Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview

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.”