Eliminating Poverty with the Universal Basic Employment Pilot

Why this investment

Considered one of the poorest and most inequitable cities in the country, approximately one-third of Cleveland’s residents and half of its children are living in poverty. Citywide, poverty is experienced along racial lines with significant disproportionate impacts on communities of color. Black people in Cleveland are 1.7 times more likely to be experiencing poverty than their white counterparts. 

Dating back to the 1940s, Universal Basic Employment is essentially a job guarantee, meaning that under this program, a good job is made available to everyone who wants one. An idea championed by Black female civil rights icons such as Sadie Alexander, Ella Baker, and Coretta Scott King, this movement has been shaped by—and for—Black women. Recognizing the legacy of Black women in shaping UBE, as well as the disproportionate impact of poverty on Black women nationwide, the pilot program decided to focus on uplifting this underserved sector of the population. It is important to note that this target population is subject to change as the design process gets underway based on research findings as the pilot evolves.

In 2021, Cleveland City Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones, a then state representative representing one of the poorest districts in Ohio (Ward 7), was actively seeking a systems approach solution to address the generational poverty experienced by the majority of her constituents. A conversation with Devin Cotten, then working at a community development corporation, revealed the potential for Universal Basic Employment as a bonafide pathway to systems-level change and poverty elimination. Particularly within the context of Ohio, universal basic employment appealed to Council Member Howse-Jones as a feasible strategy as opposed to universal basic income due to the municipalities’ culture of trusting businesses with public funds over individuals. Howse-Jones’ constituency was slated to receive $2 million in ARPA funding in the aftermath of the federally recognized disparate impacts of the pandemic. Leading with the desire to use this funding intentionally and to experiment with UBE as an innovative solution to empower her under-resourced community, Howse-Jones advocated for the Cleveland City Council to allocate $600,000 of her district's allocated funding to support Universal Basic Employment in Cleveland.

What is this investment?

UBE is a pilot program with the ultimate goal of simultaneously delivering family-sustaining jobs to un and underemployed residents while supporting the growth of small businesses and the often underserved communities in which they serve. The foundational belief of the pilot is that a job guarantee is a beneficial and worthwhile investment for people, place, and business. Devin Cotten, the founder of UBE, expands on this symbiotic benefit. “Now, advantageous private firms have the ability to solve the symptoms of poverty like [the] digital divide, food access, or food apartheid by being willing to say ‘hey, everyone in this historically disadvantaged community has the ability to pay for internet so we'll happily dig up a road and lay fiber optic cables because we know all these individuals can be potential customers.’” 

UBE is designed to subsidize salary and employment at $50,000 for 100 under and unemployed Clevelanders at various small businesses for three years. UBE and its partner United Way of Greater Cleveland (UWGC) will provide small businesses in a target neighborhood with the capital and technical assistance to hire 100 residents and subsidize the entirety of pilot participants' salaries while hiring small businesses to cover benefits such as medical, retirement, and paid leave. With the $600,000 in ARPA funding, UBE can fund staff time for the extensive research and development phase which consists of human-centered design sessions, fundraising, brainstorming, and more.

Centering equity in the program

UBE inherently centers equity. Its core mission is to “demonstrate that a federal jobs guarantee policy can eliminate poverty and be a stop-payment on its many symptoms.” By addressing the root of poverty in providing family-sustaining wages for historically underserved individuals, the allocation of resources to address symptoms of poverty can be redirected into community wellbeing.

Currently in the planning phase, UBE’s research and design process features a human-centered design framework prioritizing the knowledge of marginalized residents with the lived experience of prospective pilot participants. In April of 2023, UBE held focus group sessions, in partnership with a Black woman-owned nonprofit consulting company Monique Inc., with local business owners and human-centered design sessions with Black women. Through four facilitated sessions, participants shared feedback on design elements such as salary, on-boarding, potential indicators of success, and target lived experience of prospective pilot participants. From an equity lens, the program is deeply committed to creating a pilot reflective of the individuals that the pilot aims to uplift.  

Notably, UBE is actively working to address the benefits cliff, which often results in a lack of economic mobility for individual beneficiaries of social safety net programs, as even a small increase in earnings can cause a substantial decrease in public benefits. In selecting $50,000 as the starting salary for pilot participants, the team considered the risk of a benefits cliff and employed the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster (CLIFF) to validate that a $50,000 salary with employer-provided health insurance for a single head of household with two children under the age of five would surpass the need for any public benefit program. However, UBE is balancing the intentionality of this salary and the inevitable uncertainty of a pilot whereby the efficacy of this salary in addressing this obstacle can only be revealed in practice. “The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s benefit calculator can tell me something, but how does this actually show up in someone's individual life?” Cotten asks. “What does this actually look like from the lived experience? To be flexible enough and supportive enough to be adaptive and not be rigid in what we want to measure and what we want to see, to respond to the needs of the 100 individuals and their families as we go through this journey together.”

Outcomes to date

Currently, UBE is in the research and design phase of its evolution with a target launch of the first quarter of 2026. They are actively considering various design elements such as accessibility to benefits waivers, wraparound services, and ensuring that allocated dollars received by employers effectively reach participants. The human-centered design process and focus group sessions have informed various design adjustments such as the necessity for daily access to a social worker to support participants’ transition within the pilot. 

“It's not just about the job and things, but having real support, and not just a monthly meeting, but having someone that will go with you in life,” Howse-Jones says. “That you could pick up the phone daily if you need to talk to somebody, and that support is already developed into the pilot because it can be a real shock to your body to go from what you know to what you don’t. So being really thoughtful and thinking about that and trying to include that in this design.”

Toward transformative change

Universal Basic Income (UBE) envisions its program as the beginning of a larger movement, aiming to expand the pilot to other communities nationwide. As they work to make UBE a reality, the organization is already strategizing on how to ensure this ability is transferable to other cities.“We’re starting here today and then will begin the work of what it can mean to run multiple pilots across the country,” Cotten says. “We just had a conversation with the city of Denver yesterday. We have interest from Philadelphia, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and some other places as well. So our goal here is to demonstrate how to actually do this work here, and then move on to another pilot, multiple pilots across the country, that examine other segments of the population.”