As federal aid shrinks, communities try new ways to tackle child poverty on their own : Shots

Sh’Amir Spencer and daughter Amira pose with Rx Kids co-director Mona Hanna at the Hurley Children’s Center clinic in Flint, Mich. Spencer and her daughter are part of the first cohort of moms and babies in the program, which launched in the city in January.

‎‎Kate Wells/Michigan Public

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‎‎Kate Wells/Michigan Public

If you bring a baby into the Hurley Children’s Center clinic in downtown Flint, Mich., Mona Hanna will find you.

The pediatrician, who gained national prominence for helping uncover the city’s water crisis in 2015, strode across the waiting room in her white lab coat, eyes laser-focused on the chubby baby in the lap of an unsuspecting parent.

“Hi! I’m Dr. Mona!” she said warmly. “Any chance you guys live in Flint?”

She learned the family is from neighboring Grand Blanc.

“That’s so sad!” Hanna said. “You should move to Flint! And have another baby! And you could be part of the Rx Kids program!”

The parents chuckled politely. But the doctor was not kidding.

Billed as the first-ever citywide cash aid program for pregnant moms and babies, Rx Kids gives Flint residents $1,500 mid-pregnancy, and $500 each month for the baby’s first year.

There are no strings attached. No income limits. And it’s universal; nearly every baby born since the program launched in January is enrolled.

Parents who bring their babies in for checkups at this clinic rattle off the ways the money’s helped, from the cribs, diapers, clothes, and wipes they’ve bought to how it’s “kept them afloat” during maternity leave or provided crucial income when a spouse died.

But the true goal of Rx Kids goes far beyond Flint, as Hanna acknowledged, scooping up one of the Rx Kids babies in an exam room.

“Do you think we should do this for babies everywhere? What do you think?” she asked, cooing. The baby gurgled happily, smiling.

“Did you get that?” Hanna turned to me, the reporter in the room with a microphone. “That was an affirmative yes.”

Cash payments as a tool to reduce child poverty

Many other countries already offer a child cash benefit. They include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, Norway, and the U.K.

The U.S. essentially did, too, during the coronavirus pandemic: The 2021 expanded child tax credit gave low- and middle-income families (including those previously excluded because of insufficient income) hundreds of dollars per kid in direct, monthly payments for six months.

The child poverty rate fell to a historic low. But the expanded program expired at the end of 2021 and Congress did not renew it. The child poverty rate went back up.

For professor Luke Shaefer, a longtime advocate of child cash benefits, it was “the most brutal day” of his career, “when I realized we were going to see what it could do, and we were going to go back to the way we were before.”

Shaefer directs the Poverty Solutions initiative at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.

Soon after the federal aid expired, Shaefer got an email from Dr. Hanna asking if he wanted to collaborate on the program that would become Rx Kids.

The program’s goals go beyond cash aid for Michigan families: It is also aimed at getting donors, lawmakers, and voters excited about how child cash benefits could help their communities.

The list of the recently converted includes Republican state Sen. John Damoose, who has become an outspoken advocate for expanding Rx Kids.

Referring to himself as “a pro-life person,” Damoose said, “I sure as heck better be concerned about making it easier for mothers to make the decision to have their children.”

The Republican Party needs to get serious about supporting programs like Rx Kids, he said. “We’ve been accused for years about being pro-birth, not pro-life. And I think that’s not without merit. We need to put our money where our mouth is and support these children and support their mothers.”

Already, what once seemed like a moon shot is gaining traction: Shaefer and Hanna say their communications with Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign helped shape Harris’ “baby bonus” proposal. President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign also supported expanding the child tax credit.

Meanwhile, Michigan has budgeted some $20 million in state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash to partially fund an expansion of Rx Kids to a short list of communities — if those areas can raise local matching funds.

Those areas include rural communities like Michigan’s remote eastern Upper Peninsula, part of which is in Damoose’s district.

“We want to make the tent as big as possible,” Hanna said.

Leann Espinoza is the maternal-infant health program manager for four counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. As Rx Kids looks to expand to the remote, rural area, Espinoza is trying to balance her hope with pragmatism. Local officials must find millions of dollars a year in matching funding to support the program.

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But some Upper Peninsula health officials were initially wary. Each new Rx Kids community will need to raise millions of dollars in private donations to start and sustain the program in their community.

“It could be a good thing,” Leann Espinoza, maternal-infant health program manager for the eastern Upper Peninsula, said in August. “But I’m not getting my hopes up. I know that sounds terrible.”

How families in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula can ‘fall through the cracks’

In the wood-paneled rec room of the Clark Township Community Center, Espinoza broke the news to her team this summer: Rx Kids is not a program the eastern Upper Peninsula will be able to fund on its own.

It’s about “$3 million that we would need to raise,” she said, looking at three other LMAS District Health Department staff members.

