Chicagoans aspire to take care of themselves and their loved ones and have the financial stability to pursue their goals.  Unfortunately, for many Chicagoans, the volatility of their income and expenses make these aspirations difficult to realize.  Due to decades of exclusionary government policies and institutional practices that have inhibited the accumulation of wealth, households in communities of color face even more difficulty in achieving financial stability and economic mobility.

To address these longstanding disparities and accelerate our region’s progress toward an equitable economic recovery, both the City of Chicago and Cook County will use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to launch ambitious guaranteed income pilots in 2022. The Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot will provide $500 per month to 5,000 Chicagoans beginning in the summer of 2022. The Cook County Promise Guaranteed Income Pilot will provide $500 per month to approximately 3,250 residents of Cook County over two years beginning in the fall of 2022. The need for these programs is significant: the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot received more than 100,000 completed applications from Chicago residents.

The Inclusive Economy Lab is honored to support the City of Chicago and Cook County evaluate the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot and Cook County Promise Guaranteed Income Pilot. Together these pilots represent the largest investment in unconditional cash assistance in a single metropolitan area in the United States.

Our evaluations of both pilots will allow policymakers, elected officials, funders, and advocates to learn from this ambitious initiative. Our learning agenda will focus on four broad goals:

• Measuring the impact of these programs on outcomes of policy interest;
• Sharing the impact of these programs in participants’ own voices;
• Improving the design of future cash assistance programs; and
• Convening and amplifying national conversations on these and other efforts to alleviate poverty and inequality.

This will be accomplished via a mixed-methods study that incorporates quantitative and qualitative research approaches.

Periodically we will release updates and reports on our work as part of our commitment to make the valuable insights gleaned from our work both accessible and useful to our partners and community. 

The First Look report describes who applied to the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot, what their stated needs, goals, and priorities were prior to the pilot starting, and their self-reported physical and mental health. Also interspersed throughout the report are applicants’ experiences from qualitative interviews conducted in the summer of 2022.

The CRCP process evaluation captures lessons learned in the design, launch, outreach, and program administration.  

As part of our mixed methods approach, the Inclusive Economy Lab created a PhotoVoice project, a participatory research method that centers participants as photographers, interpreters, and creative analysts. For ten months, we provided various themes like worry, joy, fear, and stability and collected coinciding images and captions in order to gain a deeper insight into the program. You can visit this in-person exhibit, produced in partnership with the Chicago Public Library, at Harold Washington Library until September 1, and an adapted version of the exhibit will be on display at Legler Regional library, Coleman branch, and Uptown branch from September 9 to October 7.

Since 2018 the Inclusive Economy Lab has supported OpenResearch in evaluating one of the largest and longest-running direct cash assistance pilots in the United States. You can read IEL's overview of preliminary findings published in September 2024 here and our case study Making Every Dollar Count: A Closer Look at Benefits Protection Strategies Implemented by Guaranteed Income Pilots in Illinois on how multiple benefits were protected for local pilots here. 

Finally, IEL published a literature review on the existing research on guaranteed income. It will updated periodically as new studies are published. 

A First Look at the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot Implementing the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot: Process Evaluation Photovoice in the Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot OpenResearch Unconditional Income Study Findings (September 2024) Benefits Protection Strategies for Guaranteed Income GI Literature Review