). Hard copies of the papers must be mailed to a central office in Charleston, West Virginia. But with so many parents signing kids in and out each day, there are inevitable errors and snags in the process, and the papers will be sent back (again by regular mail, not electronically) for corrections before Gale can receive payment.

One of the major shifts under ARPA—and one that child care advocates have long called for—was a change in the way providers are reimbursed for children who receive state subsidies for child care.²⁵² Previously, providers like Gale were given a subsidy reimbursement based on the child’s attendance—if a child were out sick or opted to spend the day with a grandparent instead of coming to child care, Gale wouldn’t receive payment—or she’d receive a partial day rate if the child left early.²⁵³ Her child care facility is considered Tier II on her state’s quality rating, just below the Tier III level that requires national accreditation, so she is reimbursed $34 a day for an infant, $33 per day for a toddler, and $30 a day for children over three years old (25 to 30 percent below market rate). In every instance, Gale was still required to have staff on hand for the children who were enrolled, and she had to cap her waiting list based on those enrollment numbers. “Kids get sick all the time,” Gale says. “If we are forced to reserve that space, then we should get paid for that day.” This is one of the ways that early childhood education is penalized, something that doesn’t happen in K–12 education, which receives broad federal and state support, she explains. “If a child in K–12 is out one day, the teacher doesn't get paid less. For some reason, we don’t see child care as education,” Gale says.

With the ARPA funds, Gale and other child care providers received reimbursement from the state for any child enrolled in their program, regardless of any days they missed. This allowed for a more consistent revenue stream and to more effectively plan staff schedules. This change in subsidy reimbursement policy was made permanent in several states, including California, Michigan, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Montana.²⁵⁴ West Virginia is also continuing to pay providers based on enrollment rather than attendance, and though this policy has been extended several times, it has not yet been made permanent through legislation.

In addition to the more comprehensive reimbursement plan, the state raised the income eligibility limit (to families making 85 percent of the state median income) so that more families would qualify for child care subsidies. But with the end of the ARPA funding, families who had received funds for child care also lost their spots.

Rick Poling is a 59-year-old metal worker in Weirton, with custody of two of his grandchildren, Leona and Tyler, ages five and six. They had relied on Miss Tiffany’s for child care during the pandemic when Poling was working. Since he was considered an essential worker, the state used ARPA funding to provide him with free child care, regardless of income eligibility. Poling was among those who worked 12-hour shifts and appreciated that Gale kept her center open early and late for him. “The kids loved going there,” he says. “Miss Tiffany was really great with them.”

Poling’s case of raising grandchildren is not unusual in this country. More than 2.5 million kids²⁵⁵ in the United States are being raised by a relative who is not a parent—approximately 3 percent of all kids—and the prevalence of opioids²⁵⁶ makes the caregiving arrangement more likely for children in West Virginia, which has one of the highest rates of kinship care.²⁵⁷

But the child care subsidies for essential workers ended in October 2023. Poling received a letter from West Virginia’s family services agency explaining that his child care benefit would be cut off. Poling had also switched jobs, and at his new income level, he no longer qualified for any additional state subsidy. Paying $300 per week for child care for his two grandchildren at Miss Tiffany’s was too much for him. “They liked being at Miss Tiffany’s with the other kids,” Poling says. “But it’s not something I can afford right now.”

Poling’s new job is just across the state border in Ohio. He works with titanium metal: “You see any airplane in the sky, and we’re the place that put the metal on there,” he says. His shift schedules change by week and can be either 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., or 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Shift work hours like this make securing child care complicated, even with a provider like Gale who had been willing to extend hours and open early.

Without the child care option at Miss Tiffany’s, Poling relies on a friend, a retired teacher, and his girlfriend to help with the kids. For his overnight shift, he drops the grandkids off at the friend’s house, who he pays $250 “every few weeks” for helping him out. Tyler is now in a pre-K program that ends at 1 p.m., and Leona is in kindergarten until 3 p.m. “It’s much easier for them now that they’re in school,” Poling says. But this patchwork arrangement comes with its own challenges and requires mental energy to manage all of it.

Child Care Staff

Years of low wages and no benefits for child care workers have created a drastic staffing shortage in the industry, one that Gale has felt with her team.²⁵⁸ But the influx of ARPA funds allowed providers like Gale to provide bonuses for staff, which were better than raises since future funding was uncertain. ARPA also helped Gale to pay for a floating staff member, without whom Gale has had to step in, bringing paperwork into the classroom to try and finish while the kids are playing or taking a rest. On some short-staffed days, Gale wouldn’t get home until 10 p.m. after starting at 5 a.m.

In exchange for these round-the-clock hours, Gale estimates her take-home pay is $40,000 per year. That’s better than the average child care worker in the state, who makes $10.66 an hour, but the precarity of the business means that she is constantly concerned about money. And it’s less than the median household income in West Virginia, which is about $55,000.²⁵⁹

Low wages lead to other problems for her staff, like securing access to reliable transportation. Gale says many of her employees cannot afford a car. “Or if they can, it’s an extremely unreliable car,” she says, “a beater car.” She has one or two staff members without access to any car, so they find ways to get rides from friends and relatives. Public transit options in Weirton are extremely limited.

Many of her staff are already working 9- to 12-hour shifts per day, and being short-staffed means that Gale offers overtime when someone calls out sick. But even with time-and-a-half overtime pay, it’s just $15 an hour. “It’s still not a ton of money,” she says.

One of Gale’s own staff members made so little money that she also qualified for child care subsidies. This worker recently had to leave her job to care for a new baby with complications, which meant she no longer qualified for a subsidy for her older child. West Virginia’s state legislature has another bill pending, House Bill 4002, which would provide child care assistance to child care staff regardless of their income.²⁶⁰ This could also have the effect of providing some relief to child care providers who give their staff steep discounts for their own children; instead of Gale’s business taking the financial hit, the state would cover the cost of her staff’s child care.

What Comes Next

ARPA funds brought about historic investment in child care. A number of states have seen the changes ARPA made possible as a positive shift that should be continued, and their governments have poured in historic investment to build better child care infrastructure. But, as experts have advocated, a state-by-state solution isn’t enough for a national child care crisis,²⁶¹ particularly for states like West Virginia, a state with one of the highest poverty ratings and lowest economic opportunity rating.²⁶²

Manufacturers in West Virginia have expressed concerns that the lack of child care hurts the state’s competitive edge, contributing to its low ranking in child well-being.²⁶³ Gale mentioned that Form Energy coming to town speaks directly to this crisis: Good jobs are arriving in the region, and yet there still aren’t enough child care spots for the families who need them.

Gale has become a vocal supporter of passing the child care legislation in her state and speaking out on how more investment is needed for child care. The ARPA funds shifted Gale’s mindset about what’s possible and how and why she believes the government should play a role in child care—as it does in nearly every other industrialized country.

“I dumped every last penny I had into my business before COVID hit,” she says. “I did a Google search about who makes decisions in West Virginia and started reaching out to the state legislators and bringing [other child care providers] together.” She began volunteering with the West Virginia Association for Young Children and joined the board as secretary, going to Charleston and advocating for more child care funding. Her advocacy has started to take on a larger role in her life: She recently accepted a position as the executive director for the West Virginia Women’s Alliance.

