Speakers

Better Life Lab Report Authors:

Brigid Schulte, Director, Better Life Lab

Haley Swenson, Research and Writing Fellow, Better Life Lab

Julia Craven, Senior Writer and Editor, Better Life Lab

Ashley Álvarez, Advocate and storyteller, earning her MEd in education policy and analysis at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Study Participants:

Kiarica Schields, a case study participant, nurse, and solo mother of four, Atlanta, Georgia

Kel, a facilitated story study participant and solo parent of four in the Midwest

Chantel Valdez, a case study participant and solo mother of two who lives on a Native American reservation in Utah

Ruaa Sabek, a facilitated story study participant and married mother of two in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who emigrated to the United States from Syria.

Academics and Researchers:

Jessica Weeden, Senior Design Lead, New Practice Lab, New America

Megan Curran, PhD, Policy Director at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Welcome and Overview

Brigid Schulte: Hello everyone, and welcome. We're so delighted to have you here with us today. You're joining the Better Life Lab team at New America, where we've spent the last few years delving deeply into the impact that this unprecedented federal aid during the pandemic-what that impact was on families living in poverty or on low incomes.

If we could all go back a few years when the pandemic started in 2020. We'd never seen anything like it. Within a month, businesses shut down, child care centers closed, schools shut down. More than 20 million people-20 million people-were out of work. The unemployment rate hit 14%, higher than it had been since the Great Depression. Economists worry that families, not just those struggling, but that all families were headed for what they called a "financial apocalypse."

Instead, the government in a bipartisan manner, came together and invested more than 5 trillion dollars in domestic programs to shore up health and to support families. We wanted to take a close look at what that impact was, what the lived experience was for

these families. So we've spent the past few years diving deeply, spending time with families through case studies, reporting, and journalism and working with our partners at New America's New Practice Lab, who'd also done some workshops and focus groups.

We're excited to be releasing the results of all of that today, with our new report and our web collection page, where we prioritize the stories and the voices of so many of the study participants. And we're excited to have some of them here with us today, along with the Better Life Lab team, and some of our partners and research experts as well, to better understand: What are the lessons that we learned from this unprecedented aid? What did that mean for families? And what are the lessons that we can learn moving forward to design better policies that support families, to build an economy that works for all families. And what's what are the what are the cultural implications? What are the narratives and the stories that we tell ourselves about who is in poverty, and why, and how we create an economy of opportunity. Because one of the main things that we learned through this project is that poverty is not about individual choices, which is so much of what our narratives tell us, but really about chances. And how do we create more opportunity and chances, so that all families can thrive.

I'm going to turn it over to Haley Swenson, the Better Life Lab's research and writing fellow. She's going to be giving a short presentation of some of our key findings. Then we'll have a conversation with some of our study participants, followed by a

discussion with our New Practice Lab partners and some research experts. And then we'll open it up to your questions and have a robust conversation. So please feel free to put questions or comments or ideas that you have in the chat box, and we will get to them toward the end of the toward the end of the event today.

So with that, let me turn it over to Haley Swenson.

Presentation of Key Findings

Haley Swenson: Thanks so much, Brigid. I'm really happy to be speaking with you all today on behalf of the researchers and reporters who worked on this major project with Brigid Schulte, Julia Craven, Jasmine Heyward, Ashley, Álvarez, and Rebecca Gale. What I'm going to be able to do today is offer a very high-level overview of our findings from this project. Many of you will be familiar with macro-level analyses of the impact of pandemic aid on the economy, saving us from, as Brigid said, what many economists thought might be another Great Depression. But what we wanted to do at the Better Life Lab was, was dive into what that looked like for families. How did this aid impact their behaviors, their attitudes, their core beliefs? Because we believe that the human experience is ultimately what should drive not only public policy, but also private systems.

The title of our report is "A Glimpse of Stability." What I'll show today is really what created that glimpse of stability. And why we're just calling it a glimpse. What happened to it, and where some of these families stand today. As Brigid said, after I speak, you're going to hear directly from some of those participants in our study firsthand about their stories, so I won't try to replicate that. But I want to give just a sense of the the content that we were looking after we had done this major deep dive, and some of the common themes that came out of our findings.

So I'm going to start with this quote from Psychologist Barry Schwartz. This is really what drives the Better Life Lab's unique approach to understanding public policy, which is that narrative really matters, that much of the decision making that takes place at all levels of society is driven by stories that we tell ourselves about why things happen and how things have happened in the way that they have. So I'm just going to skip to the end of his quote. But he says, "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. And I would say, this is the role that ideas play in shaping us as policymakers, as employers, as leaders of society at all levels as well. So those stories really matter.

So in order to take this deep dive, to look at the actual experiences of families during the pandemic. We engaged in four basic qualitative research methods. First, with our colleagues at New America, the New Practice Lab. They conducted longitudinal multi-site mixed format, essentially focus groups with more than 30 families experiencing financial insecurity while raising young children. They were able to speak to those families in depth, not only about their current experiences, but what it would look like to have a society that truly helped them thrive. So we pulled from many of those findings in the report here today.

We also worked closely with eight individuals to develop what we've called facilitated narratives. These are first-person narrated stories of the pandemic and the aftermath. You can find these actually, not in the main body of the report, because it became very long with many individual stories, but on a separate collections page. I encourage you to read those stories. They're not particularly long, but they highlight the importance of seeing the full context of people's lives. And we believe that's really important if we actually want to design programs and services that help those families.

Thirdly, we engaged in four in-depth ethnographic case studies of families. You'll hear from one of those participants today, Chantel Valdez, who is from southern Utah. We also did one of those case studies in Spanish. We felt that it was very important that we allowed our participants to tell the stories in the languages in which they were most comfortable. So you can read that Spanish language report with a short summary in English for those who don't speak Spanish in the main body of the report as well. One of those case studies was actually not of a family, but of a child care provider in a struggling town in West Virginia. That child care provider was able to draw on ARPA [American Rescue Plan Act] funds, a major source of pandemic funding, to expand her child care business to serve essential workers in her small town in West Virginia. She's faced a lot of challenges since that money has begun to dwindle.

Lastly, we engaged in one of our favorite methods at the Better Life Lab, which is journalism. Throughout this reporting, we didn't want to just sit on our findings until the study was complete. We wanted to share them with the public as we went along. So our interviews with experts, our reporting with other families, additional families, and our analyses of how these projects and programs were working during the pandemic have already been published widely, and you can see those as well on the same collections page.

I want to start out with a quote that we got from one of our participants. This is Latoya Dyer. She's a mother of three, working with a partner to raise three children. She works as a financial and operations manager of a nonprofit in Florida. Before the pandemic, she and her husband were struggling to get by, struggling to have enough money to pay for health care, to pay for their children's basic needs, to pay for enough quality food to make their kids feel full and happy. And Latoya said of this pandemic aid, "I finally felt human."

We think this is a really important place to start, because it's something that the data about the impact of this aid really can't capture-that total qualitative impact of suddenly, going from having very little help to lots of help, and getting it from many directions.

We heard from many participants that that initial influx of pandemic aid changed the quality of life in a way that was truly profound, and helped many participants begin to think of the future, begin to think of how to parent their kids in different ways, and help them at the very least, at a time when things felt very unstable, to at least feel that in their homes things were stable.

