Empowering Black Mothers through the Multnomah Mother's Trust
Multnomah County, ORInspired by other guaranteed income programs designed by and for Black mothers, the Multnomah Mother’s Trust is a participatory research project that provides $500 in monthly direct cash assistance to 100 Black mothers living in Multnomah County, Oregon. Directed by the Multnomah Idea Lab (MIL) housed within the Multnomah County Department of Human Services, participants in the Multnomah Mother’s Trust are selected by two community-based organizations. Speaking to the unique design of the program, Director Mary Li emphasizes the Trust’s belief that “the mother knows best.”
Why this investment?
Multnomah County explicitly prioritized racial equity in its COVID-19 pandemic relief spending, beginning with the CARES Act and continuing through ARPA. The County’s COVID-19 Response Guiding Principles included commitments to “inclusively lead with race” and use an equity and racial justice approach. The principles further promised engagement and partnership with those living and working in the community, including community leaders and community-based organizations.
The Multnomah Idea Lab (MIL), launched in 2015, develops innovative approaches to address racialized poverty in the County. MIL implements pilots to test and demonstrate new solutions, with an aim to change County policies. Director Mary Li describes how their focus on the intersection of class and race led them to projects focusing on Black households, especially those headed by women, to “at least stop the decline of assets and wealth, if not try to build assets and wealth.” This impetus, as well as inspiration from the Magnolia Mother’s Trust and the Abundant Birth Project, led to the creation of the Multnomah Mother’s Trust.
The Mother’s Trust built upon MIL’s previous pandemic-era cash-focused efforts, including a cash transfer project with nonprofit UpTogether focused on Black families that were a part of the County health department’s Healthy Birth Initiative, and the County’s Food Justice ARPA-funded program which distributed prepaid grocery cards to low-income BIPOC households. Li says the ARPA funding allowed the County to meet nationwide calls on local governments to address structural racism without justifying additional spending or making budget cuts.
What is this investment?
Launched in 2021, the Trust has 100 members, all of whom are Black mothers referred by community partners the Black Parent Initiative and WomenFirst. The cohort represents a population highly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and who might not otherwise have access to resources. Each participant began receiving $500 per month in May 2022 and the monthly payments increased to $750 per household in 2023. The payments will continue for 24 months through June 2024. At the end of 2022, each household also received a one-time bonus payment of $3,000.
The Trust has a unique structure, in that all of the women involved are considered members of the Trust, rather than service-recipients or program participants. The County does not interact with the members directly, instead, Trust members collaborate with the community-based organization that referred them to the program and with whom they already had a relationship.
The Trust has been exploring additional wealth-building strategies including homeownership, debt reduction at a collective scale, and Baby Bonds. For instance, some of the women involved in the Trust have designed a culturally-specific approach to homeownership for Black women: The Finna Act Black (FAB) program, which launched in November 2022, offers peer support, counseling, down payment assistance, and debt relief for Black women looking to become homeowners.
MIL is also continuing to explore the programmatic possibility of debt consolidation, or the collective purchasing of bad debt, in addition to a Baby Bonds program for Black women with children.
Centering equity in the program
The Trust puts unconditional cash into the hands of the Black community, with a specific focus on families with children and female-headed single-parent households. Rather than make financial recommendations to the members, the MIL emphasizes unconditionality as a core value. This philosophy, whereby MIL inserts itself as little as possible into the decisions of the Trust members and passes no judgment on their decisions, is partly inspired by the work of their partner UpTogether. “Allowing people the dignity to make the choices they see fit isn’t just a matter of respect; it’s a foundational tenet of being a free human being,” Ebonee Bell, senior research evaluation analyst at the Multnomah Innovation Lab says.
MIL also sought to structure an equitable research project whereas Trust members can opt-in to entering their data every month for compensation. “They're like us in this conversation, and probably their viewpoint is more important than ours,” Li says.
Outcomes to date
Preliminary results from the evaluation will be released in 2024, but members of the Trust have been sharing their personal outcomes. Testifying at a May 2024 council hearing to support continued funding for the project, Trust Member Jamilah Trent said, “Having a basic income from Multnomah Mother’s Trust has meant that I could get out of debt sooner and save to afford a down payment on my first home in December 2022.”
Describing the program to UpTogether, Trust Member La’Quonda said, “It was astounding. It helped me catch up on all my bills. The cash investment pushed me to say ‘I need to have something to show for this’ and allowed me to open my mind and use it in the right ways. It gave me an opportunity to think bigger and broader about what I want.”
Toward transformative change
The Mother’s Trust has had a reverberating effect on the County’s budget and equity processes. Multnomah County’s Economic Justice project has been heavily influenced by the Trust, and the County is implementing the same basic income structure with a population of refugees and asylees, who receive $1,000 per month, as well as men transitioning out of incarceration. Inspired by the Trust’s success, former County Commissioner Susheela Jayapal joined Counties for a Guaranteed Income.
MIL has helped popularize the idea of basic income throughout Multnomah County as well as across Oregon, and is involved in statewide conversations around basic income, including the possibility of a basic income for unhoused youth. Li says, “this conversation and the words basic income have been completely changed by the fact that the Trust exists.”
Li hopes that the County will be able to continue the program and play its role in redressing white supremacy culture and anti-Blackness, but with the ARPA funding ending, the future is not certain. While the County committed operating funds toward staffing the initiative in 2023-2024, it has proposed eliminating the Multnomah Ideas Lab in the 2025 budget to close a budget gap. Community advocates and Trust members are advocating for continued funding.
Acknowledgements
Support for this case study was provided in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policies for Action program. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.