With these new responsibilities, Gale will retain ownership of her two child care centers but not manage the day-to-day work. “I have to be prepared for the next funding cliff,” she explains. “In case we have to close our doors.”

By Ashley Álvarez

Un Estudio Sobre Las Experiencias de Una Familia Latina Con Las Ayudas Por El COVID-19

En marzo del 2020, COVID-19 fue algo novedoso para Ivonne Valadez Solano, un relato de las noticias que escuchó durante el poco tiempo en que se encontró cerca de un televisor. Pero Valadez Solano no tenía tiempo para sentarse a mirar la televisión. Ella es madre de dos hijos y trabajaba tiempo completo cuando su trabajo en una cafetería cerró por las órdenes de “permanecer en casa” del gobernador de California.²⁶⁶ Calculó dos cosas: había una enfermedad grave que podría afectar a sus hijos, en ese entonces de cinco años y diez meses, y Valadez Solano y su pareja ya no tenían ingresos para sostener a su familia.

La situación no era la que Valadez Solano se imaginó cuando emigró a los Estados Unidos (EE.UU.) de México. Llegó a los veinte años a Los Ángeles (LA) con sueños de avanzar sus estudios en ciencia de ingeniería y informática. Desafortunadamente, las barreras sistémicas que enfrentan los Latinos que emigran a los EE.UU. impidieron sus sueños, incluyendo dificultad en acceder recursos para aprender inglés y oportunidades limitadas de empleo.

Durante la pandemia, Valadez Solano recibió asistencia de desempleo y dos cheques estímulos.²⁶⁷ Por parte de su bebé, recibió el beneficio WIC (sus siglas en inglés),²⁶⁸ o el Programa Especial de Nutrición Suplementaria para Mujeres, Infantes y Niños.²⁶⁹ De vez en cuando, la familia iba a una escuela local para recoger los alimentos gratis que el distrito de LA ofrecía a familias con estudiantes escolares.²⁷⁰ Aunque Valadez Solano trató de aplicar para la asistencia para el alquiler en LA, el proceso era demasiado frustrante y, al final, no completó el proceso.²⁷¹

Este estudio relata la realidad de millones de familias en los EE.UU. Los programas de asistencia durante la pandemia proporcionaron un alivio para familias, pero no significa que fueron suficientes. Con muchas de estas ayudas terminando por la falta de financiamiento adicional del congreso estadounidense, ¿qué va a pasar cuando las ayudas desaparezcan por completo?

El Sueño de Ivonne

Ivonne Valadez Solano emigró de Guerrero, México a los EE.UU. en junio del 2010 con grandes sueños. Completó dos años de su carrera en ciencia de ingeniería y informática antes de emigrar para aprender inglés, una competencia crítica para su profesión. Emigró a los EE.UU. con el apoyo de sus padres quienes ya habían emigrado al país y vivían en LA. Desde el hogar de sus padres en Mid-City, Valadez Solano tomó el transporte público por una hora, ida y vuelta, a una escuela para adultos en el centro de LA.

El transporte público de LA es difícil de navegar. Solo el 6.8% de Angelinos utilizan transporte público²⁷² y la mayoría son Latinos.²⁷³ La mayoría reportan ingresos bajo de $15,000 al año.²⁷⁴ Aunque el transporte público no es utilizado frecuentemente en Los Ángeles, es crítico para familias Latinos y otros usuarios de bajos recursos.

Pero el profesor de inglés dejó a Valadez Solano más confundida que cuando empezó. Determinada en aprender inglés, se transfirió a un centro ocupacional donde encontró cursos que sí le ayudaron. “Fue desesperante porque no sabia ingles,” recanto Valadez Solano. “Para tener oportunidades, se tiene que dar oportunidad.”

Pero su transporte no era gratis. Valadez Solano busco trabajo para pagar las tarifas del autobús y sus otros gastos. Encontró un puesto en un restaurante de comida rápida al otro lado de la ciudad, a una hora y media de su escuela por autobús. Entre el horario fijo de sus cursos, el horario de noche hasta la madrugada de su nuevo trabajo, y las rutas del autobús, Valadez Solano estudió cuatro meses antes de dejar los cursos. “No era lo mejor, pero era un empiezo. No es lo que quería, pero adelante,” dijo Valadez Solano.

Valadez Solano siguió trabajando en servicios al cliente por varios años. Aprendió más inglés a través de sus trabajos, y aprendió más sobre cómo las barreras sistémicas funcionan a nivel interpersonal. En el 2019, durante su sexto año trabajando en una famosa cadena de cafeterías, se dio cuenta del racismo en el trabajo. Cuando una nueva directora, quien era Negra, fue promocionada, la gerente de la tienda—quien era blanca—hizo varios comentarios racistas.

“No eran educados, ni en su carácter o su pensamiento. Más la manager decía comentarios que eran muy irrespetuosos. La DM [district manager] era nueva, pero buena. Yo como supervisor escuché muchos comentarios de la manager. Y no me pareció bien. Para nada bien,” relato Valadez Solano. “Así no se puede trabajar.”

Cuando Valadez Solano reportó los comentarios de forma anónima, fue ignorada. “Nada cambió. Nada pasó.”

Después de reportar los comentarios, el ambiente en su trabajo fue tan hostil que Valadez Solano decidió dejar su puesto, que coincidió con el tiempo que dio a luz a su segundo hijo en mayo del 2019.

“Antes, yo respetaba la misión de la compañía. Pero eso me enseñó que los valores habían cambiado.” Valadez Solano empezó un nuevo puesto con otra cadena popular de cafeterías en septiembre del 2019. Aunque quedaba más lejos de su casa, no se arrepintió de reportar los comentarios racistas.

Valadez Solano conoció a su pareja en su primer trabajo en el 2010, formando una familia de estatus migratorio mixta. Su pareja es primera generación estadounidense, cuya familia es de México. Los padres de Valadez Solano, como ella, son inmigrantes de México. La mamá de Valadez Solano ayudaba—y sigue ayudando—con el cuidado infantil. En California, este tipo de cuidado infantil está exento del requisito de tener licencia.²⁷⁵ Conocida por sus siglas en inglés, FFNs (Family, Friends, and Neighbors) o familiares, amigos, y vecinos pueden proveer cuidado infantil a menores de edad de su familia biológica y a niños de hasta una familia más.

Empezando en 2020, Valadez Solano tenía dos hijos con su pareja. Su hija tenía cuatro años y su hijo era recién nacido. Todo estaba bien. Valadez Solano trabajaba en la cafetería, su pareja trabajaba por su propia cuenta como pastelero, su hija asistía a Head Start, y su mamá ayudaba con el cuidado infantil cuando era necesario. La familia de cuatro vivía en un apartamento de una recámara.

“Estábamos bien,” dijo Valadez Solano.

Llegó la Pandemia

En el 2020, Valadez Solano trabajaba de tiempo completo en una cafetería y aprovechaba el tiempo que tenía con sus hijos. “De pasada escuchaba las noticias, cuando la televisión estaba prendida y dejaba a mis hijos con mi mamá,” ella explicó. Pero empezó a deducir que el coronavirus era grave cuando sus horarios en la cafetería empezaron a disminuir. Y, en marzo de 2020, por órdenes del gobernador de California, todos los que no eran trabajadores esenciales tenían que quedarse en casa.²⁷⁶

De repente, Valadez Solano y su pareja ya no tenían fuente de ingresos.

Asistencia al Desempleo

El primer mes, la pareja usó los pocos ahorros que tenían para pagar sus fracturas. En el segundo mes, usaron sus tarjetas de crédito y Valadez Solano aplicó a la asistencia al desempleo.²⁷⁷ Uno en cada cuatro trabajadores americanos recibieron al menos un pago del beneficio de desempleo durante la pandemia.²⁷⁸ Valadez Solano empezó a recibir la asistencia después de aproximadamente dos meses. Dijo que recibió $450 cada dos semanas, lo máximo que una persona viviendo en California puede recibir.²⁷⁹

Mientras tanto, su pareja tomó la decisión difícil de regresar a trabajar ese verano. Encontró empleo con un pequeño negocio de pastelitos. Valadez Solano dijo, “Fui super cuidadosa. Hice que se quite su ropa cuando regresaba cada día y los lavaba. Uno como madre es demasiada exagerada.” Cada día que trabajaba su pareja, Valadez Solano desinfectaba la ropa y la ponía en una bolsa separada hasta que iba a lavar.

Durante el año del 2020, solo ella o su pareja salían. Valadez Solano salía primariamente para ir al mercado y a la lavandería. Aunque el edificio tenía máquinas de lavar comunales, la mayoría de las ocasiones estaban ocupadas. Hay aproximadamente cuarenta y cinco apartamentos en su edificio, y solo cuatro máquinas para lavar. Y, Valadez Solano no se sentía cómoda usarlas con el virus cuando, en ese entonces, no había vacunas disponibles.

Beneficios Alimentarios

La familia utilizó una variedad de ayudas durante la pandemia. Por parte de su bebé, Valadez Solano recibió un aumento del beneficio de WIC, que salió a $10 más para comprar frutas y vegetales, un aumento que terminó siendo $26 cada mes.²⁸⁰ De vez en cuando, la familia pasaba a una escuela local para recoger los alimentos gratis que el distrito escolar de LA ofrecía a familias con estudiantes escolares.²⁸¹

Cheques de Estímulo

Valadez Solano también recibió dos de los tres cheques estímulos.²⁸² No sabe porque nunca recibió el tercero. Esta ocurrencia de cheques de estímulo no recibidos o de suma menos de lo que debería de ser no fue incomun, con un noticiero popular reportando en español como sugerir ayuda.²⁸³

Asistencia Para el Alquiler

Aunque Valadez Solano consideró aplicar para la asistencia para el alquiler en LA, el proceso era demasiado frustrante y, al final, no aplicó.²⁸⁴ “Mi pareja me dijo que no aplique, que solo sería una pérdida de tiempo,” contó Valadez Solano. Sin decirle a su pareja, ella fue al sitio web que vio promocionada en las noticias.

El proceso era complicado. La aplicación requería que el aplicante y el propietario proporcionen documentos, un paso que se sentía demasiado burocrático. Y, cuando Ivonne leo que uno de los requisitos era que los aplicantes tengan ingresos iguales o menos del 80 por ciento del ingreso medio del área, le dio hesitación. “No sabía si calificamos. Y, para no estar segura y tener que poner tantos documentos, mejor no traté.”

El 80 por ciento del ingreso medio del área antes de la pandemia era $83,500 para una familia de cuatro. En el 2019, Valadez Solano y su pareja reportaron aproximadamente $75,000 de ingresos.

Aunque vivieron muchos desafíos, la familia de Valadez Solano también tuvo momentos felices. En el primer año de la pandemia, Valadez Solano se encargó de apoyar a sus hijos. La hija de Valadez Solano, Delilah,²⁸⁵ se graduó de Head Start en junio de 2020, con la ceremonia pasada en vehículo como fue la práctica común durante las órdenes de “permanecer en casa.”²⁸⁶ Fue una de las pocas veces que los hijos de Valadez Solano salieron. Puede ser, por su precaución, que nadie en la familia ha contratado COVID hasta el día de hoy.

Delilah empezó una nueva etapa de su vida durante la pandemia, pero por medios poco convencionales: empezó el kinder en línea. El distrito escolar de Los Ángeles (LAUSD, o Los Angeles Unified School District) anunció²⁸⁷ que iba a continuar clases en línea para el año escolar del 2020-21, como la mayoría de las escuelas en el país.²⁸⁸

“Fue estresante para ella. Trate de hacer algo normal, para su futuro,” explicó Valadez Solano. Construyó una “esquina de escuela” para su hija. Hasta el día de hoy, esta esquina se encuentra en la sala de su apartamento. Pegatinas de letras, números, y dibujos cubren la pared. La mesa de comer se convirtió en un escritorio para la niña por cuatro horas cada día.

“Le hice una rutina. Se cambiaba a su uniforme, y haci sabía que tenía que enfocarse en la escuela,” dijo Valadez Solano. “Yo la vi enfocada, respetuosa. Se adaptó. Y eso fue lo que me importaba. Que este comoda.”

La rutina de Delilah sirvió para promover un sentimiento de normalidad y calma. Delilah se ponía su uniforme en la mañana y desayunaba. Usando la computadora proporcionada por el distrito, Delilah empezó su medio-dia de kinder. En LAUSD, una de cada tres familias no tenían acceso a una computadora y/o a una conexión a Internet estable y rápida.²⁸⁹ Afortunadamente, Delilah tenía una conexión al Internet en su apartamento, aunque no tenía su propia computadora o dispositivo. La rutina le ayudó a seguir en curso y seguir las normas de la escuela. Los estudiantes no tenían permitido tomar las clases en sus camas o pijamas. Aunque no era permitido que apaguen sus cámaras, varios si las apagaban.

Cuando le pregunté a Valadez Solano como le hablo a su hija sobre la pandemia, me contestó en Spanglish. “Le dije que era como cuando te da gripe, pero dos veces más peor. Muchas personas iban al cielo. And you don’t want to get sick, right?”

Cada día, la clase de Delilah empezó con un check-in, un ejercicio para evaluar cómo estaban los estudiantes. Usaban colores para representar sus emociones. A la memoria de Valadez Solano, verde era genial, o great; amarillo era mas o menos, o okay; y rojo era triste o enojado, o sad o mad. “También usaron azul, pero no recuerdo exactamente cual emoción representaba ese,” dijo Valadez Solano.

En general, Delilah usaba el color verde o amarillo, aunque Valadez Solano notaba que se miraba “un poco triste” por no poder conocer a sus compañeros como lo hacia en Head Start.

