Somerville Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot

What is Guaranteed Basic Income?

Guaranteed basic income (GBI) programs provide direct, unrestricted cash payments to create greater financial stability for those most in need. As wealth and income inequality have reached historic highs in the United States, GBI programs allow people to make their own choices about how cash payments can best be used to meet their needs.

How Our Program Worked

The City of Somerville enrolled 198 households through its Office of Housing Stability and the Somerville Family Learning Collaborative at Somerville Public Schools. From July 2024 through June 2025, each household received $750 per month via a reloadable debit card. The pilot was evaluated in collaboration with the Edward J. Collins Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The City worked with Givecard, a reloadable debit card platform vendor, to distribute funds to participants. Participants were also offered a free, voluntary financial workshop. In addition to ARPA funds, a $5,000 philanthropic investment from the Cummings Foundation was used to support disbursements. This investment enabled the City to secure numerous public benefit waivers which ensured that participants kept their standard or long-term state and federal benefits without interruption.

As part of the program evaluation, participants were invited to take two surveys and be interviewed about their experience with the program. Surveys were conducted prior to the start of the program and at the end of the program, and interviews occurred during the middle of the program. Highlights from the program evaluation are included below. You can read the full report here. The evaluation dataset and data dictionary are also on Somerville’s Open Data Portal. 

Impact on Financial Stability 

Findings suggest that access to stable, unrestricted income combined with continued eligibility for other public benefits (e.g., SNAP, housing assistance) supported short-term improvements in financial health and helped build limited but meaningful financial resilience. For example, by the end of the program, the percentage of participants who reported having money left over at the end of the month increased. The share of participants reporting “rarely or never” having money left over at the end of the month decreased from 73% at the beginning of the program to 55% at program end. Additionally, 30% of program participants reported being able to save some of their funds each month, and 27% of participants reported using a portion of their funds to pay off debt. 

GBI funds also improved short-term employment and economic stability, including an overall average increase in monthly income by more than $300 per month. Participants reported being able to start new jobs, change industries, increase work hours (toward more full-time employment), and even reduce unmanageable workloads (e.g., multiple jobs).  

Impact on Housing Stability 

While the GBI program alone could not fully offset structural housing affordability challenges in Somerville, it contributed to short-term stability and likely played a role in preventing displacement for some participants. For example, by the end of the program, participants reported feeling safer in their current housing than at the beginning of the program (62% reported feeling very safe at program end compared to 56% at the beginning). Additionally, of the participants who were in rental arrears (e.g., past due rent) at the beginning of the program (33 participants), 66% of those participants were able to catch up on rent by program end. 

Participant Experience 

Participants reported very high rates of satisfaction with the program. 94% of participants reported being "very satisfied" and 6% reported being "satisfied" with the program overall. Qualitatively, participants were pleased with the reliability of the fund transfer system and the lack of stigma associated with a non-descript card design. Additionally, all participants were satisfied with problem resolution, with 75% being “very satisfied”.  

Best Practices, Lessons Learned, and Recommendations 

The close collaboration between City and School departments improved the effectiveness and efficiency of Somerville’s GBI pilot. GBI programs are administratively intensive, and onboarding can be complicated for participants. Participant experience was prioritized, for example, by providing multi-lingual support and plain language documents. Eligibility was also determined by identifying participants from existing City and School department caseloads, which fostered a deeper understanding of participant needs during planning, onboarding, and implementation.  

Further, the pilot planning team opted intentionally for a broad approach to the GBI program and offered participants major flexibility on how to spend their funds. The team also spent a great deal of time structuring fund distribution and prioritized the ability for participants to withdraw cash, a non-stigmatizing card design, and a stable mechanism for fund distribution to each card.   

Future GBI or other direct cash assistance programs should consider:

• Working closely with organizations already supporting the target population, from planning and onboarding to monitoring and evaluation.
• Investing in accessibility resources to ensure that participants are well informed and supported.
• Building on established, trusted relationships with potential participants to make onboarding more effective and efficient.
• Offering optional financial and budgeting workshops to participants, again prioritizing accessibility needs.
• Implementing off-boarding procedures to help participants transition out of the program successfully.
• Targeting food and housing expenses (for programs with limited funding), as these were the two highest-ranked needs by Somerville GBI pilot participants.
• Securing sufficient resources, not only to operate the program logistically, but also to properly support participants, whose needs may include high-level communication about the program, resource support, and granular troubleshooting of day-to-day card use issues.
• Learning from existing best practices but also considering what is best for their unique participant population.

This program was funded and initiated by the City of Somerville. This program was managed by staff in the City of Somerville’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Department and SomerStat: the Mayor’s Office of Innovation and Analytics. 

Staff at the City of Somerville’s Office of Housing Stability and the Somerville Public Schools’ Somerville Family Learning Collaborative served as thought partners in the planning process and then as direct points of contact for participants during the pilot itself. 

The Cummings Foundation gifted a financial contribution to this program, which unlocked the critical opportunity to apply for benefits waivers and thereby offer a significant reduction in risk and burden to participants. 

This project was supported, in whole or in part, by federal award number SLFRP1753 awarded to City of Somerville, Massachusetts by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. 

The ARPA office will be closing on December 31st, 2026, aligning with the federal requirement for all ARPA funds to be spent by that date. Before December 31st, 2026, please direct questions about GBI to AllARPA@somervillema.gov. For questions after December 31st, 2026, please submit an information request to the City at https://www.somervillema.gov/departments/contact-us. Please see the ARPA website for more information about ARPA: www.somervillema.gov/ARPA.