{"id":89299,"date":"2021-03-23T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-23T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcity.org\/daily\/entry\/guaranteed-income-in-jackson-designed-by-black-moms-for-black-moms"},"modified":"2021-03-23T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-23T10:00:00","slug":"guaranteed-income-in-jackson-designed-by-black-moms-for-black-moms-showing-results-for-black-moms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/03\/23\/guaranteed-income-in-jackson-designed-by-black-moms-for-black-moms-showing-results-for-black-moms\/","title":{"rendered":"Guaranteed Income in Jackson Designed By Black Moms for Black Moms, Showing Results for Black Moms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t\t

(Lyndon Stratford<\/a>\/iStockPhoto)<\/p><\/figcaption>\n\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t \n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t

Ebony Beals takes after her dad. Originally from Canton, Mississippi, he founded a string of successful small businesses in the Los Angeles area, including an auto repair shop, a corner store, a screen print T-shirt shop, a car wash. Toward the end of his life he owned a bike shop and became a barber with his own barbershop, both of which ran for well over a decade, according to Beals.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\n

Born and raised in Southern California, Beals moved to Mississippi 13 years ago, and later this year she\u2019ll celebrate the fifth anniversary of Tousled & Teased Hair Lounge, her own salon just outside of Jackson.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cMy dad always said, don’t work for the man, just work for yourself, no one can put a restriction on how much you can make and how quick you can make it,\u201d says Beals. \u201cWhat he didn’t tell me though was that I was going to work and never stop. Even when I’m off work I’m thinking about work and the different ways that I can make money. Those are the things he didn’t tell me. And even if you didn’t work and make money, the bills are still going to roll in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

That reality came to pass suddenly in March 2020, as the pandemic took hold and Beals had to close down her salon. But that same month, she received the first of twelve monthly payments of $1,000 in unrestricted cash, as part of Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust, a guaranteed income demonstration program that Beals actually helped design.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cEven though I closed down I still had to pay rent and lights and internet and cable,\u201d says Beals. \u201cIt just made it work. Everything worked out and there was no gap because that money filled in a little bit of space. I was just happy that I was able to pay the bills without falling so far behind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

In the summer, the salon opened back up with very strict limitations \u2014 only one client in the salon at a time, no other workers in the salon with her except her middle child, Madison, 15 years old. \u201cShe is my young apprentice,\u201d says Beal. \u201cEverything I know I have taught her. Even the business portion of it. So if I do what I do really well, she’s going to do what I do even better because she’s 15 and she’s amazing at what she does already.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

With some of her business income restored, she started using some of the extra $1,000 a month to invest in the salon. She hired an interior decorator, bought some new equipment, a new chair, and added a pedicure station. \u201cEvery time I got money, I would buy something new for the salon. Something I could point to and say I got the most out of that investment,\u201d Beals says. \u201cIt went from a nice salon to even nicer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

She even saved up a bit \u2014 but then had to spend it all in February, when heavy winter storms and years of disinvestment resulted in mass water and electricity shut offs in and around Jackson, which lasted at least three weeks. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cAt home we didn’t have power for five days, no water, no options other than to stay at a hotel,\u201d says Beals. \u201cAnd of course I had to feed my family, then replace food that spoiled in the fridge at home, and lots of water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Beals never thought the guaranteed income would actually come to pass, even as she was meeting with other mothers like her from around Jackson, in 2018, to collectively imagine what a guaranteed income program could look like. That program just completed a lottery to select its third cohort of mothers, at least 100 of them, all of them living in federally subsidized housing in Jackson. With its third cohort, this pilot in Jackson has now surpassed the one in Stockton, California, as the longest-running guaranteed-income pilot currently underway in the country.<\/p>\n\n

