‘I needed that extra support’: Yolo program helps needy families afford rent, heal from trauma

Sacramento Bee - 5/11/2023

Every day, Marquisha Brown wakes up feeling thankful. Thankful to have her son by her side. Thankful to have a roof of their ownover their heads.

Positive sentiments adorn the walls of their modest one-bedroom apartment and spell out the love, care and intention with which she built her home.

“This is our happy place,” proclaims the mat outside the front door.

“Our family’s gathering place,” says a decal on the living room wall.

Another quotation, framed and displayed prominently beneath the TV, brings it all into focus:

This is us. Our life. Our story. Our home.

“It’s ours – that’s what we love most about it,” Brown explained. “Nobody can tell us to get out, nobody can tell us what to do. It’s ours.”

She hasn’t always been so fortunate.

Until last year, Brown, 29, and her 6-year-old son Elijah “Eli” Washington never had a place of their own.

They didn’t always have each other, either.

Brown lost custody of her son for almost 10 months after a brutal beating in February 2021 took the life of her year-old daughter Amanda Marie Owens. Eli survived, but he sustained serious physical and emotional injuries that he still copes with today.

Prosecutors have charged Brown’s ex-boyfriend with first-degree murder and “torture” in Amanda’s death — a crime that could carry the death penalty.

Brown’s and Eli’s apartment isn’t just their first home – it’s a safe haven for them to process and heal from their trauma. On the wall just inside the front door hangs a gentle reminder of that trauma: The lanyard that Brown wears to every court date, with photos of her two children and a simple demand — “Justice for Eli & Amanda.”

Each night, the mother and son might go to sleep separately, one on the couch and one in the bedroom. But by morning, Eli usually finds his way back to his mom.

Their story is about more than resilience in the face of despair. It is also a real-life example of a novel but increasingly common strategy to break generational poverty.

Halfway through a two-year pilot program

Brown is one of 76 participants in a new county program designed to help homeless families get back on track after falling on tough times.

The Yolo County Basic Income Program, or YOBI, gives monthly cash payments to a local parents with children under age 6. The 24-month pilot, which began in April 2022, chose participants in need of stable housing who were enrolled in the California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKS) Housing Support Program.

Unlike most government assistance programs, which have strict rules about how recipients can spend their benefits, guaranteed basic income entrusts money to people with no strings attached.

The idea is to help lower poverty-induced stress and remove barriers that prevent people from finding and keeping good-paying jobs. Food stamps, childcare subsidies and housing vouchers can’t buy a single parent the car needed to get to and from work. Basic income can.

The idea of distributing rules-free payments and trusting recipients to spendthem wisely used to be a lofty thought experiment rooted in academic theory. And not everyone has bought into the theory. Both liberal and conservative critics have argued that guaranteed income programs increase reliance on government aid without encouraging people to work.

But recent experiments have generated success and spurred hope. Findings from the first mayor-led program in Stockton showed that families receiving the funds were better able to find work and also had lower levels of depression and anxiety. Since the Stockton pilot launched in 2019, at least 100 local and state governments across the country have introduced similar programs, according to the Economic Security Project.

In Brown’s case, she wouldn’t have qualified for her apartment without the program’s help. And permanent housing is a key element in bringing a sense of stability to her and Eli’s lives.

“YOBI saved my life,” Brown said. “We would still be homeless if not for YOBI.”

Most monthly YOBI payments range from $1,200 to $1,500 – much higher than most other basic income pilots. Brown receives just under $1,200, paid once a month via prepaid debit card.

In addition to providing monthly cash payments, the county works with local nonprofit Yolo County Children’s Alliance to provide additional support and resource connections for the families.

Brown’s caseworker Monique Johnson, also a single mom and former CalWORKS participant, helped her enroll Eli in his special needs school in Sacramento. In the year since Johnson first met Brown and Eli, she said both mother and son have made significant progress

“She knew what her son had experienced, and she really gave him the love that he needed,” Johnson said, “which is why I feel like he flourished and which is why she so good right now too.

“She was consistent,” Johnson continued. “She stayed on top of everything.”

The idea for the program spawned when CalWORKS eligibility workers in Yolo County noticed they sometimes worked with three or four generations of the same family in a single case.

