How Cash Assistance with No Strings Attached Can Prevent Foster Care with Melody Webb

This episode of Community In-Site is a re-release with Melody Webb, founder and CEO of Mother’s Outreach Network and lead of the MotherUp pilot.

Direct cash support for parents can sound both simple and provocative. Research shows that neglect is the most common reason families become involved with child welfare, and it is often tied to economic hardship, which is why direct cash support has become part of prevention conversations. Some would say that giving families money, with no strings attached, is exactly what prevention should look like, while others raise questions about responsibility, trust, and accountability.

In this conversation, host Valerie Frost speaks with Melody Webb about MotherUp, the first known guaranteed income pilot for families involved in the child welfare system. Melody walks through how the pilot works, why it focuses on Black mothers facing economic stress and heightened system surveillance, and how direct cash support can help parents gain financial stability, plan for the future, deepen relationships with their children, and avoid deeper system involvement.

We are revisiting this episode as Mother’s Outreach Network prepares to host the Mother Up Guaranteed Income Pilot Research Project National Convening on November 6, 2026, at the University of Baltimore School of Law’s Meyerhoff Center for Families, Children and the Courts, co-hosted with CFCC. The convening will bring together researchers, advocates, funders, and mothers with lived experience to advance guaranteed income and family justice.

This conversation doesn’t offer a simple answer. Instead, it invites listeners to look more closely at the assumptions we bring to parenting, poverty, and prevention, and to consider whether distrust of families has quietly shaped the systems meant to support them.