So how did this happen? We recognize four main contributions that helped across all families we heard from:

One was unprecedented access to health care. This was due to some changes in the process of qualifying for Medicaid, which meant that many more families who were previously not able to qualify for Medicaid services suddenly were, and so the quality of care they received, the ability to receive that care without exorbitant costs, and to receive that care without going through enormous red tape was a major game changer for families. They felt that they had greater access to health care than they had before.

Substantial unemployment insurance for many families who lost their jobs at the outset of the pandemic meant that, in some cases, low-income families who had been working incredibly hard, sometimes in multiple jobs, were in many cases earning more than they had prior to the federal "top up" in unemployment insurance that happened for a few months during the pandemic.

They also experienced more stable housing. This was due to a combination of policies, including an eviction moratorium, rental assistance and mortgage forbearance. One of our participants, for example, was able to seek mortgage forbearance, which meant she added 18 months onto the end of her mortgage in exchange for not paying her mortgage for 18 months, which was really key. She's a single mom and a widow, working on one income while trying to support two children through the pandemic. Other participants were able to access rental assistance through federal programs that were then distributed to the states to help cover their rent during the pandemic.

We also saw that the expanded child tax credit and stimulus checks meant families had more cash on hand. This was really vital to families, because what it gave them ultimately was flexibility to put money where it was needed at any given time. So for some families, this meant they were able to use that money to buy better food for their families. It meant that they were able to cover bills or catch up on bills they were behind on. One family's car broke down. That car was the only means to get to work and continue to bring in income as essential workers. During the pandemic they were able to use the extra cash on hand they had from the expanded child tax credit and stimulus checks to immediately repair their car, something they wouldn't have been able to do if it weren't for those programs. Other families were able to use this money to provide their children with enriching activities that they weren't able to give them prior to this aid.

We don't want to pretend that there were no problems with any of these programs. Sometimes, there were difficulties in receiving these benefits, in learning about them, in being able to access them. There were language barriers to navigating some of these systems, and as anybody who has tried to access any of these programs in the past might tell you, sometimes it's just so confusing, and actually takes so much work to navigate that it can sometimes feel more difficult to follow through than not. So some inequalities that predated the pandemic persisted through the pandemic, and in some cases were worsened. I'll give one example of that in the case of Chantel Valdez, who is a Navajo woman living in southern Utah. There was a clear difference in the experience of the pandemic between the Navajo population and their white neighbors. We saw this at the macro level, in statistics about how communities of color were was hit by Covid-19 worse. Chantel lost more than one close family member who was really key to her family support network. As Chantel said, "How did we get hit so bad? And for some people in the same town it was like it never happened?" So this unprecedented aid was not able to compensate for some of these inequalities that long pre-existed Covid-19.

Additionally, families told us about needs that weren't met by these policies and programs. Many of these families needed access to paid leave for extended periods of time because their children were out of [school and] child care. Their aging parents or other family members needed care. That meant that they weren't able to work. They also needed access to affordable child care. Not all of our participants were laid off or unemployed as a result of the pandemic. Many were engaged in essential work and health care services. One of our participants was working as a nurse, actually, and when schools shut down she was unable to continue working as a nurse because her children had no care, and she needed to be there for them.

Participants also reported that their jobs continued to barely pay them enough to survive, and certainly not enough to keep up with their bills, and the major needs that they and their children faced during this time. So the job quality remained very low.

And lastly, more time for these programs. The programs helped while they were in existence, but, as we know, most of them were cut back by 2023. Some are still winding down. But that's meant a loss of health care, benefits, a loss of expanded unemployment insurance. So many families who experienced that glimpse of stability during the pandemic have lost it. They also lost that feeling that we were all in this together. As some policymakers said at the outset of the pandemic, they were willing to help, because families were in this position, "through no fault of their own." Most of the families that we spoke to were in the positions they were in through no fault of their own, whether that began before the pandemic or continued afterward. So more time with these benefits to help ensure some security, make larger changes to their jobs, to their child care situations.

When that aid went away, many of our participants were left feeling what they described as betrayal. Blessing, one of our facilitated storytellers said, "If our jobs paid us enough money, we wouldn't need any help at all," expressing disappointment, not just in policymakers, but in the quality of jobs that this economy offers to far too many people.

We also took a look at some of the prevailing narratives about poverty, and how they diverged from what we were learning from our participants. So we just put a few here in this presentation. If you look at the report, we go into this in more depth. We can see a prevailing narrative around poverty, that those who are in poverty have made bad choices, that they have some moral failing or some character deficit.

What we found instead was that that is not the case. We can see really clearly that quality of life changed drastically with the introduction of this pandemic aid. That's not because the study participants suddenly changed their behavior or their character. This was about a policy change, about a larger social change with how we were dealing with this question of families, and whether they deserved help, and on what scale.

We also saw how the legacy of entrenched racial inequality in the United States and racially biased and racist narratives about poverty focus on people of color and their behaviors, rather than on long-standing differences in access to health care, access to economic opportunities. That is something that came up again and again.

And lastly, the notion that people just need to work harder, that hard work is the key to escaping poverty. All of our study participants worked incredibly hard before the pandemic, sometimes in more than one job, sometimes more than full-time hours juggling side gigs in addition to full-time work, sometimes several part-time jobs, because a single part-time job just could not help them make ends meet.

Philipa, one of our facilitated storytellers, said, "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. You get out of debt in one place, and you turn and find yourself in debt in another place. 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."

Philipa's belief was shared by many of the participants who asked, why were policymakers able to find money to help us during the pandemic, and now can't seem to find the money to help us in the aftermath of the pandemic?

This led us to contemplate the path forward. What do we do for families moving forward? Of course this research was conducted prior to the most recent presidential election. But we were paying attention to the conversations around the election as we were conducting this research. This is a Pew Research Center poll that came out in August of 2024, comparing Harris and Trump voters on lots of different questions, but in particular some on their preferred size and scope of government.

The question that I have highlighted here is a question that asks participants whether they believe government aid to the poor does more harm than good. And roughly, 44% of all voters believe that that is the case, that government aid does more harm than it does good. And I have to say unequivocally, as a researcher on this project, we found absolutely no evidence of that in the lives of our participants. This aid was an overall overwhelming good for participants. When there was bad, it was due in part to a lack of resources, or states attempting to distribute far too little money to far too many people. Or states attempting to institute new, fairer, more robust programs only to have the federal money that was making them possible go away as the pandemic came to an end. This is something that we think we really have to think about and center as we move forward.

How does a myth like this, that government aid to the poor is doing more harm than good, persist in the face of overwhelming and very recent evidence that, in fact, that aid is a massive good, not only to stabilize the economy and the United States as a whole, but to help families with children who are truly struggling to get by just on the private market alone?

I'm going to wrap up there because we have so much more to hear from our participants today. I hope this high level overview has helped. If you have questions about anything I said here, I'd be happy to come back after the panelists have spoken. But also, if you drop those questions in, it's possible other panelists will be able to address those questions as we go, so don't hesitate to the end to share your questions and your concerns.

And with that I'm going to. I'm going to kick things back to Brigid, who's going to be in conversation with some of the fantastic participants who shared their time and their sometimes very difficult stories with us.

