06.02.26
Support is Layered, Reciprocal, and Uneven
Many participants piece together support through formal programs, family, and community
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.
KEY INSIGHTS
receive some form of government support
88%
receive support from friends and family
60%
receive support from NGOs or community organizations
30%
Income is not the only way people make ends meet. Alongside earnings and savings, participants draw on a combination of government programs, informal social networks, and community resources. Yet these supports do not add up to a stable safety net. They are better understood as a patchwork: important, often indispensable, but uneven and incomplete.
Government and institutional support reaches most participants. Overall, 88% of participants receive some form of government or institutional assistance, averaging two sources. Healthcare and food account for the large majority: healthcare coverage reaches 79% of participants and food assistance reaches 59%.
Beyond healthcare and food, however, institutional support drops sharply. #
Utility assistance reaches only 13% of participants, despite utilities being among households’ largest recurring expenses. NGO and community-based support appears to fill part of that gap: about 30% of participants report receiving support from NGOs or community organizations, most commonly help with utilities such as heat, water, electricity, or internet, which reaches 18% of participants.
Housing and child care show a similar pattern of thinner institutional support. Housing assistance reaches only 8% of participants, and only 7% receive institutional child care assistance even though about a third of participants have a child under five in the household. The safety net is deep in some domains and shallow in others, including some of the areas where participants face their largest ongoing costs.
Support access varies by county #
The unevenness in support also has a geographic dimension. Participants in Warren County report systematically lower rates of support across nearly every measure: SNAP (food assistance) reaches 40% there compared to 53–58% in the other two counties, LIHEAP (energy assistance) reaches 6% compared to 17–19%, and healthcare coverage reaches 68% compared to 83–86%. These differences are important context for understanding how place shapes the resources available to participants at baseline.
Informal support functions as another safety net #
Alongside institutional support, more than 60% of participants report receiving some form of informal support from friends, family, or community. In qualitative interviews across all three counties, participants describe a web of material exchanges within families and communities that functions as an informal safety net: housing provided to prevent homelessness, utility bills covered during a crisis, cars handed down or gifted, childcare shared across households, and caregiving exchanged across generations.
In the baseline survey, 42% of participants report receiving direct financial help from others; among those, roughly 42% say they rely on it only a little and 21% not at all. But these figures likely understate the full picture. The qualitative data suggest that some forms of material support, such as a plate of food from a neighbor, a family member covering a utility bill, or an uncle repairing a car, may not register as "financial help" in a survey context, even though they meaningfully reduce financial pressure.
One reason may be that support relationships described in qualitative interviews are rarely one-directional. One participant drives her mother to medical appointments; in return, her mother paid for her car. A son provides daily transportation for his legally blind father; the father cooks for him several times a week. A participant cares for her elderly father next door; he mows her grass and lends her money when finances are tight. When support flows in both directions, people may not think of what they receive as assistance because they are also giving. It may feel like mutual exchange, or simply how life is organized.
Notably, government and informal support appear to operate as overlapping rather than competing systems. Receiving institutional assistance is not associated with reporting less informal support, or vice versa. The two often coexist, and most participants draw on multiple sources simultaneously, piecing together stability through combinations of formal assistance, family exchange, and community help.
Support helps people get by, but often does not create security #
Yet despite these layered supports, most participants remain under significant strain at baseline. They are not navigating hardship without support, but neither are they supported in ways that reliably create security. The supports help people get by, but often do not close the gap between what they need and what they have.
A central question for future analyses is how these support configurations evolve: how participants describe using and combining different forms of support over time, whether those sources remain stable, and what role the cash plays alongside them.
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.