Embrace Mothers Birmingham Guaranteed Income Pilot Final Report
Report
On behalf of Mayors for Guaranteed Income (MGI), Abt Global is evaluating several guaranteed income (GI) programs in cities around the United States. This report examines the Embrace Mothers program administered by the city of Birmingham, Al., and it identifies both the potential benefits of GI programs and the need for a better understanding of how long a program must last to deliver enduring change.
Who participated in Embrace Mothers?
To date, GI programs have proven to be particularly beneficial to single parents, both financially and in terms of enabling them to invest more of their time directly parenting their children. From March 2022 to February 2023, Abt led a randomized control trial of Birmingham’s Embrace Mothers program. The participants included:
- 110 Birmingham households led by single mothers to receive a $375 monthly payment with no strings attached for 12-months; and
- 132 additional Birmingham households led by single mothers who did not receive the monthly payment.
The mothers who applied to the pilot tended to be older, with the average age at 35 years, and more economically vulnerable than most of Birmingham’s single mothers, although most participants were working and receiving benefits. Mothers participating in the program averaged $15,683 in household income per year, which is well below the median of single mothers in the city.
Findings:
During the pilot program, several short-term benefits were observed:
- Financial Health: Embrace Mothers significantly decreased debt related to utilities within six months after the initial GI payment was received. The payments also increased participants’ ability to cover an emergency expense of $400. Participants explained the funds helped them stay afloat when their wages were low, hours were unpredictable, when they faced unexpected expenses, or when these conditions overlapped.
- Confidence in Meeting Basic Needs: Participants cited an improved sense of confidence because of their ability to pay bills on time, pay off loans, expand their budgets, and better support other family members and their children.
- Parenting: Participants cited their ability to better meet basic needs such as providing clothes, shoes, more food, and hygiene items (toothpaste, soap, menstrual products) for their children. Mothers reported that they could provide treats and family experiences that they could not do before, and they could invest in their kids’ academic, physical, and social development through extracurricular activities and field trips. These emotional benefits for families have been cited consistently across studies.
- Employment & Childcare: Mothers who continued to work had fewer performance issues due to childcare, such as being late for work or missing hours. Compared with 36 percent of control participants reporting having been late for work in the past month due to childcare issues, only 19 percent of Embrace Mothers reported having these challenges. Qualitative data collected show that the payments gave some mothers more choice in types of jobs, schedules and hours worked. While receiving payments, some participants left full-time work and moved into full-time caregiving—but then returned to full-time work by the time payments ended.
However, most of these benefits evaporated within six months of the program ending. While this program and others have been shown to have emotional benefits for mothers, Embrace Mothers’ survey data show there were statistically significant adverse emotional effects at the end of the pilot and beyond, with participants’ feeling a decreased sense of hope and value, worse than they felt prior to enrolling in the program.
Given the relatively low monthly payment amount of $375 per month and the limited 12-month duration, the program did not reverse the deep and long-established hardships participants face. The time-bound benefits raise the question of how much additional income—and over what period of time—is needed to enable a permanent change.
Related Work: