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Via City News Service,

The Board of Supervisors voted Aug. 6 to expand its “Breathe'' guaranteed-income program to provide financial stipends to more than 2,000 non-minor dependents in the foster care system.

Holly Mitchell, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, speaks to the media in Los Angeles on April 1, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

In addition to the stipends, the foster dependents will also have access to career and education counseling, financial empowerment training, housing and other programs as recommended by the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs’ Center for Financial Empowerment.

The Breathe guaranteed income program began as a pilot project in March 2022, providing monthly $1,000 payments to 1,000 in-need residents.

Last year, the board agreed to expand the program to include 200 former foster care youth adjusting to life outside the system.

According to the motion, funding to expand the program is available through the state’s Flexible Family Support funding. The FFS funding requires that recipients use the money for specific purposes, defined as “extracurricular and enrichment activities that are designed to enhance the foster child or non-minor dependant’s skills, abilities, self-esteem, relationships, and overall well-being and healing.'’

Noting that L.A. County is home to the largest population of youth living in foster care, Mitchell on Tuesday called guaranteed income a “powerful and effective way to truly disrupt poverty.'’

Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also spoke out in favor of the idea, saying foster youth often have the worst outcomes when transitioning out of the system, including homelessness, dropping out of schools, poor health and poverty.

The expansion will provide support to two groups of people in the foster system between ages 18 and 21:

To enact the expansion, the board approved through the motion a $4 million increase to a contract with Strength Based Community Change— the program administrator– which will also evaluate the program’s impact and how recipients are using the funds.

It also backed a roughly $15 million expansion in the contract with MoCaFi, which distributes the debit cards used in the program and also distributes the stipends to those cards, to cover the costs of the payments.