When Celeste Lord-Timlin moved to Flint in 2018 as an AmeriCorps member, she didn’t know anyone here. Fresh out of college and ready to serve in a role in blight elimination, she came for a short-term opportunity but ended up building a life.
Celeste Lord-Timlin with baby Siobhán.
“I moved here knowing nobody,” Lord-Timlin said. “But I found so much here … community, opportunity, my husband, and eventually, my family.”
Today, Lord-Timlin is a full-time working mom, raising her 13-month-old daughter Siobhán with her husband, whom she met through their work in community development. She’s also on the verge of completing a dual master’s degree at the University of Michigan-Flint.
And during her pregnancy and for the first year of her daughter’s life, she was a recipient of Rx Kids, a program she says played a critical role in allowing her to stay in school, remain in the workforce, and plan for her family’s future.
Launched in Flint in early 2024, Rx Kids provides every pregnant person in the city with $1,500 during pregnancy and $500 per month for the baby’s first year. It’s the first community-wide maternal and infant cash prescription program in the nation. Since launching, Rx Kids has expanded to Kalamazoo, Pontiac, the eastern Upper Peninsula, Clare County, and is expected to reach several more Michigan communities by the end of 2025.
In Flint, where more than $10 million has been delivered to more than 1,800 families, the program is making a measurable impact. Early data shows increased financial security, lower food and diaper insecurity, and reductions in depression and stress among mothers. Families report fewer tradeoffs between basic needs like food, housing, and healthcare.
“Programs like Rx Kids help level the playing field,” said Dr. Mona Hanna, director of Rx Kids and associate dean of public health at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. “We’re already seeing healthier babies, stronger families, and more economic stability. This is how we build a brighter future, one child at a time.”
Lord-Timlin, who gave birth to Siobhán in June of 2024, said she enrolled in Rx Kids around the 20-week mark of her pregnancy. She was working full-time for the City of Flint and juggling graduate school. The timing of the cash support, she said, couldn’t have been better.
“I was a full-time student and full-time employee while pregnant. I was nauseous and exhausted, and I knew I had to scale back to part-time classes,” she said. “But I didn’t qualify for FAFSA as a part-time student, and I couldn’t afford tuition out-of-pocket.”
She used a portion of the $1,500 prenatal payment for essential baby gear, including a stroller and car seat, and some of the funds to cover her tuition. That support helped her stay enrolled and in good academic standing.
“When I tell people that Rx Kids helped me afford graduate school while pregnant, they’re surprised,” she said. “But that’s exactly what it did. It let me invest in myself so I could better invest in my family.”
As a family with steady employment, Lord-Timlin initially wondered if she’d qualify. But as she soon learned, the program is designed to help every Flint baby and family specifically because the first year of a child’s life is the most economically stressful for everyone.
“Our daycare costs $1,300 a month,” she said. “That’s a huge expense, even for families like ours who are doing ‘okay’ on paper. The $500 a month from Rx Kids covered about 30 to 40 percent of our childcare and helped us ease into a new budget.”
Lord-Timlin said the simplicity of the program – no strings attached, no reporting required – allowed her to focus on her family, not paperwork.
“If you are having a child, there are unavoidable expenses … diapers, food, cribs, clothes,” she said. “Rx Kids doesn’t ask you to prove how you spend every dollar. It trusts you to know what your family needs.”
Her experience has inspired her to advocate for the program and help other parents enroll, especially those who might assume they don’t qualify.
“I’m proud to live in a city that values its families,” she said. “Flint gave me so much, my career, my education, my family. And Rx Kids was another way this community showed up for us.”
Lord-Timlin expects to complete her second graduate degree this December. She and her husband plan to stay in Flint, where her sister and brother-in-law have now joined them, drawn, in part, by the life she built from a chance move seven years ago.
“This city gave me roots,” she said. “Rx Kids helped us grow.”