Family Perspectives: Discussion with Four Study Participants

Brigid Schulte: Thank you so much for that presentation, Haley. So now, what I'd like to do is welcome just a few of our study participants. Let me give a brief introduction of the four of them-we're so delighted to have you with us here today-and then we'll begin our conversation. So with us we have Kiarica Schields. She's a nurse, a single mom of four in Georgia, where I was grateful to be able to spend a lot of time with her when she agreed to be one of our case study participants. Ruaa Sabek, who participated in the project as a facilitated storyteller, lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two young children and has a really great story about becoming a bank teller, which we'll hear about. We've got Kel, a solo parent of four, joining us from the Midwest. And we also have Chantel Valdez, a single mother of two who Haley mentioned, joining us from Utah. So first of all, welcome to all of you, we're grateful that you participated in our research and study, and we're grateful to have you here today.

The first thing I'd like to say is, we've been talking about the pandemic as if it's in the past tense, and we know that, even though the worst of it is over, for many, it still continues. There's long Covid. We have Covid vaccines that we still need. There's new variants circulating. So I just want to recognize that Covid is still very much with us.

But during the height of the pandemic, when things were so difficult for so many families, I'd like each of you to share a story of your experience with pandemic aid. I know we could talk for hours. But is there one program, or one thing that really sticks with you about how it impacted your family? Chantel, let's start with you.

Chantel Valdez: Sure. So during the pandemic I was working as a grant coordinator for an after-school program that serviced four schools, three of which were on the Navajo Reservation. Once all the schools shut down, obviously, we had to stop the programming.

And I think just having enough food was really the biggest thing. Honestly, my kids were not used to being able to buy great food-the good stuff, the good fruit, the fresh vegetables, and all of those things, because, honestly, what we could usually afford came out of a box.

Brigid Schulte: It's so interesting that you're saying that the food [through expanded SNAP nutrition benefits] had the biggest impact. You also had sent us a photo of when you took your children to a beautiful natural area near your home. One of the things you had shared in talking with Haley is that you also had time.

Chantel Valdez: Yeah.

Brigid Schulte: Because instead of just scraping by to get to the end of the day. That glimpse of stability also gave you some breathing room to actually enjoy life with your children.

Chantel Valdez: And we did. We did so many things. We live in southern Utah, which is well known, for Natural Bridges and Monument Valley, all of those beautiful places, that, honestly, we had never really ventured to. Not because it was far away, but because there was just no time. I mean, Natural Bridges is literally 30, 45 minutes away from us. And we'd never really been to the Bears Ears monument, which is just right there. We went to all of those places, and it was just so great to be there and to see all those things and be like, "Hey! Look! We live in this gorgeous place, and we've never actually seen it."

Brigid Schulte Wow! Let me turn to you, Ruaa. As you go back to sort of those early days of the pandemic, when the government was responding to so much of the suffering and pain that families were experiencing. What was your experience like with your family?

Ruaa Sabek: So for me, it really helped us a lot. As Chantel mentioned, the food was a big issue. They reduced our work hours. But we still need to work. We still need to get child day care for our kids. So the child care assistance was also really good for us. It's namedin our city. CCW [Child Care Works child care subsidy.] So it's something very good for the kids under five years old.

Plus, I remember the checks that the government issued for the kids, like every kid. I'm not sure about the number, but they they issued some checks. It helped a lot for the life expenses. When they reduced our work hours, we needed to still to work. We don't have enough money to cover our bills. You know, the kids in this age, they need a lot of stuff. Besides the food, they need clothes. They grow up so fast. During two months, it's like it's too much. So this helped us a lot.

Brigid Schulte: One of the things I remember we talked about earlier, Ruaa, you were also saying that when some of the stimulus checks came, the direct cash aid, your transmission had broken,

Ruaa Sabek: Right.

Brigid Schulte: And you and your husband, your work hours have already been reduced, you're having a hard enough time paying your bills, and that cash enabled you to fix your car. What would life have been like if you weren't able to have your car?

Ruaa Sabek: Right? Right? Correct. It's a disaster with two kids, both under five years. You need to take them every day to the daycare you need to come back to your work on time. So, yeah, It helped us with fixing the car. It even helped with some rent, because we need to pay rent. So I was managing these checks just tomake sure every cent is in its right place.

Brigid Schulte: Kiarica, if I could go to you now. When you think about the pandemic, what worked for your family, and what didn't?

Kiarica Schields: Well, child care was kinda like a hit or miss, so that was always a difficult thing. And just receiving benefits. Just knowing that [the pandemic was] temporary helped me through that time. But as far as government assistance, the child care …

[Noise of the commuter train]

I'm sorry, I'm on the train headed to work.

Brigid Schulte: No worries. Kiarica, you mentioned child care. And one of the things that we did find in talking with all of you and others is that the government did send some support for child care, but it wasn't enough. People still didn't have access to it. And that was something that really mattered in your family's experience.

Kiarica Schields: Yes. The child care for me, when they cancelled out the fees, it helped. Once they added the fees back from seeing how much was being made in the house, then those fees went up to like $200 plus a week. And that begins to get difficult. But the child care [subsidy] for a short time did come in handy for me.

Brigid Schulte: I do remember from spending time with you down in Georgia that not having child care came at a critical time. Then you weren't able to get to work. And

then, if you weren't able to get to work, you weren't able to pay your bills. Then your family ended up being evicted. What was that like for your family?

[Noise from the commuter train]

Kiarica Schields: Can you hear me?

Brigid Schulte: Yes, we can hear you.

Kiarica Schields: Okay. I need child care to work. So that was always my roadblock. So if I find a good job, I can't find the right child care, or I will have to find a job that goes along with the child care hours and things like that. So that was pretty tough for me as well.

During the pandemic I was having to quit jobs. I'd get jobs, then quit jobs, because either my schedule didn't align with the kids' daycare or my son. He started, you know, acting up in school and things like that as well. So it did get a little tough for me. And the food assistance did help as well.

Brigid Schulte: Okay, thank you so much, Kiarica. Kel, can you talk about your family and your experience?

Kel: Yeah. Whew! So I'm a single parent of four. And I feel like I had a little bit of a unique experience, because I was living a fairly upper middle class life, and I experienced a lot of privilege before the pandemic. And I happened to start to be in a very slippery, unstable place because of my divorce, and being a survivor of domestic violence, and trying to actively protect my children through the court system. And then having financial abuse from my ex. It was a precarious time. And then the pandemic layered on top of that. So I was not well versed with being in an unstable place, and suddenly I was confronted with this, and it felt very scary. And I had a lot of those biases about, well, "People who are struggling are struggling because of bad choices, and they're being frivolous or something." I'm very well educated. And I didn't think that that would happen to me. And and yet I found myself really, really struggling and realizing that my place of stability was not as secure as I imagined that it was. And suddenly things were really really scary, to the point of having the electricity shut off, to the point of, "I can't pay for groceries. What am I going to do?" And with 4 kids who are all having mental health issues, I really couldn't be out working lots of jobs because I needed to keep them safe, because of suicidality and things happening in the home. I just couldn't be [working a lot.] So it really felt impossible to to navigate. It was really really difficult, and not being able to access family support because of the pandemic and not wanting to expose my elderly parents. And what do you do? It was so so hard.

