In the fall of 2023, Shaunice King was on bed rest with a complicated pregnancy, unable to work or pay rent. Her third child was on the way, and money was running out.
"A lot of things were falling apart financially, from financial bills to rent," King said.
Then she saw headlines about a new St. Louis pilot program that would give 540 qualified families $500 a month for 18 months, known as a guaranteed basic income (GBI) program.
To qualify, applicants had to live in the city of St. Louis with a child enrolled in St. Louis Public Schools or a public charter school, have proof of financial hardship from the COVID-19 pandemic and a household income that fell within poverty-level guidelines.
King met the requirements and applied. By the new year, she was getting $500 a month, deposited on a debit card. She used the money to buy diapers for her newborn, groceries for her family and clothes for her two older children, who are 9 and 14.
"It really helped me and my family get through a tough time," King said.
Now, seven months after the final payments went to hundreds of families, the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis has released research results on the pilot program, showing King's positive experience was shared by others.
Researchers found that participating families reported less economic hardship, reduced food insecurity, higher savings and improved well-being by the end of the pilot program. Parents said they had more time for their kids because they worked less overtime, and they noticed improvements in school. The researchers also found that participants missed fewer debt payments, and their average credit scores improved 12 points when compared to a control group.
"We learned that it gave people a chance to not be in constant crisis and created room in their lives, and their budget, to experience moments of joy," said Hannah Allee, associate director at the Brown School Evaluation Center.
But a court-ordered payment pause, the May 16 tornado and the recent federal government shutdown left many families struggling again, underscoring how vulnerable households can be when support stops and crises hit.
"A lot of people really are just one emergency away from a financial disaster, and I think we saw evidence of that here," said Stephen Roll, lead research investigator and assistant professor at the Brown School.
'The overwhelming need'
The St. Louis GBI pilot, launched by then-Mayor Tishaura Jones, was the first program of its kind in Missouri. City officials saw it as a way to reduce poverty and increase economic stability through direct payments to families, and to test whether a longer-term guaranteed income program could work in St. Louis.
"The purpose of these programs is not to say we helped everyone in 18 months, but to say, 'Look what 18 months can do,'" said Adam L. Layne, St. Louis treasurer.
Layne, who helped administer the program, said city leaders were inspired by the first city-led GBI program launched in Stockton, California, in 2019. That pilot sought to address inequality, income volatility and poverty, issues that St. Louis also faces.
"The rates of poverty in the city are so disproportionate as you go from neighborhood to neighborhood, and that's from legacies of segregation," Roll, the researcher, said. "To try to move past that, the city has to get creative in terms of how it envisions its public benefits, how it envisions its economic investments."
Momentum for a local program accelerated after the pandemic, when St. Louis received nearly $500 million in federal relief funds through the American Rescue Plan Act. It first used the funds to give $500 one-time direct cash payments to about 9,100 households and later used $5 million to launch the GBI pilot.
"The ARPA funds were big. They're the reason why the guaranteed income movement has spread so far and there's been so many pilots," said Michael Tubbs, founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and the former mayor of Stockton, California.
St. Louis became one of 39 cities and counties that used ARPA dollars to launch GBI programs, according to The Budget Equity Project.
Research from these pilots has shown strong short-term gains for people who receive monthly income, but it is unclear how a permanent GBI could impact participants long-term. The country's first county-level permanent guaranteed income program, now underway in Cook County, Illinois, could offer new insights.
For the St. Louis pilot, Layne said the city wanted to ensure the money reached residents most affected by the pandemic and child poverty, so city leaders created eligibility requirements around income, pandemic impact and caregiving status.
Under those requirements, more than 20,000 people qualified in a city of about 280,000, according to Rebecca Belleville, the GBI program manager. The city hired Belleville in September 2023 to organize and implement the pilot program.
"That's something that honestly keeps me up at night, is just the overwhelming need for programs like this," she said.
More than 5,000 people ultimately applied. With only 540 spots, the city used a lottery to select qualifying recipients.
Relief for many
Meloni Jones remembers when she got the acceptance call.
"I was elated, really," said Jones, a 42-year-old single mother of four. "There was now some relief for me and my family."
Jones grew up in St. Louis, also raised by a single mother. Today, she has a part-time job as a hostess at a restaurant but said she still struggles. The $500 a month came just in time to pay her electric bills through the winter months and to provide enough food for her family.
