Kristin Seefeldt

It was an experiment: give 100 citizens on the margins monthly cash payments of $528 for two years. No strings
attached—they would decide for themselves how best to spend the additional income.

Called GIG A2, the project was funded mostly by the city using Covid relief funds, with contributions from the Ann Arbor Community Foundation and the U-M. The name—short for Guaranteed Income to Grow Ann Arbor—spoke to the people it hoped to help: gig workers and small entrepreneurs.

“They do all sorts of things,” says Kristin Seefeldt, an associate professor of social work and GIG A2’s principal investigator. “Hair cutting, nails. Others do maintenance work, whether that’s cars, lawn work. Some are artists.”

When the experiment kicked off at the beginning of last year, Seefeldt was also acting director of U-M Poverty Solutions, a university-wide initiative that studies ways to prevent and alleviate poverty. From a pool of low- and very low–income workers, her team randomly chose 100 participants. Another 100 in a control group received a $25 monthly stipend and were interviewed about their own financial situations.

The hope, according to the project’s website, was to “offset structural inequities and help people recover from the economic impact of the pandemic.”

Seefeldt is tall and trim, with brown hair falling to her shoulders and big-framed glasses. In an interview at Sweetwaters in Kerrytown, she is friendly but businesslike—a day of meetings awaits.

Raised in the small town of West Bend, Wisconsin, the daughter of a “very conservative” Republican lawyer, Seefeldt grew up comfortably middle class and with no particular awareness of America’s economic divide. But as a history major at Georgetown, she stumbled into an internship at the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, which offered her a job after she graduated in 1990. Part of the work involved interviewing government officials about welfare reform, a hot topic at the time.

One day, in a welfare office in Washington state, she overheard two women share their stories.“One of the women couldn’t find housing and so she ended up moving in with a guy she hardly knew, but she felt she had no other options,” Seefeldt recalls.

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While she and her bosses had interviewed many case workers overseeing welfare payments, she realized there had been no comparable focus on the people receiving them. “And I just remember being struck by, like, ‘Wow! The caseworkers really have no idea.’”

U.S. policymakers have often framed poverty around “individual failings,” like laziness, she says. But the conversation she overheard suggested “that this was really a structural problem. … There was no affordable housing in the area.”

Determined to be a player in future poverty conversations, Seefeldt started graduate school at U-M. She finished a master’s in public policy in 1996, the same year that Congress passed and president Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that imposed time limits and other restrictions. She published a book about its impact, Working After Welfare: How Women Balance Jobs and Family in the Wake of Welfare Reform, even before completing her PhD in sociology and public policy in 2010. After a short stint teaching at Indiana University, she returned to the U-M as a faculty member in 2012.

Interviews of forty-five low-income Detroit women over a six-year period led to her 2016 book Abandoned Families: Social Isolation in the Twenty-First Century. It documented how traditional ladders into the middle class, like schools and housing, were failing poor Americans—particularly if they’re Black.

The book attracted considerable attention among academics and policymakers. They were particularly struck, she says, to realize “the role that debt played in people’s financial management.”

“Debt actually isn’t captured in official poverty records, so it is missed by many,” emails Luke Schaefer, a colleague at Poverty Solutions. “Her book broke new ground in the understanding of debt and the risks of pursuit of education and training.” 

Many of the women Seefeldt interviewed were trying to get more education. But even those attending low-tuition community colleges, she learned, struggled financially because studying took time away from their jobs. “For me, what was really disheartening was how few people were able to actually complete a degree,” Seefeldt says.

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This summer, in an address to the Ann Arbor City Council, Seefeldt talked about the results from GIG A2’s first year. They were not what everyone hoped.

In terms of food and housing insecurity, “we don’t find any statistically significant difference between those getting the payment and those not getting the payment,” she reported. In both the guaranteed-income group and the control group, people struggled to pay their rent on time and to keep the power on.

While there were positives—participants reported feeling more optimism about their future and more connected to Ann Arbor—they weren’t the stuff of headlines. Seefeldt continues to support a guaranteed income, but cautions that expectations should be toned down. After decades in poverty research and advocacy, she says, “My major conclusion … is that changes around the edges are going to produce no to very little changes in people’s day-to-day lives.

“Poverty is really a policy choice in the U.S.” she says. “We make decisions not to raise the minimum wage. We make decisions not to have health care for all.” And even existing supports are being eroded by the Trump Administration’s cuts in social services spending.

“If new work requirements for welfare and SNAP [food benefits] actually get implemented, it’s going to be a disaster on so many different levels,” Seefeldt warns. She doubts the nonprofit world will have the capacity to respond at the level needed, “not even in a place like Ann Arbor.”

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Seefeldt, who grew up skating on frozen Wisconsin ponds, now finds escape figure skating at the Ann Arbor Ice Cube. She also unwinds by walking the family dog and reading mysteries in the north side home she shares with her husband, a retired tech guy.

A popular teacher, she finds reason for optimism in her classrooms. “The students I’ve taught are really passionate about making change and not just around the edges, but are passionate at making changes around higher levels of our various systems,” she says. “Will they come to pass?”

While Seefeldt prepares to embark on a new project, the GIG A2 team is working with the recipients to wind down the guaranteed income experiment. “We are getting many unsolicited emails” from participants, she says. They may not have made financial breakthroughs, but “they are talking about what a difference it’s made in their lives.”