Chapter 3. New Key Poverty Narratives

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Unfortunately, some policymakers’ rhetoric during the pandemic reinforced the outdated narrative.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.¹ 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-19.² 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.³

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.”⁴

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.⁵ 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.”⁶

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.⁷

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.⁸

In fact, U.S. taxpayers have been subsidizing these low-wage jobs, at a time when CEO salaries and shareholder profits have been soaring.⁹ 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.¹⁰

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.¹¹ 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.¹² 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 2022.¹³ The United States still has among the highest rates of poverty, and child poverty in particular, among wealthy democracies.¹⁴

“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.¹⁵ “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.”¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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.”¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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.²⁰ It’s commonly associated with intimate partner violence, war, and childhood abuse,²¹ 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.²²

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,²³ making it more difficult to understand complex systems, initiate tasks, respond to setbacks with agility, and regulate emotions.²⁴

Some of our collaborators had internalized prevailing poverty narratives and blamed themselves, or one “bad decision”²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.²⁷

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.²⁸ 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.²⁹

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 Miller³⁰ 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 2023.³¹ Lower socioeconomic status has been associated with higher baseline levels of cortisol,³² 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.³³

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.³⁴ 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.”³⁵ 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.³⁶ 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.³⁷ 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”³⁸ are top of mind for many policymakers and voters,³⁹ leading to systems that are hypervigilant and overinclusive in their approach to combating misuse.⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹ 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.⁴²

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.⁴³ 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 residents⁴⁴ of any state, also had one of the highest rates of poverty of any state, with Black residents hit particularly hard.⁴⁵

Georgia also has one of the highest rates of housing loss, evictions, and mortgage foreclosures in the country, one analysis found.⁴⁶ Georgia is also among the least affordable states for housing⁴⁷ options or subsidized housing vouchers.⁴⁸ 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.⁴⁹ By 2023, the eviction rate in Atlanta exceeded pre-pandemic levels.⁵⁰ 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.⁵¹ 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 10.⁵² 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.⁵³ 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.⁵⁴ 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.⁵⁵ 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.⁵⁶

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.⁵⁷ 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.⁵⁸

The long legacy of racism that has shaped work, care, and public policy in the state has led to extreme economic inequality.⁵⁹ 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.⁶⁰

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.⁶¹ 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.⁶² 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.⁶³

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.⁶⁴

Many child care providers struggle to stay in business and serve the families in their communities. Because child care costs are so high⁶⁵ 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.⁶⁶ In addition, many family child care providers are reimbursed at lower rates than traditional child care centers.⁶⁷ 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.⁶⁸

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.⁶⁹ 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.”⁷⁰ One typical example of this is the way people with a Southern accent⁷¹ or the “Valley Girl”⁷² accent, any non-native English speaking accent, or Black people who speak AAVE⁷³ 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.”