The full analysis of the Jackson program\u2019s effects is still being completed, but the results so far are promising. Compared to a control group of similarly situated mothers in Jackson, beneficiaries of Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust are 40 percent less likely to report debt from emergency loans; 20 percent more likely to have children performing at or above grade level; 27 percent more likely to seek professional medical help for sickness or chronic illness; and are able to budget up to $150 more for food and household costs, resulting in lowered food insecurity and struggles with basic needs.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWhen we started this, and still to this day, no one [in the United States] has done guaranteed income with a population as low-income as ours,\u201d says Aisha Nyandoro, executive director of Springboard to Opportunity, the nonprofit that created Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust. \u201cMost individuals doing guaranteed income are doing it with individuals they consider the working poor and I’m doing air quotes around that because our families are working but we’re in a state where the minimum wage is the federal $7.25 an hour. So I have families who on average make $11,000 annually.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The ultimate goal for Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust \u2014 as with Stockton\u2019s guaranteed income demonstration program and dozens of other programs in process<\/a> \u2014 is to gather evidence to make the case that cash without restrictions is a crucial and powerful component of the social safety net that the federal government should provide. <\/p>\n\n

\u201cI definitely think we need federal policy,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cI think the way that we get there is by there being multiple studies and entry points and multiple conversations about this work and multiple proof of concepts that this works and it does help families get out of poverty and it does help families have the dignity necessary to actualize their dreams and does help families show up differently in their communities, allowing them the privilege of hoping and dreaming and living out their aspirations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Nyandoro has convinced at least some private philanthropy that doing this to help shift federal policy around the social safety net is worth their dollars. Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust is funded entirely by private philanthropic donors. She doesn\u2019t envision cash without restrictions as replacing all other forms of federal support, but rather she sees it as a key complement to all the others, and could even be the missing piece to help actually move households along so that they no longer need public assistance of any kind. <\/p>\n\n

That\u2019s where the conversation began in the first place. <\/p>\n\n

Springboard to Opportunity serves around 5,000 residents living in 11 different federally subsidized housing developments around Jackson. It provides wraparound services like career development support, matched savings programs, after-school programs and more \u2014 all based on conversations with residents about their needs, Nyandoro says.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWe pride ourselves on taking a radically resident driven approach for our work,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cWe’ve been doing this work since 2013, and in 2017 I began to get concerned that in spite of all of the wraparound programs and services that we provide, that we were not moving the needle on poverty. We were not seeing a positive matriculation out of the affordable housing complexes at a rate at which I thought we should be seeing given all the work that we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

So Nyandoro says she started asking residents a simple question \u2014 \u201cwhat are we missing?\u201d And she heard from moms who talked about not having the cash to pay for the extracurricular activities their kids wanted to participate in at school. She heard from moms about having to wait until tax refund season in order to get their car repaired instead of having to spend money for transportation every day to take them to and from work, which on some days ended up costing more than what their paycheck was for that day \u2014 or else lose that job entirely.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cIt was all of these pieces, and I was like okay it’s not a program or service, it’s cash. So how do we address that?\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cAlso, what they pointed out in those conversations was really how the punitive aspects of our safety net made it prohibitive to actually opt-in to the programs that they needed in a lot of instances.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

Racist and particularly anti-Black racist policymakers have long designed social safety net programs, especially in the South, and particularly in Mississippi, to provide the least possible support with the most possible restrictions. <\/p>\n\n

It was racist southern policymakers who first made sure that Social Security would exclude agricultural workers and domestic workers \u2014 the two professions dominated by Black workers (although the rules also excluded some 40 percent of whites). As Ira Katznelson writes in When Affirmative Action Was White<\/a>, it wasn\u2019t until 1954 when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches and southern Democrats lost the ability to shape legislation that the exclusions were removed from Social Security. <\/p>\n\n

Later, when federal cash assistance programs for poor families started rolling out, those southern legislators ensured those programs included clauses and flexibility to allow southern states like Arkansas to provide just $3.52 a month in cash benefits per child in 1940, while the national average at the time was $13 a month.<\/p>\n\n

Welfare reform \u2014 the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 \u2014 allowed southern states to further degrade already flawed cash assistance programs, under the new banner of \u201cTemporary Assistance for Needy Families,\u201d or TANF. Between 1996 and 2014, the proportion of families in poverty receiving cash assistance nationwide dropped from 68 percent to 23 percent<\/a>. In Mississippi, TANF benefits today reach less than five percent<\/a> of families below the federal poverty line.<\/p>\n\n