“We were just seeing the same people come back through the doors,” said Nolan Sullivan, director of Yolo County’s Health and Human Services Agency.

Sullivan pointed out that California’s main government assistance programs – CalWORKS and CalFresh – hardly do more than “keep people in a functional state of drowning.”

“We give them enough resources just to barely make it,” he said.

Instead of paying participants a flat rate every month like most other basic income pilots, each family on the YOBI program receives a different amount based on how much money needed to pull them $1 over the California Poverty Measure, a statistic crafted by the Public Policy Institute of California and Stanford University. The sliding scale accounts for how many adults and children live in the household and whether the family rents, mortgages or owns a house.

According to a 2019 survey from PPIC, Yolo County had the highest poverty rate out of California’s 58 counties, hovering around 20.9%. Most recently, the poverty rate has dipped closer to 17%, although researchers say pandemic-era safety net expansions account for most of that reduction.

To maximize the effectiveness of the program, the YOBI team targeted those it considered to have the greatest need: families with children under age 6 who are experiencing homelessness.

“If you’re gonna start a crazy poverty program to help families,” Sullivan said, “why not start it in a place that has the deepest level of poverty in California?”

Yolo County’s cannabis tax funded a large portion of the program, in addition to donations from private donors such as First 5 Yolo and the Sutter Health Foundation.

The program was designed to last for 24 months. But it still needs about $600,000 in funding to afford the final few payments. Sullivan estimates they will have enough to last through January 2024 — three months short of goal.

‘I needed that extra support’

For someone like Brown, a single adult renting an apartment with one child in Yolo County, the California Poverty Measure is $22,733 annually, or about $1,895 monthly.

The extra money has been a blessing for Brown.

After her daughter’s death and before she regained custody of Eli, she worked at McDonald’s for a few months and rose to the level of manager.

When Eli returned, Brown realized she would need to devote her full attention to supporting him. He copes with post-traumatic stress disorder caused by enduring intense violence and witnessing his sister’s death.

“It’s not that I didn’t want to work. It’s not that I’m disabled and can’t work,” Brown said. “I needed that extra support, and YOBI was my extra support.”

The regular stream of funding provided by the program allows Brown the freedom to return to school and finish her diploma. She plans eventually to pursue a career in child development.

“I’m going to be able to work a better job with my high school diploma,” she said, “and that’s what I want – a better job.”

Fast money and life’s tough lessons

Brown’s appreciation for her newfound independence comes from tough lessons learned and experiences no child should have to endure. At age 14, she was drawn to the streets the realization that there was a quick and easy way to make money: prostitution.

But underneath the allure of nice nails and new hairdos, stacks of cash and fast cars, Brown started cultivating a complex web of what would become toxic relationships.

“Just being in that lifestyle was addicting for me, and it was hard to get out of,” Brown said. “I didn’t have boundaries for myself.”

The first time Brown ran away from home for prostitution, she was living with her aunt Kimadaa Rule in Sacramento.

Brown was only 2 when her 23-year-old mom, Amanda Brown, died in a hit-and-run car accident in 1996. Just a few years later, after her grandmother died from cancer, Rule took in Brown, raising her as her own daughter.

Alarmed after seeing Brown was gone, Rule called the police and reported her niece missing. She found Brown not too long after in a hospital emergency room. The intake nurses recognized her as a missing minor. Rule didn’t know the true reason why her niece had run away.

They returned home and Brown lay down in her room while her aunt cooked dinner. Rule’s daughter, sent to fetch Brown, found the bedroom was empty.

She had run away again.

Police later found her in Oakland. They determined she had engaged in prostitution.

“I was super pissed off about it,” Brown said. “I was heartbroken.”

Despite her aunt’s best efforts, Brown ran back to the streets again and again.

Rule tried to convince Brown that a life of selling her body wasn’t a healthy way to make a living. She offered her niece a job nannying her two young children. She pushed Brown to finish high school and earn some kind of certification for a good-paying job.

Those calls fell on deaf ears.

“Marquisha has always been the one to do what she wanted to,” Rule said. “All I could do was love her, and show her the support that I could.”

Brown moved out of her aunt’s house at age 15 after she ran away for the third time. Rule told her niece that if she ever needed a place to stay, her door was open. And Brown would sometimes return, but never for very long.