"Nobody wants to be worried about how they're going to feed their children, you know, let alone themselves," Jones said.
The bit of money that Jones didn't need for housing and food was saved for something she never expected to provide — Christmas gifts for her baby granddaughter and teenage son.
"I was able to do something because of that program," Jones said, recalling the first Christmas she could gift books to her granddaughter.
Unlike other social assistance programs, these payments were sent via a debit card that could be used to pay for virtually anything, minus some restrictions, such as use at casinos. It gave participants access to online banking services and allowed cash withdrawals. There were also no required check-ins or financial literacy classes, though participants were encouraged to voluntarily seek out the St. Louis Office of Financial Empowerment and other counseling services.
"We did not make that mandatory because we wanted the research to reflect what families did with the money without external influence," said Belleville, the program manager. "The purpose of this program was economic mobility. So we wanted to give folks the money to be able to make decisions that are best for their families."
Spending data showed that participants used nearly all of the money for necessities. Researchers found that 99% of tracked purchases went toward daily needs like food, transportation, clothing, household goods or financial services. Only 1% of the tracked funds were spent on "Travel, Leisure, or Entertainment."
The money also allowed flexibility in a crisis. Some participants spent money on Lyft and Uber rides to get their children to school during unexpected bussing challenges at St. Louis Public Schools.
For one family, Belleville said, the cash covered lifesaving medication. "That was very hard to hear, the fact that this arbitrary program was keeping a child alive," she said.
The Brown School study used a mixed-methods approach, including application data, a longitudinal survey, spending records and participant interviews over the 18-month program. Sixty-two percent of GBI participants enrolled in the study. Of those enrolled, 193 participants consented to monthly credit-score tracking. Researchers saw the effects of the pilot almost immediately.
"We saw that their likelihood of actually falling behind on their debt payments decreased almost as soon as the payments started going out, and then correspondingly, their credit scores started improving," Roll said.
Five months in, participants gathered for a roundtable at City Hall to talk about the program, and the discussion affirmed that the program was already helping to stabilize finances — at least for a while.
Progress paused
Layne, the city treasurer, told The Midwest Newsroom there wasn't much initial pushback on the GBI pilot.
"People thought it was a great idea, at least on the city level," he said, adding that the program went through the City Counselor's Office for legal review to make sure it complied with the law.
But six months into the GBI pilot program, the Holy Joe Society, a local nonprofit, filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of two residents. The group argued the program violated the state's constitutional restrictions on giving public funds to private individuals and the eligibility requirements were against city charter. The organization did not respond to questions from The Midwest Newsroom about why it did not challenge the $500 one-time payments before the GBI pilot.
A judge issued a temporary injunction in July 2024, pausing program payments while the case moved forward. Jones felt the effects immediately. She fell behind on bills again, and her car was repossessed. Jones thought the program was over, and so did others.
"It affected [me] horribly," one participant told researchers. "I had to take out a loan because I couldn't get around or really, I didn't have any wiggle room in finances, none at all. And I'm still paying the loan back."
Data in the Brown School study also reflected this strain. Roll said that his research team saw payment delinquencies spike and credit scores start to decline when payments paused, reversing some of the progress participants had made.
"I think that really speaks to, you know, the fact that for a lot of these folks, they're living incredibly precarious economic lives," Roll said.
The city argued that the program provided a public benefit, an exception outlined in the state constitution. Roll offered expert testimony during the lawsuit, showing the impacts of the program. He highlighted an estimate from the Washington University Social Policy Institute and the Brown School Evaluation Center that put the cost of child poverty in St. Louis at $1.412 billion in 2022.
"Poverty is not just people having low incomes. Poverty is lost opportunities in the future," Roll said. "It's all these risks that impose costs on the city in terms of health care, in terms of policing, in terms of lost tax revenue."
The preliminary injunction held, preventing the city from using public funds to continue the program. St. Louis ultimately had to pay back unspent program funds using reappropriated American Rescue Plan Act money, Layne said.
Then the city went to philanthropic partners to continue the program, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation, along with other donors, stepped in. Participants received back payments in October for the missed month during litigation, and the program continued through its planned end date, May 2025.
"JSMF's support for this program has always been about keeping a promise made to 540 households, and ensuring that St. Louis can learn from real, local evidence about what helps families move toward economic stability," said Jason Purnell, president of the foundation, in a statement to The Midwest Newsroom. "We hope the data continue to inform thoughtful, long-term strategies to make prosperity attainable for as many people as possible in our region."