The [federal government's pandemic] financial benefits were really really amazing, especially because of having unstable child support. That was sometimes not there at all, and not being able to really do anything about that. And I was also one of the people who was trying to pick up extra jobs on the side, to supplement my income and and make ends meet and fill in the gaps, and those all became impossible to do because of the pandemic. At the same time my small company where I was working became intensely busy because we were really needed right then. So it was. It was chaotic, and having that cushion of this check coming in was like, "Oh, I can breathe, you know? Like "This is okay. I can pay the bills. We're going to be alright." Like, we can just have that basic hierarchy of needs, the foundation levels of needs are there. And now I can become emotionally, psychologically available for my children. For myself, it just made things possible to survive in a way that I think really wouldn't have been there.

Another thing that came to mind to me as other people were talking is that I thought there was this sort of miraculous thing happening about healthcare. It was so amazing to me that we could just drive up and get Covid tests without insurance. It was just like, "No, you don't have to jump through all these hoops to get the Covid test. You can just pull up here and we're going to swab your kids out of your car." It was so easy to take care of. I was just like, "This is astounding that the government can work like this. I am so impressed. And I can get my box of tests for home, for later. There's no hoops I have to jump through." It was miraculous to me. I was like, who knew the U.S. government could be so functional? Not me. I did not.

Brigid Schulte: That brings up a question that I'd like to move on to. A lot of that aid has since expired. Medicaid, which had expanded, has been unwinding, and millions of people have now been dropped from coverage. The expanded child tax credit, even though there was bipartisan support for it, has still not been extended. The programs that were easier to apply for no longer are. Some of that streamlining has continued in some states. Others have not. So what's it like now, now that the worst of the pandemic has passed us, even though Covid variants are still circulating. What's it like now for your family? Chantel? Should we start with you again?

Chantel Valdez: Sure. So during Covid, obviously, my kids and I all qualified for Medicaid. And I agree with Kel. It was amazing to see that we could go and get tested if we were worried that we had Covid. We could go and get tested without any red tape, or "Oh, you've got to wait. You've got to get a referral. You've got to see this person." There were no hoops to jump through whatsoever. And it'd be so amazing if that had carried on. I mean, if you had a health issue, you could go in and be like, "Hey, something's wrong. Can you please help me?" Because I feel like now that I am uninsured, my health has taken kind of a backseat to everything because I can't go in. I had a recent scare where I ended up in the ER. And I'm getting that bill now. There's a possibility that I may need surgery. But I can't go in for those referrals because I do not have the financial resources to pay for that. And it's a little scary.

Even with my kids they've got CHIP [Children's Health Insurance Program] which is part of Medicaid, but it still comes with having to pay certain expenses which I still am not financially able to pay for. So we're skating by, trying to make sure that we stay healthy. But also staying healthy means eating right. And being there for my kids, making sure they get to bed on time. But it's hard to do that when you're juggling three jobs and you're still not able to afford all the food, especially in my teeny, tiny town where we've got costs that are double what you could get at Walmart, and our closest Walmart is an hour and a half away. So it's just all these things just coupled together. Insurance would be amazing, because it would help. Instead, we have band-aids for bullet holes. Basically.

Brigid Schulte: Wow! I want to come back to that. But Ruaa, let me go to you. You have a little bit of a different story. One of the things that really struck me when we were talking, is that some of the pandemic-you were able to get a child care subsidy, which then enabled you to do some training, which then enabled you to get a better job. So in some ways, the pandemic aid gave you a glimpse of stability that you were able to build on while many others haven't been able to, Can you talk a little bit about that and what's happening now with your family?

Ruaa Sabek: Of course. Sometimes, you feel like there is something bad happening. But it's for good ways. So what happened with me, is I have a referral [for a subsidy] for my kids, for help with child care, and the organization that I was in contact with [for the subsidy,] they offer me a job training program. It lasts three to six months. I finish it. Then I do another training. And then I got a new job, which makes sense with my financial situation, because, after the pandemic, as everybody said, there was a rise up for all the prices, everywhere-you go to the to the grocery store this week and get your food. After another week or 10 days after the prices just like rise up. So for now, what is changed since the pandemic is, I have a stable job. I feel I'm more confident with my finances. I'm better than before, so I feel now I'm in a good way to provide for my family with good resources for everything, to start saving for the kids, because they're growing up. They have more activities to do. They have more expenses to deal with. So I feel now, my steps are more stable every time I take a step. I do it for my family. It takes time, but I know this is a good step for my family. But I agree with Kel and Chantel. There's no guarantee in this life. No guarantee. So we try our best.

Brigid Schulte: Thank you so much. Kiarica can I come back to you? I don't know if you're able to come back.

Kiarica Schields: Yes. Can you hear me?

Brigid Schulte: Yes, we can hear you. So you'd been talking about how you and your family were struggling through the pandemic and afterwards. So what's life like for you now?

Kiarica Schields: Kiarica Schields: Well, now I have child care, but I can't use it. I'm working 2 to 11 pm. That's my shift. So, my oldest daughter, she picks up the slack for me. I get the kids up in the morning, get them sent off to school, make dinner before I leave, and then when my daughter gets home, she takes over, makes sure everybody is fed and in bed by 8 o'clock. You find a good job. And then those resources that you once had are depleted. Now, I make too much to give my kids Medicaid. And my son has ADHD. So that's hectic. And then, no food assistance. So that's another thing. So it's just like just picking up the pieces and just rebuilding myself.

Brigid Schulte: I think we've lost you Kiarica, so we'll come back to you when the connection is stable. But at this point, Kel, let's talk with you. What is life like now for your family?

Kel: Well, 'm happy to report that we're much, much more stabilized. So much of this is just chance. Right? So my kids' father has just kind of stayed away since the pandemic started, somewhat miraculously. So we have been able to stabilize with our mental health. And I've been able to pick up some more work, so I can supplement that and piece things together. It still feels like I'm on a tightrope, but it feels less like we're under immediate threat of it all falling to pieces. And I think, just as time has gone on, I've been able to help the kids walk through the trauma that we've experienced, through the scariness of the pandemic, and then down to our individual lives. There's so much energy that goes into worrying about meeting your basic needs when you're on such a thin piece of ice financially. And you're having to jump through all of these hoops. That was one of the things that I noticed is having my kids on Medicaid. Coming out of the pandemic, I didn't realize that we were in a loosened process of getting them qualified until the pandemic ended. So I was very shocked, because I got on it during the loosened reins. And then, all of a sudden, it was like, you have to fax this thing to these people, and now there's going to be a follow up. And now you have to submit this and this. It was so demeaning and demoralizing and exhausting. The amount of mental load that you carry to try to just get access was incredible to me. And I just thought, "How do people do this?" when I'm trying to put the pieces of my life back together, from being in a very vulnerable place with really fragile kids who were on the edge of being able to be alive because of mental health.

Why are we making people who are already suffering, having to go through just this immensely arduous process of qualifying for the access to the aid? It was just astounding to me. And it's so backward technologically. Even in my state, it's like, "No, no, you cannot pay online, you have to send an actual check in the mail to pay for this.

You have to fax this thing," that is, your entire tax return to qualify for this, which is like 20 pages. What is going on? Why are these systems like this?