Losing a child

For the 12 years that Brown traded sex for money, home was wherever she could lay her head: motel rooms, friends’ couches, even her ex-pimp’s father’s house. She grew dependent on the lifestyle and the fast money.

By February 2021, at age 27, she had two children and was living in Silvey’s Motel in West Sacramento.

One afternoon, she was running errands and working the streets . She left her kids with her boyfriend at the time – Derrick Dimone Woods, who she had known since she was 18. He also happened to a cousin of her son Eli’s father.

The date was Feb. 15 – the day after Valentine’s Day.

Woods didn’t live in the motel with Brown and her kids, she said, but he’d decided to spend the night after they all had dinner at Applebee’s.

Brown said when she pulled back into the parking lot that day, she could see Woods looking out the window. She recalled watching him run out of the room and flee the property. She raced into the room and found her two children – 3-year-old Eli and 1-year-old Amanda – covered in bruises and sprawled on the floor.

Baby Amanda made no sound. Her body wasn’t moving.

“When I picked her up, she was not breathing. She was cold,” Brown said. “I just lost it. I broke down.”

Brown remembered screaming, running up and down the corridor, pounding on her neighbors’ doors, begging to know if they’d seen or heard anything that had happened.

Many of them had called the police. Soon, the parking lot was filled with squad cars and ambulances. Brown called her Auntie Kimadaa, barely able to put words together in between her sobs and wails.

“Amanda, Amanda,” Rule recalled her niece screaming.

“She’s gone.”

At first, Rule was confused.

“The last thing I’m thinking is ‘something’s wrong with the baby, or something happened to the baby,’” Rule said. “I’m like, ‘OK, tell me what happened,’ and she said, ‘He hurt my baby, my baby is gone!’”

Rule partially blamed herself. Brown and the children had been staying with her temporarily until just a month earlier, when they moved to the motel. If only she’d made them stay, Rule lamented, they would never have been living at Silvey’s Motel, and no one would have laid a hand on the children.

“I shouldn’t have let her go. I should’ve made sure the situation she went to was better,” Rule said. “For the longest time, that just constantly replayed in my head, what I could’ve done differently.”

The West Sacramento Police Department arrested Woods a day later. He faces charges of first-degree murder, assault resulting in the death of a child under 8, and abuse or endangerment of a child under 5 with infliction of great bodily injury.

Prosecutors argue that Woods also committed “torture” in Amanda’s death, according to the criminal complaint filed in Yolo County Superior Court. That makes his case eligible for the death penalty.

Woods will next appear in court on June 12 for a three-day hearing to determine whether he’s competent enough to stand trial. His attorney, Yolo public defender Jose Gonzalez, did not return a call seeking comment.

“I just loved that little girl so much,” Rule said of Amanda. “She had so much attitude.”

To her auntie and cousins, Amanda was known as “Jelly Bean.” Rule said her young niece was just learning how to form words, but nonetheless, she’d get her message across. The little girl would try to say “Auntie,” but could only manage to get out the first syllable, “Ahhhhnn.”

“I can’t even fathom how you could hurt someone so precious. She was just a little baby.”

After police questioned Brown the day Amanda died, she rushed to the hospital to join Rule and Eli, who were waiting for her. She stayed with her son until Child Protective Services took him away from her and placed him with a foster family.

CPS charged Brown with neglecting Eli and argued she was complicit in the death of his sibling, Amanda. In her heart, Brown felt the charges were wrong. But ultimately she accepted them to hasten her son’s return.

“I’ll take these charges,” she said, at the time. “I’ll say it’s my fault – I just want my son back.”

In the two years since Amanda died, Brown embarked on a journey of self-discovery and improvement. She abandoned her life on the streets and cut all ties with friends from her days as a prostitute.

She had a singular mission: Regain custody of her son.

Getting on track

Right away, Brown knew she had to do everything in her power to prove she could care for Eli. She wanted the court to have zero reasons to delay her reunion with her son.

Not even two full days after Amanda’s memorial service, Brown moved into a safe house run by Empower Yolo, a domestic violence prevention organization in Woodland. She enrolled in domestic violence and parenting classes and embraced therapy.

She never missed a court date. She never missed a visit with Eli.

“I didn’t care if I had to walk or bike to Sacramento,” she said. “I was going to be there.”