A través del día, los estudiantes tenían una variedad de actividades. Miraban videos o les enseñaban por boca usando materiales que las escuelas hicieron disponibles a los estudiantes. Hacían ejercicio con sus cámaras prendidas. A medio día, tomaban un descanso de quince minutos.

Valadez Solano notaba que Delilah se adaptó bien al cambio de aprendizaje en línea. “Era mi prioridad asegurarme que ella estuviera cómoda. Vi muchos niños con sus cámaras apagadas, o fuera de uniforme. No miraba a sus padres ahí con ellos. Puede ser que sus padres no les ayudaban, y puede ser que es porque sus padres tenían que trabajar.”

Viendo que su bebé tenía solo diez meses en marzo de 2020, él no entendía la realidad de vivir sus primeros 24 meses primariamente en el apartamento de sus padres o abuelos. Todavía se está investigando el impacto en los niños en pasar sus primeros años durante las órdenes de permanecer en casa. Un estudio²⁹⁰ encontró impactos negativos a su desarrollo y a la salud mental de los padres, y otro estudio detallo los impactos al desarrollo socioemocional de infantes nacidos un poco antes o durante de la pandemia.²⁹¹

Los recursos locales y federales ayudaron a Ivonne y su familia, pero no lo suficiente. Valadez Solano tuvo que regresar a trabajar en febrero de 2021, un mes después²⁹² que levantaron las órdenes de “permanecer en casa” en California y antes²⁹³ de que la población general pudiera obtener la vacuna. Aunque los beneficios que recibió Valadez Solano le ayudaron por un tiempo, no fueron suficientes.

“Fue demasiado estrés como madre. No me quería enfermar,” confesó Valadez Solano. “Pero necesitábamos el dinero.” Durante el día, ella dejó a sus hijos al cuidado de su mamá mientras que ella trabajaba en un concesionario de coches.

El Día de Hoy

Un día típico para Valadez Solano es extremadamente ocupado. “Trabajo desde la madrugada esos días. No quiero despertar los niños cuando entro al cuarto, so los dejo con mi mama,” explicó Valadez Solano. “Ella los deja a la escuela en la mañana y yo los recojo. Los traigo a la casa, les doy de comer, hacemos lo que necesitamos. Y los dejo con mi mama para que no los despierte en la mañana y pierdan sueño.”

Descansa dos días de la semana, los martes y miércoles. Esos días, ella pasa el tiempo con sus hijos mientras que su pareja trabaja como pastelero en una cafetería. Cuando él descansa los domingos y lunes, él cuida a los niños mientras que ella trabaja. Los jueves a sábados, dejan a sus hijos con la mamá de Valadez Solano para dormir.

Valadez Solano tiene un nuevo trabajo situado cerca del aeropuerto internacional de LA (LAX), al otro lado de la ciudad. Es una manager con una compañía que ayuda con el manejo de los restaurantes y otros negocios en los aeropuertos. Empezó en diciembre del 2023 después de dejar otro trabajo en servicio al cliente con una compañía de restaurantes.

“Lo deje por lo mismo que deje el otro trabajo,” explicó. “Escuche a una compañera, también Latina, preguntarle a mi otra compañera, ‘Why don’t you speak English?’” Valadez Solano se rió y dijo, “Vives en Los Ángeles.” Valadez Solano puso un énfasis en la pronunciación de la ciudad, reconociendo con humor que el nombre de la ciudad es una frase en español, señalando que fueron españoles que colonizaron el área. A pesar de su humor, Valadez Solano sabía por experiencia que difícil es aprender el inglés. Ambos pueden internalizar la retórica racista y xenófobo de priotizar el ingles apesar de las barreras para aprenderlo, como las que vivío Valadez Solano.

La familia de Valadez Solano sigue en su apartamento de una recamara. Ella y su pareja comparten una cama, mientras que sus hijos comparten una litera. Si ella se levanta, también se levantarian sus hijos.

Los días que cuida a sus nietos, la mamá de Valadez Solano los deja en la escuela además de irse a su trabajo. Su mamá trabaja en una lavandería mientras que su esposo está jubilado. Su mamá es la única fuente de ingreso para ella, su esposo, y la hermana menor de Ivonne. Su hermana, en ese entonces de cinco años, nació en los EE.UU. y asistía a la escuela primaria de la hija de Valadez Solano.

Cuando visité a Valadez Solano en la primavera del 2024, me sentí agradecida. Pasé uno de los dos días que tiene libre para pasar con sus hijos.

Valadez Solano me contó cómo están sus hijos, ahora de nueve y cuatro años. Su hija va en el tercer grado y le encanta la escuela. Su hijo empezó el transitional kindergarten (TK)²⁹⁴, un año escolar en California que expandirá el acceso al prekinder gratis a todas familias en el estado, independiente de sus ingresos.²⁹⁵ Empezando en el año escolar de 2025-26, TK estará disponible para todos los niños de cuatro años.²⁹⁶

Para el hijo de Valadez Solano, este año es su primera vez interactuando con niños de su edad por tanto tiempo. Más estudios dirán cómo la pandemia afectó a los niños que eran bebés durante las órdenes de “permanecer en casa.”²⁹⁷

Valadez Solano relata que su hijo es “un poco tímido, pero ahí va.” En eso le doy la razón. Cuando llegué a su apartamento, el niño me veía con timidez pero curiosidad. Después de un rato, me ofreció galletas, jugo, y me enseñó sus juguetes favoritos. Cuando me fui, me dio permiso de abrazarlo de despedida.

Le pregunté a Valadez Solano de lo que piensa que los legisladores y el público general deberían saber sobre la experiencia de familias Latinas de bajos recursos durante la pandemia.

Fue directa. Habló sobre más ayudas para la renta. “Tiene que haber rent control. Si no le van a seguir subiendo a la renta. A mí me la acaban de subir unos setenta dólares. Para el que tiene dinero, setenta dólares no es mucho. Pero para mí, para el que tiene el dinero contado, si es mucho. Es menos tiempo que puedo pasar con mis hijos.”

Habló sobre más ayudas para los trámites de imigracion. “Yo tuve suerte que mi papá me ayudó con mis trámites. Pero para el que no tiene alguien aquí, ¿que no conoce el sistema?” Valadez Solano supuso que si ella no tenía el apoyo de su familia, no sería posible acceder a las ayudas del gobierno. ”Puede ser por no tener seguro social o por miedo,” ella explicó.

En torno de las ayudas de la pandemia, dijo, “No hubieran esperado que la gente pasara hambre o tenga gran necesidad para ayudar. Esperaban que estes en la calle para darnos ayuda.” Agregó, “Antes, durante, y después, uno tiene que estar todo el día en el trabajo para que le alcance. Eso no es vida.”

Habló sobre sus hijos, y los apoyos que necesitan para que sigan adelante y cumplan sus sueños como los que ella tenía. “A mi ya se me fue el chance, y pienso en lo que hubiera hecho diferente para terminar mi carrera. Ahora me gusta el servicio al cliente; me gusta hablar con las personas. Y ahora trabajo por mis hijos, que ellos cumplan sus sueños y no los cambien.”