The unresolved lawsuit exposed a deeper reality for city officials: that future cash-assistance programs might be impossible. Layne said a constitutional amendment may be necessary as more residents struggle to meet basic needs and city intervention may be needed.
"Wages are not keeping up with prices, and costs are going up astronomically," he said. "But household income is not."
Layne said the goal is not to do multiple pilot programs, but to embed financial support into city government. He said he has had conversations about starting a cash assistance program for people recently released from prison.
"If we say as municipalities that we care about our residents, we care about our people and their prosperity, we have to build that into our budget," Layne said.
W. Bevis Schock, an attorney representing the Holy Joe Society, told The Midwest Newsroom that his organization is still pursuing a permanent injunction to ensure a city-led direct cash-assistance program cannot happen again. A motion for an official ruling was submitted on Nov. 25.
Other Midwest states moved to restrict similar programs entirely, arguing they create dependency and exceed local authority. In April 2024, the Iowa Legislature passed a law banning local governments from creating or enforcing programs that provide unearned periodic cash payments. In 2025, Kansas passed a similar bill.
A complex outcome
Despite the pause in St. Louis, researchers and city leaders said they felt the St. Louis pilot was successful.
"I think our program went as well as could have been with the resources that we had in the circumstances that were presented to us," Belleville, the program manager, said.
The survey and interviews show participants felt more confident, more in control of their lives, and better able to support their children's health, activities and schoolwork during the program. But it doesn't show the challenges participants have faced since the final payments were made.
In May, the last month of the program, a tornado hit the city of St. Louis. The apartment that Meloni Jones was preparing to move into was damaged, and she struggled to get the down payment back.
Shaunice King went back to school to get her nursing credentials. But during the recent government shutdown, she said her clinic lost its federal funding and she was out of work for weeks.
Both women said they were affected by the SNAP pause during the shutdown and that the savings they had built during the GBI program are gone.
Roll said this is a reminder of how policy shifts and funding issues outside the public's control have real impacts on their day-to-day lives and their ability to raise their children.
"Especially for low-income families, they're so vulnerable to the broader institutional failings that we have in our cities, in our states, in our federal government," he said.
City officials and researchers said they agreed that no one program can solve every issue that a city like St. Louis faces, but it was still worth launching the pilot to gather the data and help families in the short term.
"It was a great program. I really appreciated it. I just didn't think I would need it more now than ever," King said.
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR.
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METHODOLOGY
To report this story, journalist Naomi Delkamiller surveyed 10 program participants and interviewed two, visiting one participant at her home in St. Louis. She learned about how guaranteed income affected their lives and how the program's pause and its end ultimately affected them. She reviewed three research briefs from the Brown School at Washington University and visited the lead researcher on campus to learn about the study design and outcomes. She spoke with city officials, the GBI program manager, two program researchers and the founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income to understand the wider scope of GBI programs across the country.
REFERENCES
2422-CC01579 - GREGORY TUMLIN V ST LOUIS CITY MISSOURI ET AL (E-CASE) (Missouri Courts | June 2024)
Missouri Constitution VI Section 25 (State of Missouri | December 1984)
Preliminary Analysis: SEED's First Year (Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration | March 2021)
How wealth inequality shapes life in the St. Louis region (STLPR | January 2022)
Direct pandemic cash assistance helped St. Louis residents meet basic needs (STLPR | September 2022)
Guaranteed Income Pilot Programs, Policy Brief (The New School | September 2024)
Cook County becomes the first county in the US to establish permanent funding for guaranteed income (The Tribe | November 2025)
St. Louis Public Schools leaders plan to address concerns about student transportation (STLPR | August 2024)
St. Louis families say they are grateful for $500 monthly basic income help (STLPR | May 2024)
Nonprofit sues St. Louis over its Guaranteed Basic Income program (5 On Your Side | June 2024)
Judge temporarily stops St. Louis program that pays poor families $500 a month (STLPR | July 2024)
Iowa House File 2319, Governor's letter (Office of the Governor | May 2024)
Kansas House Bill No. 2101 (Kansas Secretary of State | July 2025)
TYPE OF ARTICLE
Enterprise — in-depth examination of a subject requiring extensive research and sourcing.
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