By the time her December 2021 court date arrived, Brown had already finished her courses and was working at McDonald’s to bring in income. After she successfully completed three overnight visits, she said, the court had no choice but to give Eli back.

“Everything that they were going to make her do,” Rule said, “she had already completed without them even asking her to.”

Caring for Eli was challenging though. His PTSD and trauma reactions often led him to lash out at other people in the safe house, teachers and students at school, and even at his mom.

Brown left her job to help support Eli full time. Eventually, they were asked to leave the shelter due to his outbursts. They bounced from hotel to hotel for the better part of four months, and although she applied for various affordable apartments, her lack of income and an eviction on her record always meant denial.

One day, Brown’s Yolo County housing assistance worker told her about the YOBI program. She qualified because she was on housing support through CalWORKS and Eli was still under 6. That extra $1,199 per month was enough to secure a lease at her current apartment.

She could finally give herself and Eli the home they deserved.

“I don’t know where we would have been without YOBI,” Brown said. “Probably still homeless.”

Does the program work?

Brown is among a number of program participants who feel grateful for the extra help each month.

Laini Cobain, a single mother of four in Woodland, used her YOBI money to pay the rent, put her children in sports and take family trips to the beaches around Lake Tahoe.

The money saved her family when she lost her 2018 Ford Focus in an accident with a drunk driver. The extra funds paid for rentals to drive her kids to and from their schools in Davis, and eventually for the 2002 Yukon XL she bought as a replacement.

Teresa Vargas, a mother of three in Woodland, said the extra money she received through the program has allowed her to stay home and care for her three children and also pay off debts she owes to Yolo County for overpayments of CalFresh benefits. For the last 10 years she has raised her kids as a single mother. Her husband, a Mexican citizen who originally moved to California without official papers, currently awaits a visa in Mexico. Vargas used to work seasonally as a farm laborer, but she left her job when she was pregnant with her third child.

Evaluators say they’re still six months away from completing a full analysis of the program’s first year. Initial surveys reflect an unwavering sense of hope and excitement about guaranteed income and the possibilities it can unlock for a family.

“I’m hearing very heartfelt, wonderful stories,” said Sarina Rodriguez, the lead data analyst for the YOBI evaluation. “I can feel just from the staff interviews the energy and the enthusiasm and the, like, gratitude, from the participants to the staff, and then from the staff to me.”

Data collection for the evaluation involves extensive interviews with YOBI recipients, a control group of 103 families on CalWORKS who don’t receive guaranteed income, and program staff members.

Evaluators knew the more comfortable participants felt during the interviews, the more authentic and truthful their responses would be. That’s why “peer interviewers” — current YCCA employees who have been on CalWORKS and experienced homelessness — conduct the program surveys with families.

Johnson, Brown’s caseworker, is also a Black single mom who fled an abusive relationship and experienced homelessness with her two children. Both women even stayed at Empower Yolo’s domestic violence safe house.

Researchers have only analyzed the staff interviews so far. Still, their initial findings suggest the program is working.

“If the staff are feeling really positive, that’s a really good indicator that it’s working for the participants,” said Catherine Brinkley, one of the lead researchers and the director of the UC Davis Center for Regional Change. ”They are so eager for a program that is going to provide hope and make a change.”

Brinkley and her team are paying particular attention to how the program affects participants’ mental and physical health.

“Poverty is a highly stressful situation,” she said. “Balancing early childhood care, work, and finding housing — it’s overwhelming.”

Prior to receiving the YOBI money, roughly two-thirds of the parents said they experienced moderate to severe depression. That’s more than three times the California average, based on the most recently available data from 2018.

“Depression impacts their ability to care for their children, to care for themselves, to find housing,” Brinkley said. “Housing stability correlates with mental health, which is why mental health is such a big focus in this study.”

Parents in poverty, Brinkley said, often ignore or defer their own health needs because they don’t have the time or money to seek medical help. It’s nearly impossible to find time for goal-setting or fun when families are too busy worrying about how to feed their children, make rent and keep the lights on.

So far, feedback from county staffers suggests that the county level could be a logical place to roll out a guaranteed income program, Rodriguez said. Counties already have case managers and eligibility workers who understand the social safety net and can troubleshoot questions about how guaranteed income might affect eligibility for other programs, for example.

