When people hear the phrase “low income,” Cara Gows imagines many probably think of those who work for minimum wage or those who don’t work much at all. In Massachusetts, where she lives, she said, the reality is, “low income could mean that you’re still working two jobs, and it can be above minimum wage.”

As a single mom with two kids, Gows works two jobs at two different nonprofits, one full-time, one part-time, and still, her income is low enough that she qualifies for affordable housing. That’s how she’s been able to afford to live in Cambridge, one of the most expensive cities in one of the most expensive states in the country. 

It was in the lobby of her apartment building in 2021 that Gows came across a flier that caught her attention: it was for a guaranteed-income program, where low-income single parents in the city could get $500 a month cash for a year and a half, to spend however they chose. 

“At first glance, I was like, ‘Uh…’” Gows said, trailing off and laughing. “It just felt like it was too good to be true, no strings attached.”

But wasn’t too good to be true. It was real — a pilot program the city was running. She applied and was one of just 130 people in the city selected to participate. From late 2021 through early 2023, she got that $500 a month, no strings.

“It really, really helped me just get back on my feet in every area,” Gows said. “Debts, savings, health, everything.”

In the year and a half she was getting that money, she was able to build up her savings, which she had completely depleted when she had some serious health issues, go back to school to finish her bachelor’s degree in psychology, visit her dad out of state, and pay off her car. 

The pilot program ended in March of 2023. But by then, the city had already announced it would be running it again. And this time, it would be open to all eligible Cambridge residents.

“The idea of being able to be the first city in the country to have a program like this, that is non-lottery, that everyone who is qualified gets in, was just really exciting,” said Tina Alu, executive director of the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee, which is partnering with the city to run the program. “After seeing and hearing the stories of how the initial pilot helped people, I think the city and the partners were really committed to being able to expand on it. It was just having the money to be able to do it.”

Finding the money for these kinds of programs is almost always an issue, but in this case, Cambridge had about $88 million in COVID relief funding from the American Rescue Plan that it needed to spend. 

“We made the case that the population that had actually the highest level of negative impacts from COVID were low-income families,” said Geeta Pradhan, president of the nonprofit Cambridge Community Foundation, which is also partnering with the city. 

City officials voted to put $22 million of its COVID relief funding into expanding the guaranteed-income program. Starting this month, all families in the city with kids 21 and under, making less than 250% of the federal poverty line are eligible. For a family of four, that’s $75,000.

“We know that even families earning above 250% are struggling,” Pradhan said. “But we had to create a cutoff level somewhere. And we went with the next best place where we could accommodate the maximum number of families given the resources that we had.”

Other cities and counties around the country are also using some of their COVID funding, along with private funding, to experiment with guaranteed income programs.

“Literally every week or two weeks we hear about a new pilot,” said Sean Kline, associate director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab which is tracking these programs. “I think right now there’s roughly around 60 live pilots. And we’ve had more than 100 over the past year. So we’ve really seen kind of a remarkable explosion of interest in this policy idea.”

Kline thinks there are a number of reasons that’s happening now.

“One is a decades-long kind of creeping economic insecurity, which I think all of us have felt,” he said. “But it was really punctuated during COVID, which laid bare the dramatic inequities across our systems in the United States.”

At the same time, the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed focused more attention on the deep, systemic racial inequities that have always existed in the country. 

And COVID relief funding gave cities and counties a lot more money to work with. Many decided to put a chunk into guaranteed-income pilots.

Once that federal money is gone, though, Kline expects there will be many fewer programs, he said, “because typically, local government doesn’t have the revenue base to support it.”

In Cambridge, city officials are already thinking about that.

“We want to look for ways to continue to program locally,” Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said. “But I think the only way that programs like this can be sustainable is through some dedicated funding at the state or federal level.”

Which seems unlikely, at least in the immediate future. Nationally, there’s still a lot of political opposition to guaranteed-income programs, particularly among Republicans.

But Siddiqui thinks as more places do pilots, and there’s more research on the outcomes, that might change. 

“I think our hope is that Cambridge is helping to pave the path to show how impactful programs like this are,” she said.

For Cara Gows, getting to participate in the pilot program made a big impact, and not just financially.

“Mentally, it really put me in a better place,” she said. “I had a lot of anxiety and depression, of course, after depleting my savings account, so it made me more emotionally stable. I was less stressed out about, ‘How am I going to get this paid? How am I going to do this?’”

Now that Cambridge has expanded the program, and opened it up to all eligible families, Gows has just started getting those $500 checks again.

“For the first round of money, I feel like I focused on becoming more financially stable for myself and improving my education,” she said. “For this next round, I want to focus on my kids.”