The Upjohn Institute Community Breakfast featured a preview of the Rx Kids program scheduled to launch in Kalamazoo in early 2025. Rx Kids will pay each pregnant Kalamazoo resident $1,500 and then another $500 per month for the baby’s first year.
Alyssa Stewart with the Kalamazoo Community Foundation and Ni’esha Wright of Cradle Kalamazoo, detailed the goals and background for the program during the Dec. 3 breakfast at Kalamazoo College. Rx Kids began in Flint but also makes sense for Kalamazoo, a city with high child poverty and infant mortality but with robust, interconnected community organizations in the public, nonprofit and private sectors, Stewart said.
“We have all these strong resources that position Kalamazoo to be a great expansion site.”
Upjohn Institute President Mike Horrigan opened the breakfast with a national and local economic update before offering a overview of the research on guaranteed income programs such as Rx Kids. Guaranteed income programs provide cash with no conditions attached.
Such programs can be effective, Horrigan said, as supplements to means-tested programs such as welfare and food stamps, although, more research and better ways of measuring success are needed.
Evidence from other countries and from the American Rescue Plan’s child tax credit expansion shows that guaranteed income programs can work, Stewart said. “Parents spent the money on food, housing, utilities, child enrichments – and it was a huge success.” Early data from Flint show similar results.
Rx Kids aims to reduce infant and maternal mortality and to eliminate racial disparity in mortality rates, Wright said. Currently, infants of color in Kalamazoo County have a mortality rate three to four times higher than white infants.
The program’s designers expect a large share of Kalamazoo parents will participate in Rx Kids, given its easy sign-up process and lack of the stigma that income-based programs may have. High participation rates can improve community health and other outcomes, although the program doesn’t require recipients to take any specific steps.
“The founders want this program to be about love,” Stewart said. “They trust the families will make the best possible use of those resources.”
The nonprofit GiveDirectly administers Rx Kids at the state level, in coordination with Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. Locally, Cradle Kalamazoo is the community engagement partner and the Kalamazoo Community Foundation is mobilizing local funders – which include the city of Kalamazoo and Kalamazoo County along with many nonprofit and philanthropic organizations – to launch and sustain the program.
