By Devin Murphy | October 2025
Here’s a statistic that should stop you cold: Spartanburg County in South Carolina ranks 3,023 out of 3,220 counties in America for economic mobility. If you’re Black and born there, you have less than a 2% chance of meaningfully escaping poverty. I know because I barely made it out myself—and only because of what amounted to an accidental Baby Bond.
Upon graduating from college, I received two academic awards totaling $20,000 — a sum that, for the first time in my life, offered real financial security. I chose to hand those resources over to my mother for a down payment on a home rather than investing in myself. That decision, made in a matter of minutes, quietly altered everything that came after. Mortgage payments replaced rent checks. Stability replaced the constant fear of rising rents, debt, and eviction. My family transitioned from relying on Section 8 vouchers and SNAP benefits to building equity in ways that gave us peace of mind.
I often think of that moment when I consider the promise of Baby Bonds. What my family experienced by accident—a sudden, transformative gift of security — is something that could be possible for every family. Baby Bonds are not charity; they represent our boldest commitment to saying that every child, no matter where they are born, deserves to begin life endowed with possibility.
From Personal Luck to Public Design
While there is growing momentum behind the concept of Baby Bonds as multiple states introduce legislation, the pathway to broad-scale implementation must confront some urgent, practical questions: How should eligibility and contribution formulas work? Should the policy include use restrictions? How will communities approach account administration and disbursement—particularly when it requires ongoing family engagement? These are solvable problems, but they require testing, evidence, and coordination across policy and practice.
That is why, at the start of this year, the Institute for Race, Power, and Political Economy established the National Baby Bonds Pilots Coalition, a first-of-its-kind alliance linking early efforts across nine states to test and refine wealth-building strategies rooted in the Baby Bonds concept. From Colorado’s goal of having $20,000 accounts for Medicaid-eligible youth to Vermont’s focus on rural communities to MoCaFi’s testing of tech-enabled tools for delivering financial coaching, each pilot interprets Baby Bonds through their community’s unique lens.
Together, Baby Bonds pilots form a living laboratory where diverse program designs, target populations, and policy strategies are tested in parallel.
What We’re Learning
If there’s one takeaway from this learning community, it’s that experimentation isn’t about taking risks—it’s about managing risks. By running multiple pilots simultaneously, we’re collectively de-risking the path to large-scale policy.
Different designs reveal different strengths. Each of the pilots is experimenting with different approaches. Place-based approaches like St. Louis’s Rooted project) aim to keep dollars circulating locally and counter displacement. In Rhode Island, requiring in-state use of funds aims to retain talent and reinvest in the local economy. The breadth of approaches allows for testing not only the individual and family wealth-building thesis, but also the means of addressing community wealth-building strategies.
Evidence doesn’t have to wait decades. Critics of Baby Bonds claim we won’t see the results for generations; however, several pilots are starting with older age cohorts to gather data on the impact of interventions today. Connecticut’s accelerated pilot offers up to $20,000 for young adults aged 18-35 in New Haven’s Dixwell neighborhood. Georgia’s Freedom Futures combines a $40,000 Baby Bond with $500/month guaranteed income for participants aged around18–25. By demonstrating efficacy now, these pilots hope to support future policy discussions with real data, rather than model projections.
Community trust matters as much as technical design. Pilots that engage families through schools, neighborhood groups, and culturally rooted partnerships are seeing stronger enrollment and persistence—reminding us that successful program implementation is as much about belonging as it is about balance sheets.
Policy barriers demand real-time solutions. One challenge that consistently comes up is how the disbursement of funds will be treated from a tax and benefits perspective. By documenting real interactions with asset limits and benefits cliffs (SNAP, SSI), pilot programs are generating the practical evidence and policy guidance lawmakers need to fix traps before scaling.
Collaboration multiplies momentum. As a coalition, the pilot programs are utilizing collective tools, making their budgets transparent, and building out shared evaluation templates. The efforts are speeding up cycles that normally take years. As one pilot leader said during our debrief, “Seeing others’ budgets really opened up our perspective on what different and more scalable models of community engagement could look like.” Collaboration is how innovation spreads.
A Call to Invest in the Possible
When my mother closed on her first home, she said something I’ll never forget: “It’s not about the house; it’s about having something that’s ours.” Baby Bonds promise this sense of ownership to families who never had a fair shot at it before.
The work ahead isn’t only about designing better programs. It’s about sustaining the coalition, funding shared infrastructure, and investing in shared learning so that the lessons emerging from these pilots become the foundation for state and federal policy. Philanthropy can underwrite pilot execution, evaluation, and sharing mechanisms that make this collaborative learning process possible.
My family’s story began with an accidental Baby Bond. The pilots we’re nurturing today are about making such accidents unnecessary and building a nation where every child’s potential is treated as an investable asset. That’s not just economic policy; it’s a moral choice about the future we’re willing to fund.