$2,000 monthly stipends helped these SF moms leave sex work behind

Shantanae was desperate. Homeless after fleeing a violent ex and working The Blade for a controlling pimp, the young mother of two often didn’t know where she’d sleep each night. 

Some days, she’d stay at cheap hotels. Other times, she’d couch surf, relying on friends to watch her sons, aged 2 and 5, while she worked Capp and Shotwell streets in San Francisco and International Boulevard in Oakland.

That’s when she got an offer that seemed too generous to be true: $2,000 a month for a full year. Unlike government benefits, the stipend had no strings attached. Unlike traditional charity, it was framed as compensation for her caregiving work as a mom.

Once the money began hitting her bank account in early summer 2024, she could afford to stay with her boys in hotels when they had nowhere else to go. Instead of canned goods from food banks, she could feed them fresh fruit and vegetables. After years of barely scraping by, she treated them to Disneyland — something she only dreamed of as a child. 

For the first time since becoming a mom at the age of 15, she had the mental space to envision a future for her family. She had time to heal.

“For me, trying to make money has always come with risks — especially as a woman fleeing abuse and exploitation,” said Shantanae, who’s 22 now. “This income gave me a safe, temporary alternative. It allowed me to focus on rebuilding my life without putting myself in dangerous situations.”

Then, after 12 months, the payments stopped. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

Shantanae, a San Francisco native who asked to go by her middle name for privacy, was one of 10 women in San Francisco lucky enough to get picked for a first-of-its-kind guaranteed-income pilot specifically targeting single moms vulnerable to child welfare investigations, criminalization, and sex work. 

Though the payments were unconditional, a resulting study on the project, unveiled this week, puts forward several policy recommendations. Among them: a fully refundable child tax credit that includes immigrants, a state law to prevent moms from losing custody of their kids solely because of poverty, and legislation to introduce permanent direct-cash benefits for otherwise unpaid caregivers. 

The $240,000 experiment — led by the In Defense of Prostitute Women’s Safety Project, with help from the Global Women’s Strike and the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women — stemmed from the city’s Whac-a-Mole crackdown on sex work at Capp and Shotwell streets. In 2023, the city installed barricades on the Mission District streets to deter johns from cruising to pick up dates, displacing the problem to surrounding blocks.

In the months that followed, Rachel West, head of In Defense of Prostitute Women’s Safety Project, began asking women affected by the ramped-up enforcement if they’d be interested in volunteering for the guaranteed-income pilot. 

From a list of 33 applicants, West’s team narrowed it down to 10, each of whom were paid $2,000 a month starting in June 2024.

Recipients fell between the ages of 25 and 34, with one to four children each. All were single moms and reported having no to low income. Eight had previously fought to retain custody of their kids after child welfare investigations. One was a Spanish-speaking immigrant. Few had a reliable place to live. Though the pilot wasn’t limited to sex workers to avoid women being publicly outed by enlisting, six said they relied to some degree on income from commercial sex. 

The idea for guaranteed income dates back to antiquity and claims proponents from various ideological stripes, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Milton Friedman. But the U.S. didn’t see its first city-led guaranteed-income pilot until 2019, when then Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs launched a program (opens in new tab) that put $500 a month into the pockets of 125 residents for two years. 

The years since have seen more than 70 such pilots launch in 26 states, including several in the Bay Area, accounting for a combined $335 million in direct economic relief.

The Bay Area became a hotspot for the trend. Between 2019 and 2025, more than $65 million in public funding, as well as donations from (opens in new tab)Google (opens in new tab), (opens in new tab)the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (opens in new tab), (opens in new tab)Omidyar Network (opens in new tab), and others, poured into universal basic income pilots for about 10,000 people in the nine-county region. 

According to Guaranteed Income Works (opens in new tab), a nonprofit consortium that’s tracked the outcomes of the pilots, the results have been promising.

By and large, participants managed to pull themselves out of poverty through education and long-term employment. They reported spending more time with their children, which improved academic performance. They paid off debts, saved for emergencies, and bought cars. Not a single pilot reported participants working less. 

Perhaps nowhere were the results more dramatic than in the program helping to pull sex workers like Shantanae out of poverty in San Francisco — largely because the size of the payments well exceeded other stipends, which normally range in the hundreds of dollars. 

The city’s direct-cash experiment was also the only one of its kind to cast the payments as earned income for caregiving. Though unwaged caregiving isn’t recognized by most official measures, the project’s organizers note that the insurance industry puts the value of a mother’s work at about $145,000 a year (opens in new tab).

“That was really key,” West said. “We were the first to base a pilot like this on the assumption that being a single mom is hard work and vital work for society, and is deserving of acknowledgement and financial reward.”

Aurora, a 45-year-old program participant, said the stipends came at a crucial time.

“For many women … financial hardship often means impossible choices,” she said. “Some of us have been forced to trade our bodies and safety for survival. We know that economic desperation creates inescapable traps.”

The stipends became that escape for her. She had just left her ex and was unsure how to provide for her daughter.

The money gave her the freedom to travel out of state to visit her parents. It helped her afford after-school programs for her kid, pay off debt, and buy medicine when her insurance lapsed. More importantly, it gave her time to go back to college. 

“This funding isn’t charity,” Aurora said, “it’s justice.”

Despite positive outcomes, however, the political climate has dramatically shifted. In the years since the Stockton pilot that launched a nationwide movement, federal agencies have been decimated and local safety-net services have borne crippling cutbacks. 

Under President Joe Biden, lawmakers opted not to extend (opens in new tab) pandemic-era payments and tax credits that brought child poverty to record lows. Under President Donald Trump, programs that support children and families have been gutted by mass layoffs. Up until earlier this week, the longest government shutdown in the nation’s history delayed food stamp payments for millions of impoverished families.

Meanwhile, ongoing immigration raids have made life especially difficult for single moms without citizenship who fear accessing services that might leave them exposed.

Deyling, a 30-year-old mother of two who declined to share her full name, said the unconditional $2,000-a-month payments allowed her to spend time with her kids as one recovered from two surgeries over the past year. She also used some of the funds to replace her old car and attend medical appointments. 

Since the payments expired over the summer, in the thick of Trump’s immigration crackdowns, she said she hesitates to even try accessing services that might draw attention to her as an undocumented immigrant.

In Spanish, through a translator, as she rocked her two-month-old baby girl in a stroller outside City Hall on a recent afternoon, she described how she’s since returned to relying on food banks and sex work to provide for her family. 

“It’s been very difficult,” she said, fighting back tears. “Very difficult.”

Though she’s back to scrambling for money, Shantanae said she’s determined not to go back to her old life — despite pressure from friends who still work The Blade, and the promise of quick cash. 

The year of $2,000-a-month gave her more of a leg up than she’s ever had since her mom kicked her out of the house as a pregnant teenager. She now has a reliable car. She also earned her guard card, which qualifies her for security work. 

But the job hunt is tough because of what she described as a criminal record related to self-defense against an abusive ex. Though the anxiety and guilt the cash stipend kept at bay for a year have returned to haunt her, she said she feels more confident, more hopeful than before. 

“It’s still hard,” she said. “But I am trying.”