• Beneficio de desempleo: El beneficio de desempleo provee una ayuda económica a trabajadores elegibles.²⁹⁸ Fue extendido²⁹⁹ por las políticas federales, Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act,³⁰⁰ y luego continuado por el American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) del 2021.³⁰¹ En California, una persona es elegible para el beneficio de desempleo si: gano suficiente sueldo durante un período reglamentario; está totalmente o parcialmente desempleado; está desempleado por causa ajena; y es físicamente capaz, disponible, y listo para trabajar inmediatamente.³⁰² Los beneficios de desempleo no están exentos de impuestos federales.³⁰³
• Aumento de WIC: El Programa Especial de Nutrición Suplementaria para Mujeres, Infantes y Niños, conocido por su sigla en inglés como WIC, es un programa federal.³⁰⁴ Ayuda a mujeres embarazadas y mujeres con niños hasta la edad de cinco con beneficios financieros para comprar alimentos, incluyendo fórmula para bebés, frutas, y vegetales. Los beneficios son aceptados en ciertas tiendas. El beneficio para frutas y vegetales fue aumentado durante la pandemia, de $16 a $26 cada mes.³⁰⁵
• Alimentos gratis: El Programa Nacional de Almuerzo Escolar es el programa federal administrado por el Departamento de Agricultura (USDA, su sigla en inglés) que maneja las comidas de precio reducido o gratis en las escuelas.³⁰⁶ Durante la emergencia por el coronavirus, el USDA autorizó a los distritos escolares que distribuyan alimentos gratis, conocida como el programa de alimentos ‘grab-and-go.’³⁰⁷ Empezando en marzo 18 del 2020, el distrito escolar de Los Ángeles (LAUSD, su sigla en inglés) distribuyó millones de comidas gratis a niños y familias sin requisitos de edad o que los niños sean estudiantes de LAUSD.³⁰⁸
• Cheques estímulos: El acta de CARES distribuyó dos cheques estímulos o, como se llamaron en la política, dos pagos de impacto económico.³⁰⁹ El acta de ARPA distribuyó un tercer cheque estímulo. Los pagos fueron distribuidos por depósito o por el correo como cheque.³¹⁰
• Programa de Asistencia de Emergencia para inquilinos: El propósito de Programas de Asistencia de Emergencia para Inquilinos fue proveer asistencia financiera para inquilinos de bajos ingresos en riesgo de quedarse sin hogar debido a la pandemia. La política federal Consolidated Appropriations Act³¹¹ proveyó la primera fase de ayuda, y el acta de ARPA brindó fondos adicionales.³¹² Los Ángeles estableció su propio programa para inquilinos en la ciudad.³¹³

This report is the product of a qualitative research study that began in 2022 and ran through 2024. The study sought to understand how families living in poverty or on low incomes experienced the impact and aftermath of pandemic-era aid and what lessons could be learned for policymakers and the public about what families need to thrive.

To this end, Better Life Lab researchers and reporters received training in ethical human subjects research and adopted a grounded theory approach, which entailed collecting data from individuals with direct experience of pandemic aid and relying on their interpretations and accounts of their experiences to form conclusions about this time period and its potential lessons for lawmakers and the public moving forward. The Better Life Lab team spent extensive time interviewing 11 families with children across the country living in poverty, as defined by the Supplemental Poverty Rate, or on wages low enough to qualify for public benefits. We also extensively profiled one child care provider and the financially insecure community she serves. Those who agreed to participate in our study included people who identified as white, Black, Latin, and Native American. About half were partnered, and half were raising children on their own. About half were U.S.-born and half had immigrated to the United States.

To preserve the integrity and authenticity of our narrators’ voices, we made a conscious and deliberate decision to limit edits to their vernacular speech and instead recognize that they are experts in their own lived experiences. Part of that work must include refusing to fit how narrators tell their stories into the confines of privileged language. Our narrators were courageous enough to speak freely about their experiences, and out of respect, we chose not to mold their dialects to fit within the confines of Standard American English. We also researched, reported, and wrote one case study in Spanish, recognizing the presence of an estimated 17.5 million Spanish speakers living in the United States who speak English less than “very well” and are overrepresented among families living in poverty.³²³

The researchers employed four qualitative research methods to gather the data they analyzed: focus groups, case studies, facilitated stories, and journalism. The researchers met regularly to discuss their data and their participants’ narrations of their experiences and conducted multiple synthesis sessions to map and analyze major themes emerging from the stories. They also noted particularities and exceptions among the participants to avoid overgeneralizations and maintain nuance in the eventual findings.

New America’s New Practice Lab (NPL) is conducting a longitudinal, multi-site, and mixed-format qualitative research study with families experiencing financial insecurity while raising kids under age six. This began with five in-person co-design workshops, in English and Spanish, in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, recruiting more than 30 families from rural and urban communities. For the next 18 months, the families engaged with the Lab through a remote digital diary study, offering insights into the joys and challenges of raising young children through a series of prompting questions. Together, the researchers and families explored what it would mean for their families to thrive and the resources needed to get there. Findings in this report are informed by insights pulled from some of the New Practice Lab team’s analysis of their qualitative data and deeper dive interviews conducted with select participants by the Better Life Lab team.

Better Life Lab researchers also worked through community groups and recruited four participants from across the United States for in-depth ethnographic case studies. The participants included a college-educated Black mother of four raising her children on her own in Georgia, a Spanish-speaking mixed-status immigrant family of four, two parents and two children, in Los Angeles, a single mother of Navajo descent raising two children in Utah, and one child care provider and the financially struggling community she serves in West Virginia. Individual researchers met with these participants at least once in-person in their homes and hometowns, observed their daily lives, and interviewed them extensively. These in-person meetings were supplemented with interviews on the phone and over Zoom over the years about their experiences during and after the pandemic. In particular, the researchers sought to establish timelines that showed changes to the participants’ and their families’ emotional and financial status before, during, and through the end of pandemic aid; to inquire as to which types of pandemic aid participants were able to access and how; and to ascertain how this aid and its expiration impacted participants’ attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. These participants were compensated with $250 cash cards for their time. Participants were also afforded the opportunity to fact-check and to approve or disapprove the final text of the case studies.

From the outset of the project, Better Life Lab researchers and reporters investigated, developed, and sought to use ethical storytelling guidelines to recruit, engage with, learn from, and share the stories of people living in poverty or on low wages and their experiences with the unprecedented federal investments in families during the pandemic. We chose to use facilitated storytelling to gather qualitative data, serving as facilitators to help narrators tell their own stories in their own way. The Better Life Lab recruited some narrators through our New America partners, the New Practice Lab’s focus groups, as well as through various community-based groups and partners across the country, including the Economic Security Project, Global Women’s Strike, the Aspen Institute’s Women in the Economy project, and others. We spent time with eight narrators, recording and transcribing multiple interviews, and worked alongside them to edit their stories into an “As Told To” format. Narrators, who were not compensated for their time, were engaged throughout the story development process and had final approval on their respective drafts.

