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Policy research for whom, by whom? From cash pilot to cash policy through critical participatory action research
Our findings, along with others from around the country, suggest unconditional cash is a promising element of economic justice policy. Yet, these studies navigate “tricky ground”: they may demonstrate the transformative potential of cash support, but are often top-down experiments that can enact epistemological violence, excluding the expertise of the people most impacted, normalizing practices of withholding much needed resources for the purposes of comparison, and focusing on narrow outcomes that mismeasure impact. In a paper recently published in Evidence and Policy, we describe Transforming Care's critical participatory action research approach, not only as a viable alternative for ethical and impactful cash policy research, but as a different vision of who policy research is for, and by whom it should be done. A New Standard for Policy Research Rather than adopt a randomized controlled trial model — the so-called “gold standard” of evidence-based policy research — Transforming Care combined a range of participatory methods with a propensity-score-matched comparison (a statistical technique that constructs a comparable group from existing administrative data) developed in partnership with a government research center. This work was carried out through an intergenerational core research collective — a collaboration of the Public Science Project, the Children's Defense Fund, and the Center for the Study of Social Policy — including paid youth action researchers and organizers, and adults with backgrounds in research, policy, and organizing. Our collective was a participatory contact zone, bringing together people with different standpoints, stakes, and relationships to power, and where young people with lived experience of the foster care system had real authority as co-researchers. Our methods interrogated dominant myths about unconditional cash and gave participants space to challenge welfare policy's most enduring assumptions, including that poor people cannot be trusted with money. Ninety-five percent of pilot participants rejected the claim that cash discourages work. Many described leveraging the pilot to pursue new opportunities or simply noted they couldn't afford to stop. They reported spending overwhelmingly on food, rent, transportation, emergencies, and supporting children and other family members, which reflected not irresponsibility but constrained circumstances and remarkable care. From the start, our research was also embedded in a broader movement for economic justice , so that analysis, action, and advocacy developed simultaneously, including working closely with New York State policymakers to propose permanent legislation for young people with child welfare and foster care experience. Research alone is not enough In the words of participants, cash created breathing room: to plan ahead, to have choices, to handle an emergency, to save. As one shared: "Because of the money, I no longer feel like I'm surviving. I'm starting to live." While our collective acknowledged the importance of documenting the genuine relief participants experienced, we were clear-eyed that $1,000 a month cannot erase decades of racialized and classed disinvestment, ongoing housing crises, and the systematic withdrawal of support from young people leaving state care. Our current political moment has only sharpened these conditions: across the United States, social supports are being actively dismantled while the wealth gap grows. And yet, this is also a time of openings, as dominant narratives of individual accountability, selective deservingness, and scarcity fail to make sense of, or address, deepening inequality. What we do with these openings matters, in the US and in the many countries where guaranteed income movements are gaining ground. Transforming Care teaches us that unconditional cash can transform lives, and that the methods we use to study that change must be transformed too.