Tonya Winberg, the public health nurse for Mackinac County, looked stunned. “It’s just, where does that $3 million come from?” Winberg asked.

Other potential Rx Kids expansion sites, like Kalamazoo, have wealthy private foundations that can fund the program. The eastern Upper Peninsula does not.

“And how do we sustain it?” Espinoza added. “We hate to start programs, and then the funding is gone and we have to tell people, ‘It’s not here anymore; we can’t do it anymore.'”

The ruggedly beautiful and densely forested Upper Peninsula is used to feeling forgotten.

There’s a running joke about how often it’s mislabeled as Canada or Wisconsin on maps. It has about a third of Michigan’s land mass, but just 3% of its residents.

The sheer scale and sparse population mean options for food, housing, and child care are limited.

Poverty rates are higher than the state average in much of Espinoza’s territory, and the region has some of the highest rates of newborns suffering from prebirth drug exposure in Michigan, according to the state health department.

At the community center, Espinoza and her colleagues start listing all the ways Rx Kids would be a lifesaver for families in the Upper Peninsula, many of whom have some income and some resources but “don’t make enough to make it,” Espinoza said. “The fall-through-the-cracks families. And those are the ones that I really, really, really think this program would benefit, especially up here.”

Espinoza’s next meeting was with one of those families. Jessica Kline and her 17-month-old daughter, Aurora, live in Munising, a tourist town on Lake Superior known for its waterfalls, shipwreck adventures, and breathtaking rocky shoreline.

“She’s got a big personality, and her hair is red, so she came with a warning label,” Kline said of her daughter, laughing.

Aurora is a tiny force, speeding around the family’s apartment, totally unfazed by the nasal tube that connects her to an oxygen machine. She was born early, at just 24 weeks gestation, weighing less than 2 pounds. “Just the beautifulest tiny little baby you’ve ever seen,” Kline said.

Jessica Kline and her daughter Aurora Wright live in Munising, Mich., but had to spend the first seven months of Aurora’s life at a neonatal intensive care unit in Ann Arbor, about five hours south. Kline says none of the hospitals in the Upper Peninsula could care for Aurora, who was born at 24 weeks.

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No hospital in the Upper Peninsula was equipped to care for a preemie that young. So Aurora and her parents spent seven months at a hospital in Ann Arbor, five hours south of their home.

“We didn’t have a reliable vehicle,” Kline said. “We didn’t have a source of income.”

Hospital social services provided $19 a day for food, which Kline would save up to buy supplies for Aurora.

“We’d be able to get groceries and her food. We’d be able to go to Once Upon a Child and get preemie clothes. We used that $19 a day to survive.”

When they finally got Aurora home to the Upper Peninsula, their house had been vandalized, the copper pipes stripped out.

Espinoza’s team helped them find housing and drove them to get groceries.

Every day is a series of small battles, from finding the medical supplies Aurora needs to figuring out how to get to a revolving door of specialists hundreds of miles away.

Still, Aurora’s dad has a job here in town. They’ve got family nearby. They’re making it work, Kline said.

But having a program like Rx Kids could have made a huge difference in her daughter’s first year. “Five hundred dollars a month would have been enough to actually be able to get ourselves on our feet,” she said.

Manistique, Mich., in the eastern Upper Peninsula, is one of the communities that would be included in the Rx Kids expansion if organizers can raise enough private money to match the public funds.

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After Espinoza left Kline’s apartment, she drove south to her office in Manistique. It was late. Everyone else had gone home.

Espinoza sat at her desk, trying to be pragmatic. She knows Rx Kids would not magically solve the lack of child care and housing and all the other things you need to break the cycle of poverty. But it would fix Jessica’s car. It would help.

There will undoubtedly be critics, Espinoza said — people who believe parents will just use this money to buy drugs. “‘What did they do to earn it?'” she imagined them saying. “‘You’re just giving them free money, and they didn’t do anything to get it?'”

“Because they don’t understand,” she continued. “They don’t understand the barriers. They don’t understand that sometimes the choice isn’t always yours. Like, I’ve talked to moms who desperately want to go to work, and they want to support their family, but there’s no child care. And so they have no other choice.”

Espinoza recently got an update from Rx Kids’ Hanna: Largely because of private foundations outside the Upper Peninsula, they’ve raised enough money to fund a “perinatal” version of Rx Kids for five counties in the eastern Upper Peninsula.

The perinatal program would provide the $1,500 payment mid-pregnancy, plus $500 a month for a baby’s first three months, rather than the full year. “But the goal really is the full program, so we are still raising money,” Hanna said via email.

“I think it’s fantastic if we even just get the perinatal version to start,” Espinoza said. “That’s more than we had before.”

This story comes from NPR’s health reporting partnership with Michigan Public and KFF Health News, a national newsroom focused on in-depth reporting on health issues, and one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.