The Better Life Lab, for nearly a decade, has been a pioneer in using journalistic techniques to advance its narrative change mission: We seek to advance work-family justice and intersectional gender equity and elevate the value of care through the power of solutions-focused reporting, rigorous research, and compelling storytelling. Better Life Lab team members reported widely on pandemic-era government investments, interviewing and gathering information from academic experts, researchers, policymakers, advocates, community leaders, workers, and many others to capture trends and look for specific stories to tell in reported pieces of journalism or in opinion pieces. These have been published in a variety of media outlets, including CNN, EdSurge, Early Learning Nation, The Persistent, and others, with the aim of reaching broad audiences, opening eyes and minds, and helping shape the national conversation. In addition to stand-alone pieces, the journalism informed the framing of the project, the team’s synthesis work, and this report.

The participants in these four methodologies of research do not form a representative sample of U.S. individuals nor of low-income individuals in the United States. Our researchers recruited participants through their existing networks, organizations that support low-income families, and word of mouth. Participants were selected if they were willing to participate and met the criteria of having children under 18 during the pandemic, as well as reporting having used one or more pandemic-era programs between March 2020 when the the federal government declared the pandemic a public health emergency, and May 2023, when the emergency declaration expired. Because women are more likely to be solo heads of families with low incomes than men, and families of color disproportionately have low incomes,³²⁴ participants in the various phases of this study are disproportionately women and people of color.

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”​​—Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”

As journalists, the authors of this report follow the Society of Professional Journalism’s Code of Ethics to seek the truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent. We investigate and analyze public policy, politics, cultural trends, and social issues and hold public officials to account. We seek to be accurate, authoritative, thorough, and fair.

We also seek to hold ourselves to a higher standard of ethical storytelling when we are reporting, researching, and writing about the private lives of individuals or families—often those who are unaccustomed to the spotlight and the glare of media attention. We seek to tell deeply personal stories that help us better reflect the impacts of public policy, politics, and cultural narratives and better understand and communicate the complexity of human life, our communities, our systems, and our world.

To support other researchers and journalists in telling stories with dignity, we developed this ethical storytelling guide. It recognizes that for too long, too many private individuals who do not belong to the majority white, middle-class culture have been exploited, misunderstood, “othered,” caricatured, or erased in the media. In addition to doing no harm, these guidelines also seek to repair, tell a fuller truth, and set the story straight.

At the Better Life Lab, we use character-driven, solutions-focused journalism that relies on rigorous data, academic research, and policy analysis as a key to our narrative change mission. Our journalism appears in a number of different genres in order to reach and impact diverse audiences. We write articles and op-eds that are published in mainstream media outlets. We podcast and have worked on video. We write reports, case studies, and toolkits that are published on New America’s website. We hold events, workshops, and convenings that are sometimes covered by the press. In addition to our journalism, we also do qualitative research and follow best practices for excellent “big tent” qualitative research: This means we ensure the topic is interesting and moving; the data is rigorous and credible; and the analysis is ethical, provides significance, aware of any author biases, and accomplishes what it set out to do. Below we outline some of our guiding principles.

We recognize that, as storytellers, reporters, researchers, and journalists, we are the stewards of the stories of others. We facilitate and create the space for the stories of others. We recognize others’ stories as the gifts they are. We treat people with the respect and dignity they deserve. We listen deeply. We take the time to develop mutual trust and seek to collaborate. This helps ensure that people’s voices are uplifted and they have agency in how and where their stories are shared and why. We ensure that we share common goals for the storytelling project.

We seek to feature lived experience alongside research, policy and political analysis, and scholarship in order to make cultural and political changes. Our reporting of that experience seeks to capture day-to-day interaction with policy as well as with the general public. For example, improving access to SNAP benefits may bring welcome family support, but it may not change the way a cashier looks at the benefit holder. We recognize that people are the best collaborators of their own lives and that personal experience is expertise. We ask the people closest to the problem for their ideas and perspectives on solutions.

We seek to report, facilitate, and convey stories of complex, “whole” authentic people and resist the tired tropes of “victim,” “hero,” “deserving,” “bootstrapper,” and other harmful and myopic yet pervasive media and cultural narratives. People are not their problems.

We use strengths-based framing and highlight human agency and the creativity and resilience people are often forced to use as strategies for survival in the face of explicit and implicit discrimination and bias, failed public policy and imagination, and multiple systems of oppression. We seek to practice solutions journalism, fully grounded in the challenges but highlighting real stories and data that show the potential for hope and change.

We value storytelling as an important component of social justice—connecting people and informing each other of their daily struggles and their ingenuity in surviving them. This means going deeper and showcasing complex stories that mainstream media typically sensationalizes for easy clickbait. We take time to do thorough research and speak to people directly impacted by policies.

We believe that the stories we tell should mirror the diverse experiences in the United States. Including multiple voices means counting people who have been dismissed. It means valuing the knowledge of people whose ideas, values, and cultures have been normalized as unimportant. We seek to reflect the complex intersections of race, income, gender, ethnicity, and refugee or immigration status that shape lived experiences.

Engaging with diverse populations often means understanding our participants’ positions and working to mitigate some of the systematic forces that have silenced some populations, such as fear due to anti-immigration laws and culture, language differences, education, income inequality, and geography. We recognize that we all may come from different backgrounds, and we acknowledge our privileges, power, and biases. We come as prepared as possible, having done background reporting to help us begin to understand complex, intersectional ecosystems and to engage people and communities with humility, open minds, and respect. We make real efforts to reach and build relationships with people who are often silenced. We recognize that working with trusted community partners is a key part of building trust and connection across differences. We work with trusted community partners in order to build on established relationships. Because many of the people we work with as interviewees, participants, and collaborators in our studies work long hours, we try to meet them at times and places that are most convenient for them. We sometimes conduct interviews while they are going to or at work. We work with translators in multiple languages. By sharing some questions and guidelines in advance, we give our storytellers time to process the information in their native language and English.

The systematic silencing of marginalized people happens in every field—including journalism and academia. As a result, we are conscientious about seeking out and citing diverse authors, particularly Black, Indigenous, and people of color who are historically under-cited.

Storytelling is a privileged and intimate collaboration that demands many responsibilities that we take seriously.

We obtain and maintain ongoing consent from people willing to share their stories. The storytelling process will happen through ongoing conversations. We provide participants with a topic list in advance—either in writing or verbally, based on their preferences—so that they’re aware of the subjects and themes from which we will base questions. This will give them reflection time. This will also allow the interview to flow conversationally, a methodology that helps ease the rigidity of the interview process. We keep the scope of the questions focused on what’s necessary for the completion of the project, though collaborators are free to share beyond this scope and we will always ask if there’s anything they’d like to add.

We communicate clearly from the outset the goals of the project, the goal of the story, how their stories will be used, and what impact work published publicly may have. We will keep storytellers up to date on project changes as they happen.

We set clear boundaries and expectations, and we communicate clearly our role as journalists, facilitators, and storytellers and what we can and can’t offer. We discuss the narrator’s expectations and clearly communicate our own. We explain the editorial process and what we do and do not have control over—including the limits of visibility to promote change, audience reach, responses to their narratives, story headlines, and publication deadlines. We protect our narrators’ privacy and discuss any potential safety concerns in advance. We send over consent forms in advance, allow time to read them over, and answer any questions to the best of our ability.

