Money for nothing produces exit to poverty
Aisha Nyandoro’s pilot program Magnolia Mother’s Trust gives $1,000 a month to 20 Mississippi moms
Ameya Pawar and Aisha Nyandoro discuss her Mississippi pilot program Magnolia Mother’s Trust at the Chicago Community Trust. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
CHICAGO — The head of a Mississippi pilot program touted the benefits Thursday of giving $1,000 a month to 20 African-American mothers in their bid not just to deal with poverty, but to escape it and move on to something better.
Aisha Nyandoro, head of the Springboard to Opportunities grassroots group dealing with affordable-housing residents in Jackson, Miss., spoke at the Chicago Community Trust Thursday on the Magnolia Mother’s Trust program that grew out of the agency. Bankrolled by the Economic Security Project, the one-year pilot program gives $1,000 a month to 20 African-American mothers.
The goal, Nyandoro said, is to not just enable residents to tread water in poverty, but to give them the resources and self-reliance to climb out of it and move on to something better.
“It is virtually impossible to exit poverty,” Nyandoro said, “and that is because all of our benefits are punitive.”
“This is an American thing,” said Ameya Pawar, founder of One Illinois, who moderated the discussion as a senior fellow at Economic Security for Illinois, co-host of the event. “This is what we are really good at, which is putting up barriers and making it really difficult for people to access the benefits that they deserve.”
Springboard to Opportunities has made an issue of the “barriers” erected within the social safety net that “prioritize the perceptions of fraud and abuse over human needs.” At issue, Nyandoro said, is “this idea of deservedness” that tends to drag people down even more than they already are. “We just do not trust people to know what they need,” she added.
What she discovered a couple of years ago at the agency is “we were not seeing our families exit poverty.” She asked what they needed, only to find, “They needed cash.”
Nyandoro cited one woman who had to quit her job when her car hit a pothole and she couldn’t afford to get it fixed, and another who couldn’t afford to have her newborn son circumcised in the hospital because her health care wouldn’t pay for it. Food stamps weren’t going to provide the solution to either of those problems.
By contrast, she said, Magnolia Mother’s Trust had already enabled the 20 moms involved in the program to eliminate $2,000 in predatory debt, as with payday loans. Some had paid for education either for themselves or members of their families, enabling them to move on to better jobs, while others had moved into their own homes.
The difference, she said, is the mothers weren’t treated as suspect — compelled to meet work requirements or jump through other bureaucratic hoops to prove themselves worthy — but were trusted with how to make their own best decisions with the additional funding.
“You give people cash. You’re trusting individuals,” Nyandoro said. “With cash you have the ability to say what you need.
“You give people cash. You’re trusting individuals. … With cash you have the ability to say what you need.”
Aisha Nyandoro (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
“The narrative change is so necessary,” she said, to move away from the “Welfare Queen” stereotype created by Ronald Reagan or the worries about drug use or other urban evils that conservatives often cite in calling for those bureaucratic barriers to be erected.
“It’s hard to be poor,” Nyandoro said. “There are a lot of pieces you have to negotiate.” Pointing to how that perpetual grind produces what’s known as “toxic stress,” she added that poor families not only face the anxiety of not being able to pay for what they need, they also face the possibility of critical benefits being removed if they fail to complete some requisite task or some other eligibility requirement.
“If we empower people with cash,” Pawar said, “we provide the basic dignity that they deserve to make decisions about their lives and make rational decisions just as anybody else would.”
It’s basically a small pilot program for Universal Basic Income, the main talking point of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who calls it the “Freedom Dividend” in a plan that would grant everyone $1,000 a month. Stockton, Calif., is also trying out another pilot program this year giving some residents $500 a month.
Pawar proposed a pilot UBI program to provide $500 a month to 1,000 Chicago families last year when he served as alderman. Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel thought enough of it to form the Resilient Family Task Force, which earlier this year produced the report “Big Shoulders, Bold Solutions: Economic Security for Chicagoans.” That recommended a shift to enhancing and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, embraced as the primary goal of Economic Security for Illinois.
Magnolia Mother’s Trust initially identified 110 mothers who’d be eligible, but only 37 applied. Of those, 16 were chosen by lottery to take part in the program when it launched last December, and another four were added as more funding from an anonymous donor became available.
“Over the course of the year, we’ve been listening to our moms,” Nyandoro said, “and they’ve been telling us who they are.” Six of the mothers have moved into better homes, and all now have savings accounts, most with at least $500 for a rainy day, “which puts them in a better position than most Americans.” She called it “the curative impact of cash.”
“What we are seeing with this is individuals can breathe,” Nyandoro said. “The women are just lighter. They smile more. They’re happy. They have joy. They are living. Living is fun. Who knew?”
The 12-month program ends this month, and Magnolia Mother’s Trust will begin the long process of compiling hard data on the program and its effects in order to determine whether it’s worth continuing as is or expanding to as many as 1,000 women. Nyandoro said one concern is “first do no harm,” and they’ll be making sure the program hasn’t had any unintended consequences. But they’ll also be listening to the women and what they say anecdotally, in that “storytelling” is key to the program gaining acceptance and undermining those “Welfare Queen” stereotypes.
“Cash works,” Nyandoro said. “We just have to be able to listen.”