So it's been navigating these systems that has been incredible. And like Chantel, I have been uninsured. So once we got through that period, I've been able to keep my kids on the [Medicaid] insurance, which has been great because they have medications they really need to be on. But for me, well, I'm not going to get a mammogram, even though my mom had breast cancer. I'm gonna put that off until I can figure out how to get insurance again. And that's a scary place to be in as well.

Brigid Schulte: It is astounding when you think about it, because the costs of not having health care in the long run are so much worse, not only economically to your family, but in terms of our health and wellbeing.

We have just a few minutes left before we move to the next panel, and I'm going to combine the last couple of questions together. One of the things that we've been focusing on in this project is asking families themselves, "What do you need to thrive? What would that look like? If you could wave your magic wand, what do families really need in this country? What would that feel like?

We've talked about the Trump administration that will be coming in. And in the first Trump administration, there were a number of efforts to try to cut programs like Medicaid and funding for food nutrition. Incoming president-elect Trump has also talked about having a Department of Government Efficiency, bringing in Elon Musk, who promises to cut $2 trillion dollars from the budget, looking at many of these family-supportive and anti-poverty programs.

So, briefly, in the last few minutes that we have, what does thriving look like for your families? And what are you preparing for with the coming administration? Chantel, we start with you again.

Chantel Valdez: So for my family to thrive. I honestly think that having a job, and just one job rather than three, that paid a livable wage would be amazing. I love working with kids, and that's what I've continued to do. I'm an after school grant coordinator. I'm a music paraprofessional, where I teach elementary music during the school day, and I am also a virtual assistant for a small company. So I'm juggling these three jobs, and there is no time for my kids. So I think that just having one job would be amazing that had a livable wage, and that provided insurance. I think that it's crazy that the school district I work for, they keep all of their paraprofessionals at just that threshold of where we can't go over certain hours so that they don't have to pay for insurance for us. And I really wish that that was not the case, because it's just so hard.

And with the new Trump administration, honestly, I have some fears. But I think I would have had fears, regardless of who was coming into office just because of how the economy is going, just because of how prices have surged and how housing is ridiculous. I mean, I've had it said to me once before, " Do you want to be in an apartment forever?" And that kind of hurt because I'm like, "Have you seen the cost of houses? It's impossible to get a home, especially when you're already struggling to make ends meet. So in order to thrive. I think if we had livable wages I think we wouldn't need to rely on assistance.

Haley Swenson: Thanks for that, Chantel. I'm going to take over, because Brigid is in a building where there is a fire drill taking place right now. So I'm going to shoot things over to the next participants. Let's go to Ruaa next, Ruaa, can you speak to what Brigid asked about what's next for your family and what you would really need to feel like you could thrive?

Ruaa Sabek: Yeah, actually, as I mentioned, the job is very essential for any family stability. The other thing is housing. The housing assistance is really very, very important for any family, I believe, because the rent is going crazy. The landlord wanted to do a rise up every couple months, which is really really too much for the family. Even with stable income, it won't rise within two months, it may take sometimes one year to get a raise. So, it's crazy. Housing is really a very essential thing. For my family, we have struggled with housing. Our landlord wants to rise up [the rent] every couple of months. For example, we usually don't pay for water. We do pay for gas and electricity, but we don't pay for water. But starting this year, he wants us to pay for water, and he like, "It's $100 every month for water," which is not even logical. So the housing is very, very, something I really need to take care about for families like us who struggle to survive.

And the other thing, I discussed this with Brigid, the kids, from around five years to 12 years old, they need more free activities. For example, now, I enroll my kids in their school. But even I need to pay for that activity. So with two kids, everyone needs one activity a week. It's too much. So what I was thinking about why we can't provide some of this, as a community, for the kids in elementary and middle school? Something to make them busy, because I think the tablets, or the TV, or whatever is very bad for their age, because their brains start to build up. So this is actually something for the whole community. I know it's hard to be like, "one, two, three [go.]" But if we start to build this thing, I think we're gonna deal with this good, because this age is very dangerous for the kids. We always put eyes on the teenager. But, believe me, because my kids are now six and seven years old, I see a lot of stuff I need always to keep an eye on them, even if I'm busy, and I have a lot of missions. It's really a very sensitive age.

I can't leave my kids to play in the street. I take them to play at the new playground. I have two kids. I need to keep my eyes on them. So I can't imagine If a Mom has three or four kids, How she can manage this? So housing and activities for kids are essential [for thriving.] I don't want it to be too long. Thank you very much. I appreciate all what you do for us.

Haley Swenson: Thank you so much, Ruaa. I was hearing so much there about the cost of housing rising, the cost of food rising. We've heard about the cost of child care has skyrocketed. And I think families with children are facing so many rising costs due to inflation. At the same time, they've lost these really important programs. So thank you for drawing our attention to that. Kiarica, are you able to jump back in?

Kiarica Schields: Oh, yes, yes, I am.

Haley Swenson: I'd love to hear from you what your family needs most right now.

Kiarica Schields: For me, I could use some insurance, like everyone else is saying. My son's medicine was like $250, and they cut off his Medicaid. So I use GoodRx. And I only had to pay, like $70. But he's not getting both of his medicines, so he's cutting up in school.

Life is getting better, though. We went from a one-bedroom apartment, paying $1,300, to a two-bedroom apartment paying $1,400. Things are gradually looking up. But I could definitely use some insurance, because both of my son's medicines together are $500. And that was my biggest thing, because I sent him to sleep for a week without medicine, and I was getting calls at work, and that's how it always starts. I lost a really good nursing job from being called to the school to pick him up. So insurance would help.

As far as groceries. I feel like I'm spending about $300 a week in cash to make sure that my kids have food through the week. So some assistance with that will help. I feel like, in Georgia, with the assistance [programs,] If they see you making over $20 or $25 an hour. They're like, "Oh, you got it." But they don't factor in that my two-bedroom is $1,400. Or that I gotta get back and forth to work and take care of kids and pay for food, $300 a week for food, and everything else. So that would definitely help me.

Haley Swenson: Yes. This "benefits cliff," where you can so easily make enough money that you don't qualify for food, assistance for housing, assistance for Medicaid and health care. But with the cost of those things I mean, the reality for families is you just can't cover all that on wages. Thank you so much, Kiarica. Kel, we'll go to you. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story today. What could your family really use to help it thrive right now?. And how are you? What's your mindset going into the next presidential administration?

Kel: Yeah, so I'm a queer household. I myself am bisexual and intergender, and I have three trans children. And for me, it's terrifying to think of what's happening to us in the new administration, and especially with healthcare-mental health care and their physical health care-which is essential for their thriving and being alive. My access to employment feels under threat because of my queer identity. I worry about that for my kids. My kids are a little older. My oldest is 20. And what is that life like going to be like for them going forward?

And, I think for me, I agree with everyone who said all of these things. I agree with all of it. But, I would like to bring forward the idea of dignity that I think is missing in this process. It is so humiliating to be forced through these processes of prove- "Prove this. Prove that you need it. Show us all these things. Now we need a letter from your employer."

I've been a CEO of a company. And you want me to go to my little part-time job, and prove to you that I am working these hours? Where's the dignity and how we hold each other there? There's been so many layers of shame that have been layered upon me in this process, that this is my fault, that I've put myself in this situation. And what was I thinking? How did I get here? But can we just hold each other up without that judgment you know?

