By Connie Matthiessen
Today, the concept of guaranteed basic income is gaining increasing attention in the U.S. and around the world, and has drawn notable support from philanthropies and megadonors. Guaranteed basic income programs, which provide regular cash payments with no strings attached, aim to ease poverty and strengthen families and communities.
The Steelcase Foundation recently unveiled its own guaranteed basic income program, the Investment in Families Initiative, a 10-year commitment that will provide $1,000 a month to 30 mothers in Kent County, Michigan, with no work requirements or restrictions on how they use the funds.
The Steelcase Foundation is a corporate foundation affiliated with Steelcase, a manufacturing and design company that makes furniture and designs workspaces for offices, hospitals and classrooms. Formerly the Metal Office Furniture Company, Steelcase was founded over a century ago by David Hunting, Walther Idema and Peter Wege. Idema and Hunting created the Steelcase Foundation (originally the Metal Office Furniture Company Foundation) in 1951. Wege established his own eponymous foundation in 1967.
According to Steelcase Foundation President Daniel Williams, while the foundation and the company are separate entities, there are family ties. “To make things really fun and confusing, the majority of our board members are actually descendants of the founding families of the Steelcase company,” he said. “So it is a corporate foundation, but feels and runs a little bit more like a family foundation.”
The foundation, which is based in Grand Rapids, works in Kent County, Michigan, and Limestone County, Alabama. It provides grants to nonprofit organizations that are doing work that “increases access to quality, public education and cultivates communities where children and their families can thrive,” according to its website.
With its new guaranteed basic income initiative, the Steelcase Foundation joins other philanthropies that are including this approach in their funding strategies. In Flint, Michigan, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and a host of other funders are backing Rx Kids, an initiative that provides cash to expectant and new mothers through the first year of their infant’s life. A number of tech funders favor the idea, as my colleague Philip Rojc has pointed out. Google, for one, is supporting a pilot project in San Francisco that will provide basic monthly income for families at risk of homelessness. And on the wider theme of direct cash giving, funders including Google, Blue Meridian Partners, the George Kaiser Foundation, Schusterman Family Philanthropies and a number of billionaires support GiveDirectly, which provides cash transfers to communities in the U.S. and around the world, as my colleague Wendy Paris reported.
For the Steelcase Foundation, providing families with basic income aligns with its goals. “Our foundation continues to be hyper focused on how we better support the long-term needs of children and families,” Williams said when the initiative was unveiled.
Room to breathe
Breaking down obstacles that prevent families from flourishing is one of the ways the Steelcase Foundation aims to do that. Williams observed one of these obstacles in action when he was president and CEO of the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology, which promotes skills and career development. In that position, Williams saw many single parents who had landed good jobs stop advancing when they reached a certain income level.
“We were tracking our graduates over the years and finding that they were getting quote-unquote ‘living-wage jobs’ and moving up and then just plateauing, or in some cases, going back,” he said. “Not everyone, but a significant enough portion that we wanted to find out what was going on. What we found is this structural issue: If you are a single parent — a single household earner — when you reach a salary of about $35,000 to $45,000 a year, you start to reach a benefits cliff. Mothers, quite literally, couldn’t afford to take that wage increase and promotion because what they would lose in their household income totally outpaced any gains.”
After he started at the Steelcase Foundation, Williams and his team began looking into this issue in Kent County. They found that the cliff is at about $45,000: Once single parents start earning that much, they don’t make up what they lose in benefits until they start making about $65,000 a year.
“This has a really significant impact on moms and the choices they have to make every day,” Williams said. “These are systems issues that are creating a space where families can’t actually move up and move forward; they just can’t afford it. That was really the impetus for this initiative: How can we reduce the harm that’s happening and focus on supporting the collective wellbeing of children and families in real time?”
The goal of the Invest in Families Initiative is to create a bridge across that benefits cliff so mothers can continue to advance professionally while supporting their families. Another, broader goal is to conduct research and gather information to drive advocacy for structural reform.
In many cases over the past several years, rising philanthropic support for guaranteed income programs has specifically gone toward “pilots” — smaller-scale initiatives intended to test the concept and make the case for much broader public sector implementation. Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, for example, drew in significant support from Jack Dorsey to put such pilots in place in cities across the country. The Economic Security Project has also channeled funder support toward guaranteed income pilots over the years.
