Abstract
The California Guaranteed Income Program—a pseudonym for an experimental income assistance program in Northern California—was chosen as a case study of emerging guarantee income initiative being implemented across the state as well as ways to improve them. In this pursuit, I interviewed stakeholders, reviewed publicly available records associated with the intervention, and reviewed internal communications of the organizations involved during the the planning and implementation phases of the initiative. I also leveraged access to the lead organization and its staff, as well as analyzed data from an ongoing evaluation of the California Guaranteed Income Program. During the course of this project, my role as an outside qualitative researcher shifted several times as did the focus of the project itself. Ultimately, this study repositioned, or broadened, to be more than about how guaranteed income programs are implemented, but to eventually include how involved organizations and their functionaries operate in the broader context of funders, government sponsors, researchers, think tank experts, and philosophers. My findings show that the ambivalence around what guaranteed income is, and is not, allows for contradictory program designs and philosophies to be presented as the same program, potentially masking exploitation.