By Michelle Witthaus | April 16, 2025
Baby Bonds are an increasingly popular bipartisan government policy in which every child born into poverty receives a publicly funded trust account at birth. This “start-up capital” allows young adults to access education, home ownership, and entrepreneurship, enabling them to build wealth and lead lives that are hopeful, fulfilling, productive, prosperous, and self-directed. Follow our Baby Blogs series to learn about the vision, politics, and people behind Baby Bonds and their transformative impact on the lives of young people, their families, communities, and our economy.
In this installment of Baby Blogs, Invest STL Policy Design and Activation Lead Michelle Witthaus outlines Invest STL’s latest initiative, Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place, a pilot program that explores how direct, place-based wealth-building investments impact Black residents’ ability to thrive in their chosen community in St. Louis, Missouri.
At Invest STL, we’re driven by a bold vision: make every St. Louis neighborhood a chosen place to live, raise children, and grow old by the time we sunset in 2042. A commitment this daring requires an urgent, innovative, test-and-learn approach to equitable community development by investing in both people and their chosen place.
We focus on developing communities of justice and opportunity in places that continue to endure the legacy of systemic anti-Black racism. This comes to life in four different ways, including influencing policy and decision-making. Our Policy Design + Activation Team identifies, tests, evaluates, and facilitates potential solutions to systemic issues facing predominantly Black neighborhoods. It’s this lens that led us to launch Rooted: Cultivating Black Wealth in Place—a first-of-its-kind pilot initiative that investigates direct cash transfer as a way to help long-term Black residents remain in their chosen community by increasing access to assets such as housing, long-term capital, and business development.
What We Did: Transformative Investments in People + Place
Rooted focuses on two St. Louis neighborhoods—the West End and Visitation Park—that boast rich Black history, legacy, and culture, but face the pressures of gentrification. Through the pilot, we provided 50 Black residents, or “resident investors,” within the West End and Visitation Park with:
- $2,000 for Immediate Needs: This funding helps address urgent challenges like reducing debt or creating an emergency savings account.
- $20,000 for Long-Term Investments: This larger investment positions resident investors to purchase or improve property within the neighborhoods, make property repairs within the neighborhoods, launch or scale small businesses within the neighborhoods, or grow long-term wealth through investment accounts—all focused on investing in the people within their place and neighborhoods. (Learn more about how we decided on the $22,000 investment here.)
Each resident investor was also paired with a certified financial planner at no cost. The financial planners work with resident investors to develop customized wealth-building strategies, ensuring they have the tools, support, and guidance needed to achieve their unique long-term goals and dreams.
Since the pilot launched in mid-2023, Rooted resident investors have:
- launched 6 new businesses;
- scaled up 2 existing businesses;
- created 19 investment accounts;
- made 24 major home repairs; and
- created and filed beneficiary deeds for 16 homes.
Why We Did It: Preventing Displacement Through Wealth Building
New developments and a surge in population and outside investments have brought new economic activity to neighborhoods like the West End and Visitation Park, but have also caused rising property values and housing costs. For long-term residents, this means the places they call home—where they’ve built their lives, contributed to culture, and established relationships—are at risk of becoming unaffordable. This happens across the country, oftentimes to legacy Black and Brown communities, and exacerbates systemic practices that have stunted upward mobility in these communities for generations.
Rooted is our response to this challenge. It adapts the concept of Baby Bonds to meet the needs of adults in communities most at risk for displacement. By providing financial resources and wrap-around supports, Rooted helps residents invest in their futures, remain in their chosen place, and build wealth that can be passed on to future generations.
Recognizing the importance of scaling this impact around the country, we applied the lessons learned from our Rooted pilot and developed a comprehensive anti-displacement and wealth-building replication resource and how-to guide: Rooted Powerbook: Action Steps for Investing Directly in People to Prevent Displacement through Wealth Building. This resource is designed to help policymakers, nonprofits, and advocates build and implement similar wealth-building, cash transfer, and anti-displacement programs and projects in their own communities.
As one resident investor noted, “It’s where I live, and where I’m comfortable. And I want to see whatever’s coming. I want to see the development of it. You know, new things are coming. I want to see what the changes will bring since the days my mother and grandmother lived here.”
The Connection Between People + Place
We know that place—especially at the neighborhood level—matters. Place and opportunity are inseparably linked… for better or for worse. Place shapes who we are, how we perceive the world, and what opportunities we have. And yet, without people, place is simply a series of structures, streets, and vegetation. Place holds power as it becomes significant for people to exist, connect, experience, and thrive. People have tended to place, they have created place, and they deserve and are owed opportunities to prosper in that place. That’s why we are focused on investing in both people and their place.
Rooted embodies this inextricable connection. By combining direct cash investments for people to build long-term wealth in their chosen place, residents can benefit individually and as part of a thriving, interconnected community.
Michelle Witthaus is the policy design + activation lead for STL Invest, designing projects that will influence future policymaking with an emphasis on investing in people, not just place. Download the Rooted Powerbook: Action Steps for Investing Directly in People to Prevent Displacement through Wealth Building and contact rooted@investstl.org to learn more about how you can help your own community.
If you missed previous installments of our Baby Blogs series, read them here.
Learn more about Baby Bonds in Missouri.
To share feedback on this blog, or for questions about Baby Bonds, email David Radcliffe at radclifd@newschool.edu.
To learn more, explore our Baby Bonds resources.