“If we’re successful at the county level, and as we build a cohort of county-level cases in California,” Brinkley said, “it’s much easier to make the argument that the state should roll out statewide.”

The program’s leaders hope lawmakers will see YOBI as a guaranteed income model that could be scaled up across the state. At the same time, they know that politicians have most of the power when choosing how to spend taxpayer money. Without the support of elected officials, all that has been accomplished in Yolo County could disappear when the funds dry up.

Will YOBI continue after next year? Will it inspire more counties adopt basic income programs?

“It’ll be up to the politicians to decide,” Brinkley said.

Building a new life

Every morning, Brown and Eli wake up at 6:45 a.m. The “school bus” — a white transit van — arrives at 7:30 to pick him up, and Eli traipses out the door and downstairs to catch his ride to his half-day kindergarten in Sacramento.

After he leaves, Brown sneaks back into bed for a few precious moments of rest before rising to clean the apartment. On this day, she washed the dishes and cleared the dining room table of her crafting projects and her son’s strewn Jenga blocks. She swept up jelly beans and crumbs from the living room and kitchen floors, then filled a bucket with cleanser and mopped them to a shine.

She plopped down on the couch for a quick scroll through YouTube before Eli comes home.

Brown needs all the rest she can get. She’s expecting a new baby girl in July with her fiancé Darren Lee, a longtime friend who has always had her back. She knows she can count on him for anything, she said, and he’s been an exceptional role model for Eli as well.

“That’s her fairy tale ending right there,” Rule said. “Someone who’s been there with her, who knows all her past traumas. You can’t ask for more than that.”

Still, Brown’s life has taught her the need to take care of herself. Now that she’s financially independent, she never wants to be dependent on someone else.

In the fall, once she’s had her baby and Eli goes to school full-time, Brown intends to find full-time work. She knows her YOBI checks end next March, and her $600 a month in welfare won’t pay all the bills. To stay on track, she’ll need a good, stable job.

Eli’s van pulled back into the parking lot. Brown walked outside to greet him, picking him up with one arm and lifting him out of the van as his feet dangle around her pregnant belly.

“I want to play water balloons,” he said as they walked toward the elevator. They reached their floor and he tore down the corridor toward the front door like a rocket, throwing open the front door and running inside. He knocked over his blue and orange bike, then grabbed his Razor scooter and rode it around the pristine living room floor.

“Not in the house please, Eli,” Brown calmly said to him as she heated up a Hot Pocket for lunch. He dropped the scooter.

“Can we play Jenga?” he asked, running to grab the blocks and dumping them back onto the dining room table Brown had cleared just an hour earlier.

“Where’s my water balloons?” he asked eagerly. Brown found the grocery sack with the quick-fill water balloons and handed them to Eli. He carried them to the kitchen sink.

“No Eli, not in the house,” his mom instructed. “Outside.”

Parenting classes taught her that calm, patient responses work better than losing her cool or shouting — especially when Eli becomes frustrated.

After he gleefully burst his water balloons outside, he tried using the PlayStation remote to search YouTube for dance videos.

“People getting sturdy,” he said into the microphone. The search engine only caught the last word. He tried again. And again, each time getting louder and more agitated.

“If you have a calm body and a calm voice,” Brown told him, “maybe it will hear you.”

All around their living room are photos of baby Amanda and young Eli. They smile down from every wall and from frames on the TV stand. Brown plans to hang even more photos once she frames them. On the counter behind the TV is Amanda’s shrine — an urn with some of her ashes, a pair of her baby slippers, sympathy cards from loved ones.

“We keep her name alive in this house,” Brown said.

In the corner of the living room next to the couch sits a towering stack of baby clothes, diapers, toys and a baby bouncer. Initially, Brown didn’t want a daughter. But now, she and Eli and Darren are all excited for the latest member of their family to arrive.

Before the baby comes though, Brown and Eli will take a trip to Sylvan Cemetery in Citrus Heights to visit her mom and her baby girl — two Amandas, gone too soon, buried together. They’ll bring some combination of candles and flowers, balloons and Barbies. They’ll stay at least an hour, maybe more.

And then they’ll return home, mother and son, ready to welcome a new life into their new home.