But in this case, the Steelcase Foundation team doesn’t consider the initiative a study or a pilot to evaluate the effectiveness of guaranteed basic income as a strategy. “We’ll be gathering information and listening to the stories of the partners themselves, but we’ve been really careful not to talk about this as a study, or an experiment,” Williams said. “We know that giving people money works — that is settled science. What we’re trying to do is help create additional room to breathe for moms so they can work alongside us to identify and address the systemic issues that are keeping them from moving to the next step,” Williams said.
Something bigger
To create the foundation’s cohort of Invest in Families participants, 30 mothers were randomly chosen from a large group of individuals who met the selection criteria. To identify the larger group of participants, the Steelcase Foundation conducted research in Kent County; that process led them to prioritize women from Black and Latina communities, according to Stacy Stout, director of family-centered philanthropy at the foundation.
“When you look at unemployment, wealth, access to housing, homeownership, etc., the data clearly say Black women, followed by [Latinas], have been most impacted,” she said. “So when we did the randomized drawing, it was indexed to reflect the need in the community.” The 30 mothers chosen are all either Black or Latina; some are from both communities.
Narrowing the larger group down to 30 mothers was tough, because many families were eager to participate. “It was very difficult, because we know that this has the potential to be life changing — and for generations,” Stout said. “In our outreach sessions, we let the women know that while we’re partnering with 30 women in this cohort, the ultimate goal is to change conditions and policies and behaviors of systems for everyone in Michigan, so this is about something bigger. All the women knew that participation wasn’t guaranteed, but they were still very supportive, they’re like, ‘even if we don’t get in, how do we support this?’”
Immediate needs, systemic barriers
The Steelcase Foundation conducted research, surveys and focus groups to help them shape the Investment in Families Initiative. Along with $1,000 a month in basic income, families will receive savings accounts for underage children. The mothers in the program will also join regular gatherings with fellow participants (who Steelcase calls “partners”) to foster networking and build community.
“We’ll get together four times a year, and within those four sessions, we’ll weave in wellness and mental health topics,” Stout said. “These are busy moms, so we want to honor their time. In between gatherings, we have a coordinator who will work with women to help them identify their own goals. We don’t tell them what those goals should be; the idea is to help them identify their goals and then provide support and access to resources to advance those goals.”
The Steelcase Foundation is supporting the Invest in Families Initiative without backing from other funders, but it is partnering with other nonprofits and institutions that are providing other types of support. That includes the Women’s Resource Center in Grand Rapids, which offers a range of career development and job placement programs. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS), another partner, is providing a full-time caseworker, based at the Women’s Resource Center, who will work with partner families to help navigate MDHHS systems and policies and access benefits and other resources.
A role for philanthropy
Last month, the Steelcase Foundation kicked off the Invest in Families Initiative with a gathering to welcome the 30 partners and their families. It’s worth noting that the initiative is far smaller than many of the other guaranteed basic income programs that have been rolled out to date. Over 1000 families have enrolled in Flint’s RX Kids program since its launch at the beginning of this year, for example.
At the same time, Steelcase’s initiative stands out in terms of its long, 10-year timeframe. None of the programs the Stanford Basic Income Lab is tracking on its Guaranteed Income Pilots Dashboard, for example, run for more than three years. The Steelcase Foundation sees the longer timeframe as essential if it is to learn what families need, how needs and goals change, and the ways systems help families further those goals — or prevent them from doing so. “We think that if we don’t stay for 10 years, we won’t really understand what is happening with the families over time,” Williams said.
He drew a contrast between the foundation’s 10-year commitment and the way philanthropy has often operated. “The 10-year duration of the initiative is a groundbreaking approach to combat the fleeting nature of traditional programming and philanthropic investments,” he said when the initiative was announced.
Williams believes this is changing. “A large part of the recent and appropriate shift in philanthropy is away from these really specific, tight programs that are time bound and expect these really specific outcomes,” he said. “It represents a shift to thinking about philanthropy work as a way to both convene and lift up learning, and to help support the incredible work that’s already happening in communities.”
