06.02.26
Participants Enter RISE From Different Starting Points
How income, age, and place shape what participants face at the outset of the study
The RISE Research Project follows 1,479 participants in three rural counties who are receiving $1,500 per month in unconditional cash payments for 16 months. The baseline insights draw on 1,472 completed baseline surveys, 84 in-depth interviews, and early ethnographic fieldwork across the three sites.
Although several dynamics—financial strain, overlapping barriers, layered support—are widely shared, participants do not enter the study from a single common baseline. Starting conditions vary meaningfully by income, age and life stage, the depth and breadth of challenges, available support, and county context. These are not small variations around one experience. They reflect distinct starting points that shape what participants are focused on and what trajectories may look like over time.
Constraint depth shapes what participants prioritize
The breadth of what participants identify as priorities is closely related to the severity of the challenges they face. The average participant selects roughly 10 out of 23 possible priorities, but participants who rate two or more areas of life as “very challenging” identify more. When multiple areas of life are under strain at once, more feels urgent. The breadth of priorities reflects the reality of managing overlapping pressures across finances, health, housing, caregiving, and transportation.
Differences in starting conditions are also visible across the income distribution. Financial stability is central for everyone, but priorities diverge beyond that shared core. Lower-income participants are more likely to focus on securing basic material needs, such as reliable transportation and improved housing. Finding a job appears as a top-three priority only among participants with incomes below 50% of the federal poverty level. Higher-income participants are more likely to focus on financial repair, particularly paying down debt and building savings. When asked what single change would make the biggest difference, participants at the lowest income levels are most likely to name reliable transportation, while those at higher income levels are most likely to name paying off or reducing debt.
The lowest-income group also reports the most diverse set of top-three priorities, suggesting a need to stabilize multiple areas of life simultaneously. The highest-income group is more narrowly concentrated on financial goals—a different kind of starting point, where fewer domains are under acute strain and it is easier to focus on building a stable financial foundation.
Priorities shift by age and life stage
Priorities also differ by age in ways that reflect both what participants are focused on and the conditions they are navigating. Participants ages 18–34 are most focused on education and employment, with about half naming each as a priority. Those ages 35–54 are more likely to name stress as a top-three priority, consistent with this group reporting the heaviest burden across multiple indicators, including stress, food insecurity, skipped healthcare, and the number of life domains rated as very challenging. Participants ages 55 and older look distinct in a different way: education and employment priorities drop sharply, while health, healthcare access, and faith become more salient, consistent with a group that is less connected to the labor market and more likely to be managing health concerns.
What does not change much across age groups is the financial core. Bills and housing show minimal variation by age, reinforcing that these pressures are widely shared regardless of life stage.
What this variation could mean
Participants are starting from a range of conditions, not a single baseline. Some are trying to secure basic resources across multiple domains at once. Others are focused more narrowly on financial stabilization. Some are oriented toward entering or advancing in the labor market, while others are navigating health challenges or caregiving responsibilities that shape what is possible.
This variation provides essential context for understanding what unfolds over time. The RISE GMI program may intersect differently with participants’ lives depending on what constraints they face, what resources they have, and how many areas of life require attention at once. Future analyses will explore how participants across these different starting points describe changes in their circumstances, priorities, and daily lives.
Looking ahead #
Participants do not enter the RISE GMI program from a common baseline. While many share a core experience of financial pressure, they differ in the severity of what they face, the barriers that constrain them, the support they can draw on, and what they prioritize. Some are managing moderate challenges that are primarily financial. Others are navigating overlapping constraints across multiple areas of life that may not respond to money alone. These differences shape what feels urgent, what feels possible, and how participants approach change.
That variation matters for how we interpret what follows. Support does not enter a uniform landscape, and changes over time will not mean the same thing for everyone. Understanding what support makes possible in people’s lives requires understanding the lives it enters. Without that context, patterns of improvement, persistence, or change risk being misread or oversimplified.
This report is intended to make those starting conditions visible and to establish a foundation for the study’s longitudinal work. As future waves of data are collected, the study will track how participants describe changes in their financial situation, barriers, supports, priorities, wellbeing, and future outlook; which challenges ease, persist, or shift; and how those trajectories differ across people and place. The goal is not only to observe whether conditions change, but to understand how people experience and navigate the circumstances that shape what change is possible.