And I'd also like to say, I really feel like in my experience, the people who have fallen behind and needed to be lifted up are the people who will give back the most. We are the ones who will stand forward when we get back on our feet, and we will be the most helpful people in our society. More than anyone else. And so to me, the cost benefit ratio for me, as somebody in business, it just makes sense, even just financially we're preventing further medical costs, because we're not getting healthcare, because we don't have access. But, on a cultural standpoint, if we lift these people up, these are the people who are going to volunteer and give their hearts and give back so much when we're on our feet again.

And I just think it could be a radical change for our entire society to invest in this.

Haley Swenson: Thanks so much, Kel. I think we see that even in the way that your stories relate to each other, from Ruaa needing more activities for her kids that don't cost money to Chantel's work as an after school program coordinator. So many of you are engaged in work that is about care and about supporting society and making it run, and yet very little public consciousness of just how difficult it is to make ends meet when you are working very hard, when you are making every decision as carefully as possible, and there's just not enough to go around.

I want to thank all the panelists so much for sharing their stories. You can read each of their stories in depth, in our report and on our collections page, like I said before. I really encourage you to do that. There's so much richness there, and you learn so much more about families and what they're going through by reading the full context of their lives in these stories. So, please enjoy those.

We're going to go to our next panel now. I'm going to kick things over to my colleague, our senior writer and editor for the Better Life Lab team, Julia Craven, who's going to lead this next panel. But just so you know, our panelists aren't going away. They're going to stick around for the Q and A at the end. So, if you have questions for them or comments, or words of support, let us know, and we'll make sure we get to those at the end.

Julia, you're up.

Research Perspectives: Discussion with Researchers

Julia Craven: Thank you so much, Haley, and thank you to Kel to Kiarica, to Ruaa and to Chantel as well for sharing your stories with us. What you have done for our work, and what you have done to further advance our cause here, I can't say enough how appreciative we all are of y'all trusting us with your stories.

Now we are going to have a conversation that is a bit more policy dense about the way forward and how we can make life better for everyone, especially the people who spoke with us here today. So, we're going to start off with a little roundabout of introductions, and I will start with Ashley. So introduce yourself.

Ashley Álvarez: Thank you, Julia. Hi, everyone! My name is Ashley Álvarez. I am a contractor with the Better Life Lab team, and I supported the project with one of the case studies, and writing it in Spanish, and celebrating one of the families in my community of Los Angeles, California.

Julia Craven: Thank you. And Jess, I'll bounce to you.

Jessica Weeden: Hey, everyone, I'm Jessica Weedon. I'm the Senior Design Lead at the New Practice Lab, which is a peer program at New America. At the New Practice Lab, we focus on increasing benefit access for economically excluded families with young children, specifically. And I've been working in the design space and benefits space for the past seven-plus years at this point, on programs ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to immigration to most recently paid family and medical leave.

I'll pass it back to you.

Julia Craven: Awesome. And Megan.

Megan Curran: Hi, everyone. My name is Megan Curran. I'm the policy director with the

Center on Poverty and Social Policy. We're based at Columbia University in New York City. We study poverty trends, and how it's measured. And we try and identify ways that the measure that the government uses to decide who's eligible and who's not for all of these types of critical programs can be improved over time and actually capture the reality of what families have and what they need.

And we also analyze the impact of policy decisions. So, when we get into the conversation, I'll talk a little bit about how we try and provide analysis of the ways in which things that are proposed, or laws that are already on the books, either reduce poverty, or sometimes, obviously unfortunately, increase it and make lives harder for families, but also the ways that new proposals can actually make more positive change.

Julia Craven: Awesome. Thank you. And so we're gonna hop right in. And we're gonna get started with a group question. But I am gonna single Megan out, though, because you have some data that you want to share with us.

So, we have to talk about direct cash assistance, especially the child tax credit, stimulus checks and rental assistance which was often coupled with eviction moratoriums. We also have some instances in our research of guaranteed income being paid to eligible residents within their municipality. And so, what we found is that the people we talked to, they use that money to pay their rent, buy food, cover child-related expenses, pay off debts and more. So, Megan, I want you to walk us through the impact of the child tax credit and what happened after it expired, and then I'll come back to the group with the second part of this question.

Megan Curran: Sure. Thank you so much, Julia. I'll just take the opportunity to share my screen for a second, just to show a couple of visuals. Because, before I start saying a lot of numbers that get confusing, I'll show you a few things.

As I mentioned, we focus a lot on measurement. How poverty is measured, how the government uses those numbers and what they do for it in terms of determining policy and program eligibility and things like that. So, when Covid hit, our work as researchers really sprang into action, led by my colleague at the time, who actually contributed to this report, Zach Parolin. I and many of my colleagues worked with him to try and understand what actually the Covid pandemic was about to do to poverty in the U.S.

At the time we saw unemployment spike. And we saw that poverty actually could have then hit the highest levels that we've ever had since we've been recording it. But we also know that that's not actually what happened, because Congress did take action.

And all of the things that we've been hearing about in the event so far today, we know that this made a huge difference for families, and as a result, poverty actually hit the lowest that it ever has, particularly for children, while a lot of these pandemic supports were in place.

So, there's been a lot of just discussion about the different types of [benefits.] But, as Julia mentioned, the child tax credit is one particular example, because it was something that was transformed during the height of the pandemic to actually deliver cash directly to families. And it included a lot of families who didn't actually used to be able to get it.

So, just to back up for one second, before Covid hit, we've had a child tax credit on the books for about 20 years in this country. But the structure of it is leaving out so many families who could really benefit from it the most. So, one out of every three children in the U.S. was excluded from the child tax credit before Covid hit.

Basically, because we have a structure where we require families to earn a certain amount of money and families earn too little to qualify. But, the structure is the problem right? Because what this chart on the bottom of the screen shows is that what we're actually asking of families is totally backwards with the reality of life: the structure of the child tax credit makes you earn more money with each additional child in your family, in order to get the full amount of the benefit.

So, if you have one child, you have to earn about $30,000 just to get a full child tax credit benefit of about $2,000 for your child. If you have a second child, you have to earn $36,000. If you have a third child, you actually need to earn over $40,000, and so on and so forth. This is backwards. Obviously, you don't automatically have more money when you have more children, it's usually actually the opposite, because you're not able to work as much, and you have more mouths to feed.

And you'll also notice that this would be quite a lot of money to earn, say, on a minimum wage for two parents. But if there is one parent in the household, it's setting a really difficult bar. And so, as as a result, we actually had not just one out of every three children nationwide left out, but we had half of black children, half of Latino children, and actually three out of four- so 75% of kids in single-parent-female-headed-households- were left out nationwide.

And this kind of structure is replicated across other programs where you have to prove a certain amount of income, but also not too much. And you get caught in these traps that, I think, a lot of people gave voice to in the report and also in the panel earlier.

So, during Covid, we saw three major changes to the child tax credit: 1. They increased the benefit overall. 2. They included all of those folks who are usually left out, and then 3. they started delivering it in monthly direct deposits or [monthly payments.]

And, just to zip through this really quickly, we researchers across the country have studied this policy inside, out, upside down, and the results are exactly the same: No matter which way you look at it, we know how families spent [the child tax credit.] And it's the exact same way that families themselves, like in this report, and everyone on the first panel just said, they spent it on their families and on their basic needs. So, that's the first thing that we saw, no matter how much money folks had.

