In recent years, the Greater Washington Community Foundation has been piloting programs around the D.C. region aimed at boosting low-income families, including offering grants that essentially provide universal basic income to some families, and more recently, the funding of child savings accounts that follow selected students until they become adults.
This week, the foundation announced a new program that aims to combine those two programs together with the hope of potentially spurring action toward a bigger, broader program.
The “Pathway to Economic Mobility, Prosperity and Family Wellness” involves 100 families scattered around D.C. who currently receive subsidized housing from the District.
For the next two years, they’ll be receiving $1,000 per month. On top of that, parents will get $1,000 they can put toward an IRA or emergency savings account. Their children will also get $1,000 put into a 529 college savings plan and $1,000 toward a Roth IRA.
In all, it’s about a $5 million investment into those families for the next two years.
“We are supporting the immediate, the midterm, and then also the retirement years of both the parents and the children,” said Marla Dean, senior director of the Health Equity Fund project with the GWCF.
“They decide how it will best help support their family now, and help them meet their goals in the long term,” added Kimberly Perry, executive director at DC Action.
Wraparound services like financial literacy instructions and other family navigation services, like help finding child care, will also be included in this program. Far from creating more dependence on assistance, Perry said it would actually provide the participating families with more autonomy.
“So many families are just struggling, living paycheck to paycheck,” Perry said.
She said this program will hope to make them “feel like they are economically secure that they can, over time, begin to build assets, slowly but surely. And what we hope is that this will really close the racial wealth gap, because not only will this generation begin to be able to save and dream about their future, but their children will be as well.”
And if the program goes the way Perry and Dean think it can, the initial $5 million investment can eventually transform into $34 million in wealth for the 100 families participating. Dean said, from there, successful outcomes could spur conversations that focus on moving programs like this from the pilot project stage to becoming broader policies.
“Not everyone will need this intervention,” Dean said. “But we know that children and families need a lot of support in D.C. Far too many of them are struggling in one way or another. Working individually usually does not have the level of impact that working with both parent and child will have.”