Within the consent forms, we inform narrators that their participation is voluntary. They are co-creators and have a say in whether and how to use photographs, images, and other representations of them and their lives. We will inform them that they reserve the right to decline to answer any question, and they can refuse the use of their quotes and/or narratives after the research is completed. We will circle back with them before publication to fact-check to ensure that their quotes and narratives are accurate, and we explain that their quotes and/or narratives cannot be retracted once published.

Consent forms for our journalistic work will explain clearly the topics we want to explore, their right to decline to answer any questions, and the fact that we will share their quotes with them before publication for review. We also ask for consent from parents or guardians before interviewing anyone under the age of 18 and strongly encourage that an adult be present during the interview. We explain that since we are following best journalism practices, they do not have the ability to change or alter their quotes. This is an opportunity to ensure that the tone and context are accurate and all facts are consistent and correct with what was shared in the interview. To be clear, the consent forms, along with sharing quotes ahead of publication, is a protocol that does not apply to politicians, public officials, others in a position of power (i.e., corporate leaders, police officers, etc.), or anyone whose role it is to interface with the media or any other situation where the person interviewed has been accused publicly of causing harm.

For qualitative research and convenings, we follow best research practices and compensate families or provide honoraria to recognize the time collaborators spend with us. We will list the honorarium amount in the consent form and make it clear to collaborators that refusing to participate in any part of the process—such as answering a question—will not disqualify them from receiving the compensation. If warranted, we can also compensate community partners for their time and work connecting us to people.

For journalism that we hope to place in mainstream media, we will communicate clearly that we typically don’t pay directly and that mainstream media editors frown on what’s called “checkbook journalism.” The Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Committee condemns the practice and says it “threatens to corrupt journalism” and that direct payments may mean the story we’re collaborating on won’t be published in a desired outlet.

However, we recognize that many families are struggling financially. We can and will use our best judgment when it comes to paying for meals we share or reimburse expenses, like transportation, that enable our work together. We can have conversations as a team about when compensation may make sense. And if we decide (on a case-by-case basis) that it does, we will disclose that fully to our editorial partners.

Just as we clearly communicate from the outset the goal of the project, the audience, and how the story will be used, we also make clear that collaborators may opt out at any point. We use best journalism practices, checking quotes and facts, potentially sharing relevant portions of drafts, and addressing any collaborator concerns before publication.

For our qualitative work, and when we help facilitate for the people who want to tell their own stories, we invite collaborators in as collaborators to the storytelling process—from story shaping to data collection to writing to publishing to sharing for impact. We will share final products and seek to ensure, where possible, that they are accessible to individuals and communities. We recognize that for immigrant populations who do not read English, the stories written in English are not accessible. In these circumstances, the responsibility to be accountable to these individuals is even greater. As a result, we aim to create a space for some of the refugee/immigrant collaborators to directly tell their stories to the audience of our published work. For example, in a past project on early childhood education in the immigrant/refugee community, we organized a panel of all immigrant/refugee women with a translator to tell their stories after our report was published.

We will either share relevant portions of narratives or quotes with collaborators or read material back to them before publication to ensure the tone and cited information accurately depict their experience. This provides an opportunity to ensure accuracy, but it does not afford participants a chance to change or alter quotes or the story.

We seek to use trauma-informed practices. While sharing one’s story can be healing, it can also be re-traumatizing. We seek to be supportive and responsive and offer choices and agency to the collaborator to prioritize their well-being. We will avoid telling our collaborators that we “know” or “understand” their unique experiences. We will not be overly interrogative or pushy if someone is hesitant to share. We will work to keep the scope of our questions relevant to the subject matter of our project. We will operate through a people-first lens.

We follow some basic steps to promote good communication with participants or those trusting us with their story. We share an agenda and some questions in written form in advance, and when possible, we use captioning available through Zoom, GoogleMeet, and Otter, to include individuals with hearing, learning, and other cognitive diversity. For audio stories and podcasts, we produce an accessible written transcript.

Many of our events, which are run by New America’s Central Communications team, are recorded, with the permission of speakers, for participants who cannot attend, who do not have stable internet, and who want to review the content after the event at a pace that works for them. When registering for New America events on our website, the team at New America provides a comment box for accessibility: “If you have a disability and may require accommodations in order to fully participate, please indicate here.”

A translator is often present at our panel discussions depending on the participants. We are constantly learning. If you have recommendations that would make our content more accessible, please send them to betterlifelab@newamerica.org.

As researchers, we seek answers to big and challenging questions because our aim is to make social and cultural changes. We recognize that these questions are overwhelming. As a result, we aim to scaffold, and use shared vocabularies, neutral ideas, and accessible language. Early questions are intentionally simple and broad. Asking individuals to name or define concepts or specific resources opens the most room for them to explain the details of their daily routines and prevents us from making assumptions about their lives. For example, in order to learn what families with young children need to thrive, we might begin by asking narrators to draw a map of their family members.

We can ask them to define concepts, such as: What is a community? What are communities you are a part of? What do you like about that community? In what ways does that community support your goals or needs? Who do you take care of? Who takes care of you?

Asking individuals to name or define concepts or specific resources opens the door to ask questions about who does what tasks in the narrator’s close family, extended family, and friends. Comparing these answers with the roles of institutions in the community can help us understand how labor is divided, and the form of help families routinely receive.

We also seek to use a “human-first” approach when framing our questions. Below we offer sample questions by topic, as an example of this.

• Personal life or opinions: What do you want people to take away from your story? How would you describe yourself, family, and life to others? What brings you joy? How long have you lived here? Walk me through a typical day: Do you take your kids to school? What does your day look like? What are your hopes/desires for yourself? Your family? If appropriate: What are your dreams now, and ones you have deferred? What’s your fondest memory of/with your children?
• Food: How do you go about buying food? Where’s the nearest grocery store? Does your grocery store offer what you need and want? How much do you spend on food and other bills each month?
• Work: Are you currently employed? What are your hours like? What’s the job like day to day? Do you have any schedule control or flexibility? Do you have control over your time or workload at work or how your work day is shaped? Do you get enough hours to be able to support your life? Are your hours consistent or erratic? How far do you have to travel to work? What’s the commute like? Is your transportation reliable? Does your employer offer health, dental, and vision insurance? Can you take time off when you need to (due to illness, children’s needs, emergencies)? Do you have vacation time?
• Housing/neighborhood: Is it adequate? How close can you afford to live to work or family? Is family close by? Can you let your kids out to play? How far are you comfortable letting them roam? Is your neighborhood walkable? Is it safe? If you need child care, is it available nearby? Is there anyone in the neighborhood or any family around who can watch your children?
• Health care: Do you have health insurance? Is it through work, Medicaid, or do you buy it yourself? Does it cover what you need? Can you afford the co-pays and deductible?
• Care: Do you provide care to anyone else? What care do you need?
• Time: Do you feel like you have enough time daily to do the things you want and need to do? Why or why not? What about leisure time? Do you have any?