A big reason for that is the flexibility in TANF that allows a state like Mississippi to enforce strict work requirements for cash assistance, requiring recipients work a certain number of hours per week \u2014 despite the reality that low-wage workers are increasingly and more likely than higher-wage workers to face irregular work schedules they can\u2019t control<\/a>. Work-related sanctions and \u201cother sanctions\u201d accounted for the majority of TANF case closures in Mississippi from 2003-2014, according to the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cSo with all of that data and that reality of where we were, I started saying, \u2018How do I go about giving my people money,\u2019\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cThat’s when I started researching what this could or would look like. I never heard of universal basic income at the time. This was 2017. But in my research I learned about UBI and once I had the terminology I had a term, there is a way to give people money. That’s where we got connected to the Economic Security Project and other innovators in the field at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The Economic Security Project, backed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, supported the Stockton guaranteed income demonstration program and is now funding the Mayors for Guaranteed Income network, and also provided funding for Springboard to Opportunity to design a guaranteed income pilot.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cSo in 2018, I pulled together a task force of mothers to help me think about what this could look like,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cI called those dreaming sessions. Moms showed up and they dreamed out loud with me. I remember one of my moms at the time was like \u2018Girl, stop playing!\u2019 And I’m like, \u2018I’m not playing, I’m so serious.\u2019 But how many instances in their lives has anybody said to them \u2018I’m going to give you money without strings attached, just because.\u2019 That had not happened. That does not happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

They met in a handful of different places. All the apartment complexes Springboard works in have community rooms where they met. A couple were in the nonprofit\u2019s office. Some got so big they had to use another organization\u2019s office with a larger conference room. A few times the nonprofit even rented AirBNBs. \u201cWe wanted to get away from the properties, away from the sterile office and create that homey feeling,\u201d says Nyandoro.<\/p>\n\n

Nyandoro says the mothers discussed findings from economic research but had the final say on everything, from the monthly amount to the duration of the assistance. She initially envisioned 18 months, based on prior research about guaranteed income programs, which have become popular as low-income household interventions in other countries<\/a>. Beals was one of the mothers who said 12 months at $1,000 a month was the right amount.<\/p>\n\n

Too much could hurt. Boosting incomes and savings can result in reductions or complete loss of eligibility for SNAP, or rental assistance.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWe worked with an economist to come up with an educated guess that by doing a thousand dollars a month we could still do good without doing harm, but we didn’t have any actual data to know,\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cMany moms really did take a chance on the opportunity not knowing whether or not it would actually be a good investment or good opportunity for themselves or their families. And that’s a hard decision to have to make.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

That\u2019s also why it was important for the moms to make this an opt-in decision. And they agreed a lottery was the fairest and most transparent way to decide who could receive the limited resources for a pilot or demonstration program.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cI took all of that and went on maternity leave and had my second kid,\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cWhile I was on maternity leave is where I had the bandwidth \u2014 it’s crazy how you find bandwidth. It was like my sabbatical, honestly. When I think about it now I’m like it seems crazy. Sometimes I would be up in the middle of the night listening to some of the tapes [from the dream sessions] while he was asleep. Or in the middle of the day I would be writing out the program design while he was napping. So I just had this magical moment of free space where I could actually think, and I used that time to develop the program model for Magnolia Mother’s Trust, and raised the resources necessary for the pilot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The name came from a couple different places. The Magnolia is Mississippi\u2019s state flower, but it’s also Nyandoro\u2019s grandmother’s favorite flower. \u201cMothers,\u201d because, Nyandoro says, \u201cwe’re rooted with our moms, wanting to make sure they were included. And then trust, there\u2019s the two meanings with trust, we’re going to trust our families but also thinking about trust funds and wealth and those pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

So far, Nyandoro says, they have seen in early results that on average mothers have seen a reduction of other benefits of three to four hundred dollars a month, but the net gain they still have from the cash assistance is six or seven hundred dollars. \u201cAnd they appreciate the fact they have it in cash,\u201d says Nyandoro.<\/p>\n\n

