Devin Cotten traces his interest in income inequality back to childhood. He grew up in a middle-class family in a suburb of Cleveland and frequently visited the city. He especially remembers a trip to his father’s favorite barber shop in the southeastern corner of the city and noticing differences like the scarcity of stores.

This interest led him to earn a degree in urban studies at the College of Wooster and later to jobs at Burten, Bell, Carr Development, Inc. and Old Brooklyn Community Development Corp. All the while, he continued to ponder what determines who can shop in their own neighborhoods, access credit and fully participate in the economy. Because, as he saw it, it clearly wasn’t work ethic. Everywhere he looked he saw people working very hard and never getting ahead.

That led him to the concept he calls Universal Basic Employment, or UBE.

UBE is not the same as Universal Basic Income, a system that involves giving people money with no strings attached to raise their standard of living. UBE has the same goal but approaches it differently, by guaranteeing a certain salary for whatever job a person works.

When Cotten’s UBE pilot program launches in Cleveland next year with 100 people, that salary will be at least $50,000 a year.

Last year, City Council Member Stephanie Howse-Jones persuaded her colleagues to kick in $600,000 to help Cotten begin planning for a pilot program to launch in the of 2026. He has partnered with United Way of Greater Cleveland to make the plans, which will include raising the millions needed for the three-year pilot.

Signal Cleveland checked in with Cotten to learn more about the concept and his progress toward the launch.

How did you develop the plan for Universal Basic Employment?

When I started working in community development, I learned about this wonderful thing called a subsidy. We subsidize businesses [through tax breaks and other methods]. Why don’t we just subsidize to ensure that people have enough?

If you go to our most vulnerable communities, you see folks working every single day, whether they’re watching kids, whether they’re a hair braider or cosmetologist, they’re doing something. People have an innate desire to work, even while benefiting from safety-net benefits. A lot of the folks that are living in poverty are working full time.

So the question is, do you want to pay [people] on the front end, or do you want to pay on the back end [through social safety-net programs]? And I’m suggesting that it’s more efficient and more effective to pay on the front end. 

We offer micro solutions to macro problems — a housing intervention, a health intervention, a youth intervention. Poor folks have to go through all these doors and navigate all these services. We can center people in an efficient process that allows them to have the agency to be part of our economy so that the private sector can support their needs and wants in the same way that it does for middle- and upper-income folks.

Where are you in the planning process?

We’re gathering the necessary data to understand what our government is currently spending on reactive responses to poverty — how many SNAP dollars are going into communities, how many housing and TANF dollars are going into the communities, and how do we map this at the ZIP code level. And then from there, we’ll see what area [of the city] is the best fit for us to run the pilot.

Then, following that data, we’ll start to identify business partners. So let’s say there are 10 businesses in that neighborhood that we can work with. And in those businesses, collectively, they have 75 folks who fit our research question. Then we know we need to find 25 other additional individuals through other community partners.

We’re also providing credentialing and educational stipends, because we want to ensure that folks coming out to the pilot at the end can maintain that level of employment or salary.

You’ve said that Universal Basic Employment will fully subsidize the $50,000 salaries of those 100 people. That’s a big benefit to those employers as well.

It’s monumental, yeah. Our small businesses have needs and there are ‘help wanted’ signs in every single one of them. And additionally they’ll be looking to add some folks as well. So I think that’s a cool thing about this solution, is that it allows us to expand the capacity of small businesses as well. We believe that a jobs guarantee policy is a simultaneous investment in people, place and business.

What kinds of business will you partner with? Are there any that you would rule out?

We’re going to look at a myriad of businesses and industries, true ‘Main Street’ businesses, like a barber shop, a bakery, places where people can start as an entry-level worker. We’ll look at big and small outfits, so that we have a suite of options to show in the research [to be shared when the pilot ends]. That will include ‘big’ small businesses, like [the size of] Orlando Baking Company. We’re not in the business of subsidizing Amazon, Walmart, anything like that.

Above: Cotten speaking at the Ideas We Should Steal Festival in Philadelphia in 2024.

How will you measure success?

We’ll measure the qualitative and quantitative impacts. From a qualitative standpoint, we want to measure things like, did a family go from one quality meal time together in a week to five? Quality time together changes the social emotional development of a child and the trajectory of their educational outcomes.

From a quantitative standpoint, do we see a family go from zero life infrastructure — quality housing, transportation, child care, a reliable pathway to secure food — to having all of that or a good portion of that stuff in place. Do we see people go from negative $10,000 in net worth to zero or positive net worth? Do we see someone go from subsidized housing to market-rate housing to home ownership?

Do we see businesses go from an average employee stay of 90 days to three years? Do we see businesses being able to invest more in things like the beautification of their community?

Do we see folks attending things like [City] Council meetings more, because now they have the time. Do we see someone going from a non-voter to a voter? Do we see this intervention turning folks into active participants, not only in our economy, but in our community, in our democracy?

What do you hope all that research will lead to?

Once we have the research paper in hand, our goal is to run pilots in other cities across the country. Cleveland is one mid-sized market. We have to show what this demonstration looks like in other markets. 

That’s the work, to get enough of a groundswell and enough research to show our state and federal governments that by shifting from a reactive response to poverty to this proactive solution we can dignify historically low-wage workers, close the Black-white wealth gap, put agency back into the hands of cities and local municipalities to solve the symptoms of poverty that are often left at their doorstep and restore the individual agency and prosperity to the 200,000 Clevelanders and 41 million Americans that are currently living in poverty.