Why We Decided to Write A Series Of Facilitated Stories

Our facilitated, first-person storytelling series interrogates a question critical to this project: “How do we design an economy that works for all families?” We sought to answer this by looking into the day-to-day lives of our narrators and how they were affected by the unprecedented funding allocated to help families during the coronavirus pandemic.

During the first two years, we saw that a robust policy response could lift most families out of poverty. Between March 2020 and March 2022, the U.S. government allocated $5.2 trillion to pandemic relief funding—five times the federal aid provided during the Great Recession of 2008. Government aid in the form of child tax credits, direct cash assistance, mortgage forbearance, and noncash benefits like SNAP and eviction moratoriums lifted nearly 46 million people out of poverty in 2020. That assistance kept 45.4 million out of poverty the following year. When the aid ended, families suffered.

While we found narrators from various demographic backgrounds, many identify as Black women. Even though more white Americans, numerically speaking, live in poverty, Black Americans are disproportionately struggling to make ends meet. Black Americans comprise 13.7 percent of the U.S. population, and they account for 18.5 percent of people who live in poverty, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure [1]. For comparison, white Americans make up 11.7 percent of those who live in poverty while accounting for 75.3 percent of the total U.S. population.

The demographic breakdown of our narrators makes sense in terms of who was lifted from poverty when pandemic-era benefits were active:

After poverty rates for non-Hispanic White, Black, and Hispanic children fell to historic lows in 2021 due to pandemic-era policies that targeted families with children, SPM rates for children of all races in the figure began to rise in 2022 as those policies ended. They rose further for Hispanic (any race), Black, and Asian children between 2022 and 2023. The SPM rate for non-Hispanic White children did not change significantly between 2022 and 2023.

Our narrators challenge the neoliberal notion that the market knows best and, as such, should be left to its own devices. Beyond a safety net with federally assisted bounce, people need jobs big enough to support the fullness of human life—something that's been under threat since the 1970s and is only accelerating with technology, worker automation, inflation, and more.

But people also need room to dream.

When the focus becomes ensuring the survival of oneself and one’s family, imagining what a better life can look like isn’t often the subject of day-to-day conversation. We considered this as we crafted our interview process. Each interview is a dialogue between a member of our team and a narrator. We used a list of questions as a roadmap for the conversation while allowing it to flow naturally and authentically. This authenticity in storytelling is crucial to fostering a sense of connection and empathy. Under our ethical storytelling guidelines, our philosophy holds that narrators are the experts of their own lives. So we gave narrators space to take the conversation where they believed it should go. We operated as willful observers. To serve this purpose, we chose six focus areas for our questions: family dynamics, daily routines, work, how pandemic-era funding influenced their daily life, their ideas for solutions to income inequality and an economy that would work for their families, and their hopes and dreams for the future for themselves and their children.

The following themes emerged during our conversations:

• People had more time to spend with and focus on their family.
• Any financial or social stability gained during the first two years of the pandemic led to lower stress levels.
• Navigating the ever-changing benefits landscape was a chore.
• A deep sense of betrayal permeated once the aid was gone.
• Families that entered the pandemic in poverty had worse outcomes, regardless of pandemic intervention, highlighting the long-lasting harm caused by chronic impoverishment.
• Hard work isn’t enough to escape poverty.
• Individuals were left to rely on their own social networks and create their own safety nets.
• Poverty is a cause of intergenerational trauma.

Another goal of this project is to subvert familiar narratives about people who live in poverty. Part of that work must include refusing to fit how narrators tell their stories into the confines of privileged language. To preserve the integrity and authenticity of our narrators’ voices, we made a conscious and deliberate decision to limit edits to their vernacular speech. Our narrators were courageous enough to speak freely about their experiences, and out of respect, we chose not to mold their dialects to fit within the confines of standard American English. With this in mind, we understand they may say things that are not considered politically correct or culturally sensitive. While we at the Better Life Lab may not have chosen the same language to describe certain situations as our narrators, we acknowledge that we have the time, space, and privilege to devote mental bandwidth toward how we choose to describe experiences.

Below are the stories of our narrators, lightly edited for length and clarity. We hope that you see their narratives for what they are: sharp, compelling analyses of poverty with sensible recommendations for improving the lives of all U.S. residents.

[1] The Supplemental Poverty Measure provides a more comprehensive picture of poverty than the official one. Instead of just looking at income, the SPM considers a broader range of resources and expenses that impact people's lives—such as noncash benefits like food stamps and housing subsidies, tax credits, and other financial supports. The SPM also bases its threshold on what a family spends on essential items such as food, housing, and utilities.