Renegotiating Interdependence: Transition Age Youth's Mobilization of Guaranteed Income in the Transition from Foster Care

Background and Purpose: Annually, approximately 20,000–24,000 Transition-Age Youth (TAY) exit the United States foster care system and face compounding disadvantages, including housing instability, disrupted social networks, limited educational attainment, and persistent employment challenges. Up to 30% of these youth also become involved with the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Guaranteed income (GI) has emerged as a promising systems-level intervention providing economic support for youth exiting foster care. However, limited research examines how TAY may strategically leverage GI to navigate the transition out of foster care. This study addresses this gap by investigating the following research question: How do emerging adults who have aged out of foster care mobilize resources such as GI to navigate the transition back to their communities?

Methods: This qualitative study is part of a larger convergent parallel mixed-methods study within a randomized control trial based in Los Angeles County. The larger study provides a treatment group (N=200) with monthly $1,000 GI payments over 24 months (August 2023-August 2025), while a control group (N=287) receives no payments. Participants complete longitudinal surveys every 6 months. The current study draws on phenomenological semi-structured interviews at 12 months post-receipt of GI (T1; N=28). Interviews (mean=61.6 minutes) explored participants' life trajectories, social supports, child welfare experiences, GI utilization, and future aspirations, and were analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis.

Findings: Participants (21 women, 5 men, 1 non-binary individual; mean age = 23.1) were diverse in racial and ethnic backgrounds. Using the six steps of Reflexive Thematic Analysis, three central themes were identified illustrating how participants leverage GI to navigate the transition out of foster care in Los Angeles County. First, participants utilized GI to re-establish safety nets through securing stable housing, securing access to transportation, and meeting their basic needs such as paying bills or purchasing monthly groceries. Second, once basic needs were secured, GI allowed participants to redirect their additional resources (income, benefits) toward educational advancement, career shifts, and broader economic mobility. Third, and most importantly, participants leveraged GI to renegotiate bonds of care, facilitating family reunification through shared housing arrangements, pursuing educational opportunities aimed at increasing their family's financial mobility and well-being, and providing financial and childcare support to relatives' children.

Conclusion and Implications: These findings extend prior scholarship on compounding harms associated with child welfare system involvement, particularly family separation, and challenge traditional policy frameworks that emphasize the centrality of individual independence for this population. Instead, results demonstrate that emerging adults exiting foster care actively redirect resources toward communal and familial interdependence, suggesting that interventions like GI can simultaneously promote economic stability and mobility and strengthen family connections. Findings also suggest that future research on GI should adopt context- and population-sensitive evaluations of GI and other economic interventions, prioritizing both individual and community-level outcomes and qualitative methodologies to capture complex experiences. At the policy level, findings suggest that GI may serve as a useful mechanism for supporting young people aging out of foster care while also potentially reducing family-level harms caused by child welfare involvement.