By Belinda Luscombe
In 2017, Aisha Nyandoro came to a sobering realization. As founder and CEO of the nonprofit Springboard to Opportunities in Jackson, Miss., she was committed to helping lift families in local public housing into the next phase—a place of their own. But her organization wasn’t moving the needle. “We were doing everything, from after-school programs, work-training programs, mommy and me, reading programs, all of these different activities and services we were providing on site,” says Nyandoro, 45. “But we were not actually seeing families successfully transition out of affordable housing, and that was important to us, because that was important to the families.”
So her organization spent some time talking to the mothers and came up with a solution that was at once extremely simple and very complicated. These mothers needed cash. Not in the form of housing vouchers. Not in the form of credits that could be used at a grocery store. Not in the form of free health care. Just plain old moolah. Loot. Legal tender.
Money—the type that can be spent on anything—has been out of favor as a method of helping impoverished Americans. Mississippi has been so allergic to giving its citizens cash that Congress held hearings in September to understand how the state mismanaged federal funds for needy families. The year before Nyandoro came to her realization, fewer than 2% of Mississippi’s low-income families who applied for welfare payments from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program had been approved. Meanwhile money from that fund has been lavished on almost anything else, including a $5 million volleyball stadium, payments to sports celebrities, and boot-camp-style fitness programs. And Mississippi is not alone. “We got caught, but I don’t believe that we are the only state that is using TANF funds erroneously,” says Nyandoro.
In 2018, Nyandoro founded the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, a fund that gave 20 mothers in Jackson $1,000 a month for a year. Any Black mother living in the housing complexes that Springboard served could apply; the first 20 recipients’ names were drawn out of a box. Nyandoro called each one personally. She physically signed each check, put it in an envelope, and gave it to recipients in time for Christmas.
This modest program was the first guaranteed-income project in the 21st century, and nobody knew quite what to expect. Not all of the mothers flourished—getting people out of poverty is rarely a linear process—but most did. They paid off debts, fixed cars, made sure everyone had enough to eat, enrolled their children in activities, invested in their own business, went back to school, and socked away what they could for the future. Most of all, they got to think about something besides bills. They had enough stability to plan.
This fall Magnolia will welcome its sixth set of mothers, this time numbering more than 100. These moms will also get a 529 educational savings account for each child with $1,000 deposited in it. So far the trust has directly helped more than 400 families, but more importantly, it has provided a proof of concept for how to administer such a cash-provision program. There are now 150 similar initiatives around America. The Magnolia Mother’s model was echoed in the expanded child-tax-credit payments that lifted millions of kids out of poverty during the pandemic. The idea has been championed by Vice President Kamala Harris, who has proposed a tax credit of $6,000 in the first year of an infant’s life followed by an annual credit of up to $3,600, and vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance, who has floated a tax credit of $5,000 per child annually. Even the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency that provides housing vouchers, is exploring the possibilities of cash.
“I think of her as spurring the current momentum that has led to these thousand flowers blooming all over the country,” says University of Michigan professor of public policy Luke Shaefer, whose book $2 a Day, co-authored with Kathryn Edin, was also an influential work among advocates of cash assistance. “She was the first one to get it off the ground.”
The lift was considerable. Shaefer has found opposition to cash assistance to be a rare nonpartisan issue. Conservatives oppose it because they believe it’s expensive, disincentivizes work, and people will fritter it away. Progressives oppose it, he has noticed, because they feel like it might jeopardize funds for the work they’re doing in social services.
“If we give people money, what will happen? I myself had that question,” says Natalie Foster, president and co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. “The evidence made it very clear that people continue working. People are working incredibly hard in this economy just to get by, and a guaranteed income creates a bit more breathing room. Study after study after study has shown that to be true.”
But back in 2018, Nyandoro had a tough time getting donors to understand why her approach was important. Even worse, she kept running up against the narrative that poor Black mothers couldn’t be trusted with the flexibility of cash. “The amount of toxicity that, quite frankly, I had to take on just trying to help people understand what this work was was really probably one of the darkest times of my life,” she says. “It’s when I truly realized how disconnected the majority of people are from people.” She made a last-ditch call to one of her existing Springboard donors (who does not wish to be named), who agreed to fund the pilot program.
One recipient that first year who particularly affected Nyandoro was a mother whose children had only met their grandfather on FaceTime because he lived in Pittsburgh. The mama—as Nyandoro calls the women she works with—used some of the cash to take her children to visit him on spring break. “She didn’t fly, she didn’t do anything luxurious like that,” recalls Nyandoro. “She just made sure that her car was in decent working order, and she drove to Pittsburgh so her kids could meet their grandfather for the first time. Seeing what that did for herself and her father and her kids, it just broke me.” In a later program, a mother used her first check to pay off her $300 debt at the local community college so she could resume the phlebotomy course she could not attend until her back fees were paid.
Nyandoro was raised in Mississippi in a family rich in civic-mindedness. Her grandmother, L.C. Dorsey, the daughter of sharecroppers, left school to get married when she got pregnant at 17, but was drawn into the civil rights movement after she became friends with Fannie Lou Hamer. She helped start the first rural community health center in America, advocated for civil rights and prison reform, and served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity. She also resumed her education and went on to get a PhD in social work. Nyandoro’s mother was a social worker and her father an elder in the AME Church; community issues were frequent topics of discussion around the dinner table. “I always knew I’d work in advocacy, because of how I grew up,” says Nyandoro.
Today, Black families have the second-highest poverty rate in the U.S., after only Native Americans, with 21.2% living below the poverty line. And 27% of Black families with single mothers live in poverty, according to Census Bureau data. Nevertheless, the hardy stereotype of the single Black mother as a welfare queen, living large on public benefits, still affects so much of the way government assistance is distributed. “Black mothers get demonized,” says Shaefer. “I think Aisha is really a big part of stopping that train and moving it in a different direction, in terms of a different vision of Black motherhood and a different vision of the safety net.”
Mothers who get assistance from Magnolia do not want to be on the program permanently. “Time and time again, our mamas tell us that one year is enough, because they really just use it as a year of breathing room, as a year of planning and being very strategic in how they go about doing their work,” says Nyandoro. “They also say they don’t want to become dependent on it.”
The real difference between cash-assistance programs and aid that is tied to specific needs, such as housing vouchers, is the amount of agency recipients have. Giving out cash suggests that the donor believes the beneficiary knows how best to address her own needs. Nyandoro, who has now won a slew of awards and is in demand as an expert on anti-poverty initiatives, often talks about dignity, which to people with enough sounds like a luxury item, but to these women means something more profound–that they can be trusted, that they know what’s optimal for their families, and that they can make decisions without seeking anyone’s permission or approval.
“We don’t understand how simple poverty is, and we try to make it overcomplicated,” she says. “Poverty is really about a lack of financial resources and about systems that we have all allowed to be put in place because we all benefit from them. But the narrative we tell ourselves is that people are poor because they choose to be poor, and are making bad financial decisions, and if they made better financial decisions, they wouldn’t be poor. This is not true.” With the work of Magnolia Mother’s Trust, Nyandoro has the receipts to prove it.