The red bars are actually folks earning all the way up to $150,000 in income. The blue bars are families who have less than $35,000 in income. And both types of income groups spent the child tax credit on food. And after that it was housing, clothing, children's school expenses, things like that.

And the one thing that I'll just say here is that, speaking from a data and research perspective, the evidence that we have in terms of the hard data and numbers matches exactly what everyone has said in terms of their real experiences. And so this makes a really strong evidence base. Because what we see in terms of this blue line here is basically what poverty could have looked like over the months during Covid- the blue line is much lower, because when we had all the supports, it actually reduced poverty, especially for kids. But, these numbers are not just numbers right? They translate to real people. So, when we had that expanded child tax credit in place, about four million children were kept out of poverty during the period while it was in place.

But, when it expired we saw poverty go up and we've seen it continue to go up after that, and that's replicated in everything that we see in the news. Families started to struggle with their expenses, hunger- things like that. And so we have an example here with the data that matches exactly the stories. The question is really, then, how to make a policy like this a lot more permanent going forward.

Julia Craven: Absolutely. And so the second question that I have, which is open to the group is, how can we build on the successes of these programs to create more sustainable, long-term economic security for families. And so this is important for a lot of reasons, including research, showing that long, severe disease from Covid increases the odds of negative long term economic impacts.

For millions of Americans the pandemic is still current. It has a long tail. So with that in mind, how can we build on the successes of those early years of the pandemic in order to keep families afloat as we go forward?

No one jump in at once.

Megan Curran: I'm sorry, was this for everyone?

Julia Craven: Yeah, it's for everyone. But you can take it if you want to.

Megan Curran: Can you just repeat the last, the last part of it? Sorry.

Julia Craven: Yeah. So, I was just speaking to the importance of making these programs sustainable. For families and their economic security, considering that we are still very much within the pandemic, and that long covid especially still is having an effect on people and their ability to take care of themselves and their family.

Megan Curran: Yeah, I'll jump in, and then anyone else may be able to contribute.

But, I think we have a roadmap from the pandemic in terms of what actually works for families. And not to say everything was perfect, because we also know that it wasn't seamless for everyone-some folks were still falling through the cracks. It wasn't a perfect system. But it was something that the government was able to get up and running in an extraordinarily short amount of time.

And there's reason to believe that had we been able to continue a number of these policies that we would have gotten better at making sure that those cracks were filled. That any of the bumps that were still left in the application systems and things like that could have gotten smoothed out over time had we been given the chance to actually see those policies continue.

So, I think one of the reasons that I was really happy to see everything that was in this report and in this conversation is because I think there's a lot that happened during the height of the pandemic that probably a lot of us would like to block out- it was a traumatic time for a lot of people for lots of different reasons. But, we don't want to throw out our memories of everything that happened during that period, because as Kel mentioned in the last panel, experiencing the easier ways to sort of enroll and stay connected to healthcare and different things like that shouldn't actually be forgotten. These are possible things.

And also the sky didn't fall when that happened, based on critics or folks who are against expanding policies for families and communities. Quite the contrary, families were healthier, families had more in their checking accounts. They were able to think more about the future, maybe, and be able to support themselves more moving forward.

So, I think, conversations like these are really important to highlight exactly what worked during the height of the pandemic and what we want to push for as a future vision. There's gonna be a lot of challenges coming up in the next few years, where things are going to be pushed very much in the opposite direction- probably make it a lot harder for families to get connected [to benefits.] And so I think, having this vision of what we want as the baseline, and then we advance from there, is just really invaluable to keep in the spotlight.

Julia Craven: Awesome, and we'll come back to what people are worried about happening in the future in a little bit. So, we learned that providing people with a minimum standard of living freed up a lot of their time. And two prominent examples of this that we found were expanded unemployment benefits, which reduced the financial stress of the job search, something that many people can relate to, and continuous enrollment in Medicaid which eliminated the complicated annual recertification process.

And another is child care, which wasn't as widely available. We do have one participant where the lack of child care led to job loss and eviction. And then one of our case study participants, Tiffany Gale, used pandemic aid to expand child care services for her community. And so, Jess, I'm going to pick on you now. The New Practice Lab has been researching what families with children need to thrive. What have you heard? And how does access to child care fit into this equation?

Jessica Weeden: Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think child care means time and mental space for parents to do the things that they need to do. And I think that's work. I think, because of the limited supply of child care, what child care is available is used to get to work, and what they really need to thrive is a more robust option of child care.

One of the activities that we do with our families is having them design the support services that they would want to see and how they want it to work. And almost to a T, you get a more robust child care option from all of the participants-one that can offer more flexible hours so that they can do training in the evenings or schooling, or they can pursue hobbies.

You know, we heard from folks that want to learn to sew or learn a new language, and that's just not available to them. But then also things like mental health support available through the same service, or help navigating tricky parenting situations, or even what one parent called Parenting 101. When you have your first child, it's like "Okay, how do I do these things? How do I meal plan? How do I keep the house clean?" And just learning in that multifaceted sort of way is not something that's available when all of your time is sucked up, either working or providing child care for your children.

And I think another big piece of this is also transportation. I can't help but note that Kiarica told us that she's commuting to work for a shift that starts at 2 pm, and she said, that about an hour ago. [Around noon eastern.] And so, we don't all have the same 24 hours in a day if you have a two-hour commute time to work and back.

And so reliable transportation is something that came up quite a bit, and support services around that. If you do have your own vehicle- registration is expensive, getting your driver's license takes time, car maintenance, gas, all of that. And there's not really much support available, and a lot of times public transit doesn't feel safe, especially with your children. So there's a lot of things that families could use to thrive. But I think time is a big key piece of it.

Julia Craven: Yeah, absolutely. And so, how can we leverage those insights to design better policy?

Jessica Weeden: I think a big piece of this is having policymakers really understand and meet families where they're at. I can't imagine anyone hasn't learned from the families that we've heard from today, the parents that we've heard from today, and understanding where they need the support and what that support looks like.

And, once again, Kel's point of supporting them in a dignified way. And that reflects the realities of what it's like to raise a family right now and then designing the supports and integrating with the community that they exist in both the formal and informal supports that are available.

Julia Craven: Awesome. Thank you. And so another pivot. And this one's for you, Ashley. So, we decided to publish one of our case studies entirely in Spanish. As researchers and writers, we often confine the people we interview to Standard American English, which results in the loss of nuance and meaning, and we wanted Ivonne and her community's story to be shared more fully. This is also something that we did for our facilitated storytelling series as well. And so the other side of that is that we wanted to uplift linguistic capital, or the skills that you develop through communicating in multiple languages and dialects. And so, Ashley, you wrote Ivonne's case study- tell us about that process, and how we can continue to ensure that research and storytelling authentically feature the voices of communities where English isn't the default?

Ashley Álvarez: Thank you, Julia. I think I'll start off with where your question left off about linguistic capital. So, as a researcher, I usually begin with sharing my positionality. So, my first language is Spanish. I am from a community that is predominantly Black and Latinx, so there are community ties that I still have and can leverage when I interact with folks. And when I use that positionality, I make sure that I adjust my storytelling in a way that makes the other person comfortable. If that means speaking in Spanish, then that means speaking in Spanish, if that means speaking in English, then I speak in English.

