‘No Soft Landing’: City Cash Assistance Brought Relief, Limited Lasting Impact, Report Finds

In 2023, Tabithalee N. Howard — a lifelong Cambridge resident and mother of three — was among roughly 6,000 residents receiving a monthly stipend through the city’s Rise Up program, an initiative intended to help offset the high cost of living.

But last February, the payments stopped. The shift after, she said, was difficult.

“Things got so much more expensive,” Howard said. “Now I struggle a little bit with maintaining food. I’ve prioritized my bills differently to try to create a little bit of extra money to be able to keep up with that leisure time that I created for my kids.”

Funded with $22 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, Rise Up Cambridge provided $500 per month to low-income families with children over an 18-month period, with the goal of helping cover basic needs.

The program was started in partnership with the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee and the Cambridge Community Foundation as a successor program to Cambridge RISE, a lottery-based pilot program spearheaded by Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui in 2021 to provide financial assistance to 130 single-caretaker households.

The second iteration of the program, launched in June 2023, was the nation’s first citywide guaranteed income program that did not rely on a lottery system. Instead, it offered broad, eligibility-based access to households earning less than 250 percent of the federal poverty level — roughly $80,000 a year for a family of four.

Howard, a city employee, said the stipend helped ease day-to-day financial pressure.

“Having that extra $500 a month that didn’t count towards my everyday bills gave me the freedom to feel like I could do a couple of extra things with my kids,” she said.

But the city never intended for Rise Up to be permanent. Though she knew the program would only run for a year and a half, Howard said that adjusting her budget after the program ended was difficult.

“I guess 18 months of a freedom, you create a habit and then it’s just gone,” she added. “You just keep getting emails. You know the end date is coming, but there was no soft landing.”

In late 2024, the Council began exploring alternatives to Rise Up to continue providing cash assistance to residents amid growing concerns over the city’s budget. The city then contracted the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, to evaluate the outcomes of the program.

And in a Council committee meeting last week, MDRC researchers presented the final report, finding that Rise Up helped ease residents’ stress and day-to-day financial strain — but left deeper economic inequalities largely unchanged.

The researchers did not evaluate the concrete financial improvements that could have come as a result of the program, but focused largely on the outcomes and experiences reported by residents. The MDRC’s report found that the cash payments increased free time and a sense of empowerment while decreasing stress among recipients, with greater impacts among relatively higher income families in the program.

Still, bringing back some version of Rise Up has been a main priority for Siddiqui as she takes on her third term as mayor, even as Cambridge faces its first budget cuts in years. She said she would prioritize finding a way to fund Rise Up over other anti-poverty services.

“Given the fiscal environment that we’re in, I do think we can get creative on how to support our biggest anti-poverty agency to keep being able to help people,” she said at the Council committee meeting last week.

But City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 said there isn’t a clear-cut answer on whether the city should revive Rise Up, saying in a March interview with The Crimson that any decision to do so would require substantially pulling from Cambridge’s budget in the absence of ARPA funding.

“If we were to do any continuation or a different version of Rise Up, we would need pretty significant conversation, and we need to make a pretty significant budget commitment,” he said.

Siddiqui pointed to the potential for collaboration between the city and private donors and nonprofits to sustain the effort in an interview, framing the program as an early step in a longer push to expand economic opportunity.

“A public-private partnership would probably be key,” she said. “I think a lot of the pilot programs that have continued have mostly been private funding. Not a lot of places are using their actual city general fund.”

Huang said that the program’s mixed results — mitigating short-term pressure while lacking long-term impacts — should not be taken as a reason to abandon it. Instead, he said, the findings are a part of a more nuanced conversation about what cash assistance can sustainably help residents achieve.

“What we’ve learned about cash transfer is that it isn’t a solution to poverty,” Huang said in an interview.

Mina Addo, one of four MDRC researchers who authored the report, said that the data from Rise Up aligns with research on other short term programs, finding that most do not show large-scale economic changes.

“Short term cash payments effectively solve some, but not all economic challenges. And from this body of research, we don’t find large-scale changes in economic circumstances,” she said.

Despite a lack of lasting or permanent changes, Tina Alu, the executive director of the CEOC, considered Rise Up a success, since there were no expectations for long-term benefits from the beginning.

“We didn’t expect that this was going to solve poverty or necessarily have a long term impact on a lot of the families that were under 100 percent of the federal poverty level,” she said. “Having that additional cash just helps people to keep their head above water a little bit.”

City councilors remained divided on whether the city could support restarting the program outright, and questioned whether doing so held value. Councilor Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80 said she would be interested in isolating elements of the program and implementing them in addition to additional programs like job training and childcare.

“I’m really interested in digging in and understanding what elements of this we would be able to replicate and actually have the trajectory change of people’s lives,” she said.

Councilor Jivan G. Sobrino-Wheeler said he supported bringing the program back because of the increased autonomy it provides families in poverty.

“You need less administrative support to review tons of applications, to figure out if the person is qualifying for this specific heating, or housing, or child care assistance,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “You’re just giving them the funding directly, and there are a bunch of advantages to doing that.”

As the city pushes to finalize its budget for 2027, Siddiqui maintains a hopeful outlook for finding a solution.

“I do think it’s possible. I think we should find a way forward for some of these Cambridge families,” she said.

—Staff writer Maya Fu can be reached at [email protected].

—Staff writer Risha Sinha can be reached at [email protected].