The payments also flow through newly established bank accounts for the mothers, at Hope Federal Credit Union, the Jackson-based regional credit union with a community development focus<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cWe already had an established relationship with Hope Federal Credit Union, so we worked with Hope to establish banking accounts with no fees and allowed moms to access ATMs without having to incur fees,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cThat was important to us to help them establish checking accounts and important for our mothers as well because so many of them talked about wanting to establish banking relationships and wanting to repair credit and not having to use predatory lenders. We do know some individuals saved up and bought cars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

In this newest cohort, the child of each mother will also have a 529 education savings account opened up in their name with an initial $1,000 deposit from Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust. They\u2019re expecting between 250-300 children will benefit from the accounts, which can be used later to fund tuition for college, vocational training or other qualified educational expenses like textbooks.<\/p>\n\n

The pandemic provided even further evidence to contradict the deeply embedded racist narratives that have shaped the existing social safety net. With all the expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, researchers have had more data than ever to analyze, and new research during the pandemic from Yale<\/a>, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago<\/a>, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York<\/a>, and the National Bureau of Economic Research<\/a> piled on top of older research<\/a> that these kinds of unrestricted cash benefits don\u2019t reduce incentives to find a job.<\/p>\n\n

But those old narratives still persist among policymakers, as well as among those living in poverty who are taught they are poor because they\u2019re not smart enough or working hard enough.<\/p>\n\n

\u201cThe hardest part about this work is the way that we still view poverty in this country, that we really still see poverty as a moral failing, we don’t really understand individuals are not poor because they choose to be poor, that if you are making $7.25 an hour, you cannot save your way out of poverty,\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cAnd we don’t have those conversations so we feel like individuals are poor because they don’t work enough, they’re not thrifty enough, they’re not doing the right things and they just should do better, and that’s not true, the reality is they can’t do any more than they’re already doing and it’s time for us collectively to do better and that means putting policies and systems in place that will work for all of us and not just a subset.\u201d<\/p>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t

Oscar is Next City's senior economics correspondent. He previously served as Next City’s editor from 2018-2019, and was a Next City Equitable Cities Fellow from 2015-2016. Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance, community banking, impact investing, economic development, housing and more for media outlets such as Shelterforce, B Magazine, Impact Alpha, and Fast Company.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\t \n\t\n

This post was originally published on Next City<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\n

(Lyndon Stratford<\/a>\/iStockPhoto)<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ebony Beals takes after her dad. Originally from Canton, Mississippi, he founded a string of successful small businesses in the Los Angeles area, including an auto repair shop, a corner store, a screen print T-shirt shop, a car wash. Toward the end of his life he owned a bike shop and became a barber with his own barbershop, both of which ran for well over a decade, according to Beals.<\/p>\n

Born and raised in Southern California, Beals moved to Mississippi 13 years ago, and later this year she\u2019ll celebrate the fifth anniversary of Tousled & Teased Hair Lounge, her own salon just outside of Jackson.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad always said, don\u2019t work for the man, just work for yourself, no one can put a restriction on how much you can make and how quick you can make it,\u201d says Beals. \u201cWhat he didn\u2019t tell me though was that I was going to work and never stop. Even when I\u2019m off work I\u2019m thinking about work and the different ways that I can make money. Those are the things he didn\u2019t tell me. And even if you didn\u2019t work and make money, the bills are still going to roll in.\u201d<\/p>\n

That reality came to pass suddenly in March 2020, as the pandemic took hold and Beals had to close down her salon. But that same month, she received the first of twelve monthly payments of $1,000 in unrestricted cash, as part of Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust, a guaranteed income demonstration program that Beals actually helped design.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though I closed down I still had to pay rent and lights and internet and cable,\u201d says Beals. \u201cIt just made it work. Everything worked out and there was no gap because that money filled in a little bit of space. I was just happy that I was able to pay the bills without falling so far behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the summer, the salon opened back up with very strict limitations \u2014 only one client in the salon at a time, no other workers in the salon with her except her middle child, Madison, 15 years old. \u201cShe is my young apprentice,\u201d says Beal. \u201cEverything I know I have taught her. Even the business portion of it. So if I do what I do really well, she\u2019s going to do what I do even better because she\u2019s 15 and she\u2019s amazing at what she does already.\u201d<\/p>\n