• Ethical Storytelling, Stewarding the Stories of Others
• Voice of Witness, Ethical Storytelling Guidelines
• Deborah Swerdlow, “Ethical Storytelling: Communication without Exploitation,” Idealist.org
• Child Protection Manifesto, Telling Their Story: A Manifesto to Help Storytellers Keep Children Living in Crisis Safe
• Resource Media, Tipsheet: Ethical Storytelling
• Canva Design, “How to Tell a Story in an Ethical Way,” YouTube
• Julia Craven, “Why Some Journalists Are Centering Trauma-Informed Reporting,” Nieman Reports

People are the products of the systems we live in, and our thoughts are shaped by the dominant narratives of society, neither of which we may perceive. We often assume they’re the truth without question. For instance, we buy into the uniquely American narrative of individual responsibility, that we are all, ultimately, masters of our own fate. We’re led to believe that if we succeed, or if we falter, it has more to do with our own actions than the circumstances of our birth, the zip code where we live, or the history of systematic and overt and covert oppression of certain groups, particularly communities of color. This powerful and false narrative is particularly pernicious when it comes to people living in poverty or on low wages—that their life circumstance is somehow linked to an individual moral failing. There is always the “one story,” as former Sacramento mayor Michael Tubbs has said—one miraculous bootstraps-up-out-of-poverty success story, like his own. It is often used as a patronizing and cruel cudgel against those who remain trapped in impoverished situations. In essence, he told us: “See, if this one person, this one unicorn, could do it, why can’t you?”

Over the last 40 years, conservatives and neoliberals have masterfully taken this individual responsibility framing and crafted narratives that public support and public investment are wasteful, all business is good, the market is always right, the wealthy are the job creators, and, if unleashed from mandates to share the wealth, they will do a better job of creating more and sharing the wealth equitably.

This approach, however, has resulted in such high rates of inequality and human misery that it can only be called grotesque. CEOs earn as much as 1,000 times more than the average worker and 53 million people work in jobs that don’t pay a living wage or offer living hours.³²⁵ The United States, alone among advanced economies, fails on every front to support families on critical practices such as equitable paid family leave, paid sick days, and flexible work or child and elder care infrastructure. This approach has enshrined the belief that public investments in federal and state social support and poverty-prevention programs should be offered sparingly, that benefits should be difficult to obtain and keep, and that people who need such “handouts” are weak and need fixing.

So many people living in poverty or on low wages blame themselves for their financial struggles, believe that they aren’t worthy of public support, and doubt that support will actually move them out of poverty. There is often little hope. And though these narratives about individual actions impact all of us, they can be particularly punishing to immigrant families, who can be legally and socially penalized, labeled “public charges” that will be a drain on public resources rather than a boon to society, and their immigration status threatened if they try to use public supports to survive or weather difficult circumstances.

New America’s Better Life Lab team and their collaborators at the New Practice Lab wanted to have real conversations with families living in or near poverty—to work with and learn from them. Doing so requires not only an understanding of how deeply these insidious narratives are ingrained in all of us but also an approach that broadens our perspective on poverty-prevention programs. After all, the current slate of initiatives was constructed on the basis of deeply flawed narratives and beliefs about what economically vulnerable individuals and families need, often excluding the perspectives and voices of those it intends to reach.

To change course, we need to get at human hopes and dreams and hear directly from families about what they say they need. We need to start our inquiry with families, not existing policies, and create a space for families to imagine a new sense of the possible. What do they really need to thrive, not just survive? This human-centric approach became our “north star” as we began the qualitative research for this report. We understand that this reimagination cannot happen if we start with an approach grounded in and limited by current, systematically flawed policies. For example, because many immigrants in the United States are grateful for an opportunity to escape the danger and precarity of their previous homes, they wholeheartedly invest in the idea of the American Dream, which reinforces the narrative of success through individual responsibility and hard work. As a result, questions about their struggles might make them feel guilty and ashamed. How do we frame questions that give diverse families space to see where the system is failing and could be better?

Poet, writer, and revolutionary Black feminist Audre Lorde tells us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”³²⁶ In other words, if we want to make deep change in the world, then we need to work in new ways, with new questions, new tools, and new voices.

Working backwards to policy from family-centered learning, a new narrative can emerge, about the kind of economy, the kind of business practices and public policies, and the kind of mindset shift that finally acknowledges the worth and dignity of all humans and has as its goal the well-being, quality of life, and flourishing of all humans.

To operationalize an open, person-centered, “anything is possible” approach that fosters agency, recognizes strength and resilience, and values diverse experiences and languages, New America’s New Practice Lab, as the lead on the focus group phase of this project, consulted with Hilary Cottam, entrepreneur, pioneering social designer, and author of Radical Help. Together, they developed a framework to guide the focus groups and interactive activities.³²⁷ Below are guiding questions used in our conversations with families.

• Imagine: What are the elements of a thriving family life? How do families define it?
• Imagine: What would it take to get there?
  • What resources are needed to reach this ideal?
  • How would families design resources and systems of support that enable thriving?
  • What role does culture play?
• Current reality: What are family experiences with the resources offered during the COVID-19 pandemic and the current poverty-prevention programs?
  • In what ways did pandemic investments help families to thrive?³²⁸
  • What in the current landscape is contributing to family thriving? What’s not?
  • What else would you need, not just to survive, but to be your best, for your family to be at their best?
• Synthesis: What can happen to change the current landscape? And how can these family-centered lessons inform actionable recommendations that point the way toward long-overdue systems and cultural transformations?
  • What are the stories we need to be telling in order to shift from the old narrative frames to newer, truer frames? Did families change their beliefs—about themselves, about government and public policy—as a result of a better functioning safety net? What has changed about how they think of the future for themselves and their families?

When the global COVID-19 pandemic broke out, shuttering businesses, schools, and child care facilities and throwing millions out of work, economists feared families—and the economy—would face a financial apocalypse. Instead, as this timeline shows, the unprecedented federal spending to protect health and stabilize families and the economy improved financial well-being. Child poverty, hunger, and eviction rates dropped to historic lows. For a brief, powerful moment, families had a glimpse of what a more stable, financially secure life might be like. The end of pandemic aid brought a return to the daily struggle to survive for many families living in poverty or striving to make ends meet on low pay.

Throughout our research for this report, we consulted various academic, journalistic, and policy sources, some of which aren’t directly cited in this report. These readings were essential in shaping our understanding of these topics, though, and we have listed and annotated them in an Airtable collection here. We hope this collection will be valuable to journalists, researchers, advocates, and anyone interested in diving deeper into the issues discussed in this report.

While we tried to find open-access links to as many sources as possible, some academic and journalistic texts are paywalled. If you need access, we recommend seeing if your public library, employer, or any academic institution you are (even distantly!) affiliated with may have access. Additionally, in the case of academic texts, consider reaching out directly to the author via email. They may be able to share a PDF with you.

For support in navigating Airtable, see this guide.