So, with this case study, the process for that was really about ensuring what was most comfortable for Ivonne. So when I asked Ivonne she spoke both languages. I asked her, "What do you prefer? Do you want this to be in Spanish and English both?" And she did slip in and out. It was mostly in Spanish, but there were times when she needed to use jargon, like manager, or some other word that she just was needing to say in English.

So, with our commitment to ethical storytelling, this piece of writing it in Spanish in the way that preserved Ivonne story and authentic quotes and authentic experiences, is a way of us remaining committed to the fact that communities are experts in their own stories, and we should allow them to tell them our stories in a way that makes them feel most comfortable.

Julia Craven: Awesome. Thank you so much. And so now I am going to move on, this is another question for the group. So various forms of discrimination came up in our conversations with our study participants, who all belong to at least one underserved community, in addition to identifying as women.

And so this aligns with the demographics of poverty and being low-income in the United States: the official poverty rate for families with children headed by a single woman, is something like 32%, which is about twice the rate for families with children headed by a single Dad. And so a couple of examples came up in our work where people experienced a type of discrimination in their workplace, typically, or while they were searching for work. And so when we think about making life better for families, how should the intersection of systemic discrimination and economic hardship be addressed to ensure that underserved communities receive equitable opportunities and support?

Megan Curran: I think part of it-and again, this is one particular angle- is that we have to really examine the ways in which systemic discrimination has bled into our policy structures, and then compounds and reproduces these inequalities moving forward. So, I showed that chart using one policy example, the child tax credit, about how you have to earn a certain amount of money just to get it, and then you have to earn more with each additional child. All of this makes it difficult in general, but it makes it particularly hard-the reason why three out of four kids in a single-mother-headed-household are left out of that tax credit is because that type of structure which, on the face of it, just seems like, "Oh, it's just an earnings requirement. It doesn't end up having that impact right?"

We know there's a gender wage gap, with women earning less on average than men for lots of different structural inequality reasons. We know that there's a racial gap. We know that there's also racial and gender gap together. So women of color earn much less even than white women. Then, when you have policies that you can only access certain basic needs-cash, health, care, food assistance-all these types of things that are conditioned on whether or not you earn a certain amount of money ends up reproducing and compounding all these inequalities. Right?

So, a lot of the ways that we saw during Covid during the height of it as a way to correct that imbalance that's been in place for generations is to actually stop putting all these conditions on things. Just for basic needs, to say you're eligible because you're eligible, because you're a human being, and you're in this country, and you are eligible for it.

Healthcare and things like that.

I think, unfortunately, what we need to pay attention to over the next couple of years is that there's going to be a bull's eye on programs-health care access, food assistance, and things like that-during the incoming Trump administration. We know that from the first time around. But there's also going to be a bull's eye on communities who have historically experienced discrimination and inequalities. So things may get worse before they get better in certain instances.

But we need to have our eyes wide open on how these policy decisions are key, right? And to get past the rhetoric and say, "We need to actually keep studying exactly how things are put into place behind the scenes, because all of these things can be corrected, as we saw during the height of the pandemic." But it just may take some time.

Julia Craven: Thank you.

Jessica Weeden: I think Megan is spot on with the policy design. I also want to shout out the way that policy gets implemented a lot of times. This can be where additional barriers that maybe weren't intended show up, because there were maybe shorter timelines for implementing a program. And so the team needed to do what was easiest for them, and not necessarily what was easiest for the claimants or the beneficiaries- focusing on multiple languages and how to provide access.

Kel mentioned having stuff that's accessible online and thinking about building for mobile first, rather than someone that maybe has a desktop, but who is working on applying as they commute to their job. Or for someone who doesn't have access to a desktop computer, having hours outside of typical business hours so that folks can apply in person in the evenings or in the mornings, or times that maybe aren't as convenient for folks that work a 9 to 5 schedule. And starting [to design] with those folks at the forefront of your mind as you build out the program, can really help level the playing field in a way that we don't always do it today.

Julia Craven: Thank you so much everyone for answering all of our questions today. And so now we're gonna kick it back to Haley, and everyone's going to come back on screen, and we're gonna do a Q&A.

Question and Answer Session

Haley Swenson: Thanks, everybody. Thank you so much, Julia. We are very short on time. This was just such a robust, rich, full discussion with both of our panels. I don't think we have a ton of time for questions and answers, although we've seen some great ones come in.

Ashley, I do want to hear from you just once more. When we're talking about this next administration, we do not want to be in a position on this panel where we're predicting the future, speculating about what might happen, but we do know there's been a lot of discussion about immigrants. Several of our participants are immigrant families. They're a key part of the U.S. demographic, of the U.S. experience. I'm just wondering if you can say a little something about how that kind of rhetoric affects families that are are trying to just get through the day and help their children.

Ashley Álvarez: So, I will leverage our case study that we shared in the report on Ivonne to answer this question. So when she emigrated to the United States, she had dreams of being a computer science engineer. It was different barriers that she experienced that really hindered her from accomplishing that dream, and she now works in customer service.

So, when we think about when immigrants come to the United States, there are a lot of false and harmful narratives around what immigrants are doing here in the United States, and what their wishes, what their dreams are, what their stories are. And in elevating these stories and clarifying these narratives. We're finding that well, they had dreams. Ivonne had a dream. But barriers, including language, transportation, lack of resources, lack of support, made those dreams inaccessible to her, and she's now hoping that her children can accomplish those dreams because she could not.

So, to many of my panelists, and we discussed this before, that there are just false narratives around families in poverty, and this report really helps clarify them. And we want to emphasize the fact that the report really does a deep dive into the stories of individuals, and diversifies narratives around poverty.

Haley Swenson: Thanks so much. I want to come back to this point that Kel raised about dignity, because I think that's at the center of this. I don't think many people, if you ask them directly, would say they don't want families to have dignity, that they don't think families with children deserve dignity. And yet these myths that we have about families in poverty and the decisions that they make, why they're in the positions they are, they are so powerful and they are so pervasive.

We're at time. I want to thank Chantel, Ruaa, Kiarica and Kel in particular. Thank you so much for not only sharing your stories with our researchers, letting us put them out in the world, but being here today to speak to them. I know this time period has been difficult and traumatic for you in multiple ways, and your bravery, and talking about that and sharing that and making yourselves vulnerable is just invaluable.

And I hope that as people continue circulating in the world, talking to people who agree with you, who don't agree with you, that you can use this report and this story collection as a resource and point people toward that. If they make claims about people who rely on government programs, about people who are in poverty with children, you can direct them to this as a resource to learn more about what those families are going through, about what the Ivonnes of the world are facing when they immigrate to this country and seek to make a better life for themselves.

So to my colleagues, to the panelists, to the experts who joined us today. Thank you all so much. We wish you really well. And we will be sending out an email following this event with links to our report, to the story collection, to the research, so you can check it out for yourselves. And in the coming weeks, we'll also have some [online] interactives. So people can experience the report in different ways. Maybe reading long form reports is not for you. But we'll have other ways for you to access this information.

I just want to say, thank you so much. Have a great day, and please follow our work at the Better Life Lab for more programming just like this. Thank you.