With some of her business income restored, she started using some of the extra $1,000 a month to invest in the salon. She hired an interior decorator, bought some new equipment, a new chair, and added a pedicure station. \u201cEvery time I got money, I would buy something new for the salon. Something I could point to and say I got the most out of that investment,\u201d Beals says. \u201cIt went from a nice salon to even nicer.\u201d<\/p>\n

She even saved up a bit \u2014 but then had to spend it all in February, when heavy winter storms and years of disinvestment resulted in mass water and electricity shut offs in and around Jackson, which lasted at least three weeks. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt home we didn\u2019t have power for five days, no water, no options other than to stay at a hotel,\u201d says Beals. \u201cAnd of course I had to feed my family, then replace food that spoiled in the fridge at home, and lots of water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beals never thought the guaranteed income would actually come to pass, even as she was meeting with other mothers like her from around Jackson, in 2018, to collectively imagine what a guaranteed income program could look like. That program just completed a lottery to select its third cohort of mothers, at least 100 of them, all of them living in federally subsidized housing in Jackson. With its third cohort, this pilot in Jackson has now surpassed the one in Stockton, California, as the longest-running guaranteed-income pilot currently underway in the country.<\/p>\n

The full analysis of the Jackson program\u2019s effects is still being completed, but the results so far are promising. Compared to a control group of similarly situated mothers in Jackson, beneficiaries of Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust are 40 percent less likely to report debt from emergency loans; 20 percent more likely to have children performing at or above grade level; 27 percent more likely to seek professional medical help for sickness or chronic illness; and are able to budget up to $150 more for food and household costs, resulting in lowered food insecurity and struggles with basic needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we started this, and still to this day, no one [in the United States] has done guaranteed income with a population as low-income as ours,\u201d says Aisha Nyandoro, executive director of Springboard to Opportunity, the nonprofit that created Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust. \u201cMost individuals doing guaranteed income are doing it with individuals they consider the working poor and I\u2019m doing air quotes around that because our families are working but we\u2019re in a state where the minimum wage is the federal $7.25 an hour. So I have families who on average make $11,000 annually.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ultimate goal for Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust \u2014 as with Stockton\u2019s guaranteed income demonstration program and dozens of other programs in process<\/a> \u2014 is to gather evidence to make the case that cash without restrictions is a crucial and powerful component of the social safety net that the federal government should provide. <\/p>\n

\u201cI definitely think we need federal policy,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cI think the way that we get there is by there being multiple studies and entry points and multiple conversations about this work and multiple proof of concepts that this works and it does help families get out of poverty and it does help families have the dignity necessary to actualize their dreams and does help families show up differently in their communities, allowing them the privilege of hoping and dreaming and living out their aspirations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nyandoro has convinced at least some private philanthropy that doing this to help shift federal policy around the social safety net is worth their dollars. Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust is funded entirely by private philanthropic donors. She doesn\u2019t envision cash without restrictions as replacing all other forms of federal support, but rather she sees it as a key complement to all the others, and could even be the missing piece to help actually move households along so that they no longer need public assistance of any kind. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the conversation began in the first place. <\/p>\n

Springboard to Opportunity serves around 5,000 residents living in 11 different federally subsidized housing developments around Jackson. It provides wraparound services like career development support, matched savings programs, after-school programs and more \u2014 all based on conversations with residents about their needs, Nyandoro says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pride ourselves on taking a radically resident driven approach for our work,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cWe\u2019ve been doing this work since 2013, and in 2017 I began to get concerned that in spite of all of the wraparound programs and services that we provide, that we were not moving the needle on poverty. We were not seeing a positive matriculation out of the affordable housing complexes at a rate at which I thought we should be seeing given all the work that we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Nyandoro says she started asking residents a simple question \u2014 \u201cwhat are we missing?\u201d And she heard from moms who talked about not having the cash to pay for the extracurricular activities their kids wanted to participate in at school. She heard from moms about having to wait until tax refund season in order to get their car repaired instead of having to spend money for transportation every day to take them to and from work, which on some days ended up costing more than what their paycheck was for that day \u2014 or else lose that job entirely.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was all of these pieces, and I was like okay it\u2019s not a program or service, it\u2019s cash. So how do we address that?\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cAlso, what they pointed out in those conversations was really how the punitive aspects of our safety net made it prohibitive to actually opt-in to the programs that they needed in a lot of instances.\u201d<\/p>\n

