Mayor Michael Tubbs — the city’s first black mayor and, at 27, one of the youngest of any race for any comparably sized city — will soon unroll an experiment to give $500 cash every month to a select group of families for about 18 months. The project, which will begin in 2019, is being funded by $1 million from the Economic Security Project, a philanthropic group helmed in part by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Stockton will be the first U.S. city to run the program. Tubbs has spoken in interviews about his familiarity with the issue of basic economic need. His mother was on welfare for the first five or six years of his life, he has said, and he said he thinks the program could help people like her.