Pilot project empowers low-income black women

Aisha Nyandoro | Guest Columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption A friend remembers Fannie Lou Hamer In 2012, Civil Rights activist, Lawrence Guyot, talks about Fannie Lou Hamer and how she became a civil rights icon.

Typically, when we see Mississippi in the news or in history books, we are not given a glowing review. We have all seen the lists where Mississippi ranks 50th and we are well aware of our history of slavery, segregation and inequity along racial lines.

But there is another story from Mississippi’s history I do not think we tell often enough of low-income, black women who organized to create stronger communities and better outcomes for their people. This includes the women who started the Child Development Group of Mississippi, a Head Start program that provided children in poverty with early childhood education and employed more than 2500 women; the women who started the Community Health Centers in Mound Bayou that became a model for health centers nationwide; and Fannie Lou Hamer, whose first goal was to empower and strengthen her community to recognize their power and agency.

I am committed to finding ways to continue telling that story today.

At Springboard To Opportunities, we work with families who live in affordable housing to help them reach their goals in life, work and school. We pride ourselves on being radically, resident-driven and trusting our families know better than anyone else what they need to be successful. But after many years of focus groups, conversations and round tables, we have found not many people believe that. Instead, our families are forced to wade through mountains of paperwork to prove they deserve to receive benefits. And once they do that, they are still only given benefits in the form of what distant policymakers believe they deserve, rather than being given the dignity of choice the rest of us are afforded.

Most of these families are headed by single, working mothers trying to balance a job, find child care and meet the other demands of raising a family while adding in the time-consuming work of continually proving you still qualify for SNAP, subsidized housing or other safety net programs. Our moms have told usthey want to go to school and want to find a career they love but need more cash and more time if that is ever going to happen.

Through a new initiative at Springboard To Opportunities in partnership with the Economic Security Project — The Magnolia Mother’s Trust — 15 Springboard families will receive $1,000 in cash each month to spend as they see fit, no strings attached. The Economic Security Project has been a champion of guaranteed income models in the United States since 2016, but this will be the first pilot in the nation that specifically targets extremely low-income, African-American women living in affordable housing.

An unconditional, cash-based system of benefits, most closely associated with proposals for a Universal Basic Income, would offer a range of advantages by enabling recipients to make the best choices about how to use their assistance, rather than making those choices for them and making an infusion of cash into the household predictable and accessible. 44 percent of U.S. households cannot afford an unexpected emergency of $400, an expense that needs cash rather than SNAP benefits or a housing subsidy to cover.

We recognize this program is a risk. Nothing quite like it has ever been tried before, and we do not have data and numbers to prove to funders this model will work. But what we do have are the stories and words of our families who have told us this is what they need, and we believe them.

Our hope is that with a little extra breathing room and not constantly having to operate in survival mode, our families will have an opportunity to dream about goals for their own lives and, just like the incredible women before them, become leaders who help organize for change in their communities. The families participating in the program will be offered the opportunity for ongoing leadership opportunities designed to provide respite and external support, along with individual coaching and counseling to help disrupt the scarcity ideology so many families have had to adopt as a basic survival technique.

We will be learning alongside our families, finding out how this project affects benefits and what our families are capable of when they are offered serious trust and an opportunity to do more for themselves, their families and their communities. We are hoping our initial results will be able to push this program forward to even more families.

We believe all people have the strength and capacity to be the authors of their own lives. And just as so many women did during the civil rights movement, they have the capacity to write a better story for their communities and, ultimately, for Mississippi. For too long we have allowed ourselves and our fellow community members to live in the story of shame, mistrust and marginalization. But The Magnolia Mother’s Trust seeks instead to continue the story of dignity, empowerment and collaboration that also defines Mississippi.

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Contact Aisha Nyandoro at aisha@springboardto.org.