Racist and particularly anti-Black racist policymakers have long designed social safety net programs, especially in the South, and particularly in Mississippi, to provide the least possible support with the most possible restrictions. <\/p>\n

It was racist southern policymakers who first made sure that Social Security would exclude agricultural workers and domestic workers \u2014 the two professions dominated by Black workers (although the rules also excluded some 40 percent of whites). As Ira Katznelson writes in When Affirmative Action Was White<\/a>, it wasn\u2019t until 1954 when Republicans controlled the executive and legislative branches and southern Democrats lost the ability to shape legislation that the exclusions were removed from Social Security. <\/p>\n

Later, when federal cash assistance programs for poor families started rolling out, those southern legislators ensured those programs included clauses and flexibility to allow southern states like Arkansas to provide just $3.52 a month in cash benefits per child in 1940, while the national average at the time was $13 a month.<\/p>\n

Welfare reform \u2014 the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 \u2014 allowed southern states to further degrade already flawed cash assistance programs, under the new banner of \u201cTemporary Assistance for Needy Families,\u201d or TANF. Between 1996 and 2014, the proportion of families in poverty receiving cash assistance nationwide dropped from 68 percent to 23 percent<\/a>. In Mississippi, TANF benefits today reach less than five percent<\/a> of families below the federal poverty line.<\/p>\n

A big reason for that is the flexibility in TANF that allows a state like Mississippi to enforce strict work requirements for cash assistance, requiring recipients work a certain number of hours per week \u2014 despite the reality that low-wage workers are increasingly and more likely than higher-wage workers to face irregular work schedules they can\u2019t control<\/a>. Work-related sanctions and \u201cother sanctions\u201d accounted for the majority of TANF case closures in Mississippi from 2003-2014, according to the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo with all of that data and that reality of where we were, I started saying, \u2018How do I go about giving my people money,\u2019\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cThat\u2019s when I started researching what this could or would look like. I never heard of universal basic income at the time. This was 2017. But in my research I learned about UBI and once I had the terminology I had a term, there is a way to give people money. That\u2019s where we got connected to the Economic Security Project and other innovators in the field at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Economic Security Project, backed by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, supported the Stockton guaranteed income demonstration program and is now funding the Mayors for Guaranteed Income network, and also provided funding for Springboard to Opportunity to design a guaranteed income pilot.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo in 2018, I pulled together a task force of mothers to help me think about what this could look like,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cI called those dreaming sessions. Moms showed up and they dreamed out loud with me. I remember one of my moms at the time was like \u2018Girl, stop playing!\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018I\u2019m not playing, I\u2019m so serious.\u2019 But how many instances in their lives has anybody said to them \u2018I\u2019m going to give you money without strings attached, just because.\u2019 That had not happened. That does not happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

They met in a handful of different places. All the apartment complexes Springboard works in have community rooms where they met. A couple were in the nonprofit\u2019s office. Some got so big they had to use another organization\u2019s office with a larger conference room. A few times the nonprofit even rented AirBNBs. \u201cWe wanted to get away from the properties, away from the sterile office and create that homey feeling,\u201d says Nyandoro.<\/p>\n

Nyandoro says the mothers discussed findings from economic research but had the final say on everything, from the monthly amount to the duration of the assistance. She initially envisioned 18 months, based on prior research about guaranteed income programs, which have become popular as low-income household interventions in other countries<\/a>. Beals was one of the mothers who said 12 months at $1,000 a month was the right amount.<\/p>\n

