How cash payments are helping Yolo County families reduce depression and improve childhoods

Money can’t buy happiness, or so the proverb goes, but UC Davis researchers found that impoverished mothers in Yolo County experienced less depression and spent more time with their children after they were awarded cash payments.

In 2022, Yolo County began providing a guaranteed basic income to 67 families with children under age 6 — 90% of them led by single women. It was enough money to raise the families’ incomes one dollar above the California Poverty Measure over a two-year period.

Midway through this program, UCD researcher Catherine Brinkley found that depression rates had dropped by 30%, and library visits with children soared by 127%.

“I’m honestly shocked by our results,” Brinkley said. “Caregivers are … literally feeling better. They’re reporting spending more time with their children, more outings, taking them to the library, spending more time reading — all of these pieces that are so crucial to parent-child bonding, mental health, wellness.”

Because parents feel less stress around feeding, housing and caring for their children, they have energy to put toward enriching their children’s environments, nurturing their relationships, teaching and developing their social and emotional skills, said Sarah Marikos, who leads ACE Resource Network, an organization dedicated to preventing toxic stress in children.

“If these results hold and can hold over the longer term, what we could potentially see is a reduction … in the mental health challenges that mothers and parents are experiencing, which could reduce the number of ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) that children experience at a really young age,” Marikos said.

A model for how CA can deal with deep child poverty

More than 100 similar experimental programs have launched around the country to test whether infusions of cash can help indigent residents stabilize their finances and avert homelessness. In fact, Sacramento County is accepting applications for its third round of cash payments.

While analysis of other projects largely focused on how people spent money and whether they lost or gained jobs, Yolo County and the research team at the University of California, Davis, have taken a different tack: They looked at whether the payments can improve early childhood health and wellness.

The survey results show that Yolo County Basic Income Program, or YOBI, could be a model throughout California of a cost-effective, efficient way to address deep child poverty, said Nolan Sullivan, the county director of health and human services.

The rates of depression were “alarming” among program participants who had been sleeping in their vehicles or living in shelters or moving from house to house, Sullivan said, but the small influx of cash gave them housing stability, time for child care and a greater sense of well-being.

Before Yolo County issued the first payments, depression rates in participants were four to five times higher than the average Yolo County resident, Brinkley said. “To be able to reduce those depression rates by 30% with one year of funding is just incredible.”

Minors who grow up in a household with mental illness are at greater risk of having adverse childhood experiences: stressful, even potentially traumatic moments that could affect a child’s health into adulthood, research has found.

Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted a landmark study in the 1990s showing that as exposure to adverse childhood experiences increases, so does the risk that a child will go on to experience substance abuse, mental health disorders, suicidal thoughts or even cardiovascular disease later in life.

Early intervention, however, can change a child’s destiny, reducing the impact of toxic stress, Marikos said, and the CDC has said that economic support for families with children is one of the strategies that could reduce ACES.

The Yolo County Basic Income Program, however, is far more generous than most basic income programs. While, the Sacramento pilot pays $500 monthly, YOBI participants got $1,289 on average, according to the UCD survey.

Cash came at right time for domestic violence survivor

YOBI participant Marquisha Brown said that her cash payment was invaluable in ensuring that she and her son Eli could heal after they suffered a horrifying loss.

In February 2021, court records state, Brown’s then-boyfriend, Derrick Dimone Woods, brutally beat and killed her year-old daughter Amanda Marie Owens while she and Eli were in his care. The court determined that Woods is not currently competent to stand trial, and he has been sent for mental health treatment.

Eli, who’s 6 now, was placed in foster care for 10 months after Amanda was killed, Brown said. By the time she got him back, he was no longer the sweet boy he had been before his sister’s death.

Brown was living in a shelter for domestic violence survivors, but because of Eli’s inappropriate outbursts, the shelter operators told her she would have to leave. Although Brown had identified a potential place to stay, she said, it wasn’t ready.

The shelter operators ultimately agreed to provide her with a hotel room, but things got complicated. Although Brown had ensured that Eli received therapy soon after he was placed in foster care, his actions sometimes could be violent, she said, and his language inappropriate.

He was having similar behavioral issues at school, she said, and she frequently had to leave work and pick him up early from school. Ultimately, Brown decided to quit her job and focus on her son’s emotional and mental health. His behavior, she said, seemed to be a cry for help.

“Nothing was good for him,” she said. “He was so mean to people and he could not be in a regular setting. He needed the extra support, and he needed me to be there for him. So it was him or it was my job. He definitely needed me more.”

Without that income, though, Brown no longer qualified for the apartment she had found. While her stress level was high, she said, she never lost hope that she would find an answer because Eli needed that home, that stability.

It was at this juncture that a worker with Yolo County’s Health and Human Services Agency offered her a lifeline: a chance to apply for the Yolo County Basic Income Program.

“When I did get YOBI, it was just ... a relief for me,” Brown said, “and I knew that when I did get YOBI, that my family was for sure going to be alright.”

Funder sees YOBI as an investment in future workers

The two-year budget for YOBI totaled nearly $2.3 million. County leaders set aside $1.3 million in funding from cannabis fees and federal dollars received as part of the American Rescue Plan. They then raised $771,500 from a collection of philanthropic organizations and state agencies, including Sutter Health Foundation and Sierra Health Foundation. They are still seeking roughly $300,000 to close the funding gap.

Chet Hewitt, the chief executive officer of the Sierra Health Foundation, said he sees the funding as an investment that will pay off with healthy future workers who can pay into tax coffers and social security.

If Eli was in foster care or a residential mental health treatment facility, Hewitt said, the county would likely have to pay as much or more than the average YOBI cash payment of $1,289 for foster care or for intensive behavioral health treatment.

“But when (a child) goes back to mom, the person who’s most likely to be there for him over the course of his life, we as a society think mom shouldn’t get anything because it’s her son, and we have this perverse and unrealistic idea that caring for your child is not work or worthy of support,” Hewitt said.

Care and supervision at a short-term residential treatment facility could cost more than $16,000 a month, not including mental health treatment, according to the California Alliance of Child and Family Services. Foster care for a 4-year-old child is a minimum of $1,100 a month, according to the nonprofit iFoster.

But foster care brings greater risk, Sullivan said. Kids in foster care are far more likely to be trafficked, more likely to get molested or sexually abused, more likely to have substance-use or mental health problems as adults and more likely to be incarcerated later in life.

With therapy, school interventions and her guidance, Brown said Eli is now doing so much better that she feels able to return to work and has started looking for a job.

“YOBI ends in March,” she said. “I’m not worried about it ending in March. It helped me when I couldn’t work.”