Too much could hurt. Boosting incomes and savings can result in reductions or complete loss of eligibility for SNAP, or rental assistance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe worked with an economist to come up with an educated guess that by doing a thousand dollars a month we could still do good without doing harm, but we didn\u2019t have any actual data to know,\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cMany moms really did take a chance on the opportunity not knowing whether or not it would actually be a good investment or good opportunity for themselves or their families. And that\u2019s a hard decision to have to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also why it was important for the moms to make this an opt-in decision. And they agreed a lottery was the fairest and most transparent way to decide who could receive the limited resources for a pilot or demonstration program.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took all of that and went on maternity leave and had my second kid,\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cWhile I was on maternity leave is where I had the bandwidth \u2014 it\u2019s crazy how you find bandwidth. It was like my sabbatical, honestly. When I think about it now I\u2019m like it seems crazy. Sometimes I would be up in the middle of the night listening to some of the tapes [from the dream sessions] while he was asleep. Or in the middle of the day I would be writing out the program design while he was napping. So I just had this magical moment of free space where I could actually think, and I used that time to develop the program model for Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust, and raised the resources necessary for the pilot.\u201d<\/p>\n

The name came from a couple different places. The Magnolia is Mississippi\u2019s state flower, but it\u2019s also Nyandoro\u2019s grandmother\u2019s favorite flower. \u201cMothers,\u201d because, Nyandoro says, \u201cwe\u2019re rooted with our moms, wanting to make sure they were included. And then trust, there\u2019s the two meanings with trust, we\u2019re going to trust our families but also thinking about trust funds and wealth and those pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, Nyandoro says, they have seen in early results that on average mothers have seen a reduction of other benefits of three to four hundred dollars a month, but the net gain they still have from the cash assistance is six or seven hundred dollars. \u201cAnd they appreciate the fact they have it in cash,\u201d says Nyandoro.<\/p>\n

The payments also flow through newly established bank accounts for the mothers, at Hope Federal Credit Union, the Jackson-based regional credit union with a community development focus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe already had an established relationship with Hope Federal Credit Union, so we worked with Hope to establish banking accounts with no fees and allowed moms to access ATMs without having to incur fees,\u201d says Nyandoro. \u201cThat was important to us to help them establish checking accounts and important for our mothers as well because so many of them talked about wanting to establish banking relationships and wanting to repair credit and not having to use predatory lenders. We do know some individuals saved up and bought cars.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this newest cohort, the child of each mother will also have a 529 education savings account opened up in their name with an initial $1,000 deposit from Magnolia Mother\u2019s Trust. They\u2019re expecting between 250-300 children will benefit from the accounts, which can be used later to fund tuition for college, vocational training or other qualified educational expenses like textbooks.<\/p>\n

The pandemic provided even further evidence to contradict the deeply embedded racist narratives that have shaped the existing social safety net. With all the expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus checks, researchers have had more data than ever to analyze, and new research during the pandemic from Yale<\/a>, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago<\/a>, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York<\/a>, and the National Bureau of Economic Research<\/a> piled on top of older research<\/a> that these kinds of unrestricted cash benefits don\u2019t reduce incentives to find a job.<\/p>\n

But those old narratives still persist among policymakers, as well as among those living in poverty who are taught they are poor because they\u2019re not smart enough or working hard enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hardest part about this work is the way that we still view poverty in this country, that we really still see poverty as a moral failing, we don\u2019t really understand individuals are not poor because they choose to be poor, that if you are making $7.25 an hour, you cannot save your way out of poverty,\u201d Nyandoro says. \u201cAnd we don\u2019t have those conversations so we feel like individuals are poor because they don\u2019t work enough, they\u2019re not thrifty enough, they\u2019re not doing the right things and they just should do better, and that\u2019s not true, the reality is they can\u2019t do any more than they\u2019re already doing and it\u2019s time for us collectively to do better and that means putting policies and systems in place that will work for all of us and not just a subset.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Oscar is Next City’s senior economics correspondent. He previously served as\u00a0Next City\u2019s editor from\u00a02018-2019, and was a Next City Equitable Cities Fellow from 2015-2016. Since 2011, Oscar has covered community development finance,\u00a0community banking, impact investing, economic development, housing\u00a0and more for media outlets such\u00a0as Shelterforce, B Magazine, Impact Alpha, and Fast Company.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1624,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1624"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89299"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93217,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89299\/revisions\/93217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}