In 2013, Aisha co-founded Springboard To Opportunities, a non-profit that supports families living in federally subsidized affordable housing – whose income is typically 200% below the poverty index. Springboard takes a unique “radically resident driven” approach to supporting residents, which means working alongside families in all aspects of program design and evaluation. The fact that Springboard provides resident identified services – many of which happen on-site – sets them apart from the vast majority of affordable housing service providers, which function as “linkages” to external services in crisis situations. Instead, Springboard provides wrap-around supports for families where they live, including after school programs, workforce development, health care clinics, etc. Springboard serves over 5,000 residents annually, mostly Black moms and their children. They also became the first resident service provider in privately developed Section 8 housing in the U.S. to launch a HUD Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program, which aims to help families increase their earnings and build financial capability.
Despite the marked benefits of their programs on health outcomes, school attendance, and employment, by 2017 Aisha and her team were troubled by the fact that most families still weren’t able to achieve their goal of matriculating out of affordable housing. The team conducted interviews with residents to figure out what was going on, and the common denominator of nearly every conversation about economic and emotional stress was a lack of cash. Not only did residents not have enough money to cover an emergency $300 car repair, they weren’t able to pay for the basics, like school supplies, diapers, or formula. They didn’t need another program, they needed cash.
At the time, virtually zero private or public dollars were supporting guaranteed income programs, but Aisha decided to figure out how to pull it off. She organized a group of moms living in affordable housing to meet every month for six months and design a model that would work for them. Meanwhile, Aisha set out to try and secure private dollars for the experiment. Her pitch – give poor people cash, no strings attached – was initially met with resistance or dismissal, but she persisted. In 2018, Aisha launched the Magnolia Mother’s Trust as a pilot to provide 20 extremely low-income Black mothers living in affordable housing with $1,000 of unrestricted cash per month for one year to supplement their existing incomes (which were on average less than $12,000 annually). The participants were selected through a lottery system. The group of women decided every aspect of the program, from the monthly amount to the length. At the core of Aisha’s work is the idea that people need to be the arbiters of their own lives.
The choice of Black mothers living far below the poverty line is a deliberate one, and part of Aisha’s entrepreneurial strategy. When you support the most vulnerable, everyone does better. And if you can make it work with the most vulnerable, it is more likely to work elsewhere. The targeted approach also enabled Aisha and her team to take into account the unique circumstances of the participants' lives.
Aisha's end game is to help usher in federal policy that weaves a new social safety net, but given the persistent barriers that have kept such a policy from being implemented she sought support from private philanthropy to launch the bold experiment and demonstrate its benefits. Aisha launched this effort with several systems change goals in mind: (1) to show what would happen if financial resources were provided to low-income mothers on their own terms, designed by them, (2) to seed and spread the approach elsewhere, and (3) to change the narrative about persistent poverty in America. When she started MMT, it had been 50 years since anyone had tried to start a robust GI pilot in the U.S. So while the concept itself isn’t new, Aisha’s approach to GI includes a number of new components that are crucial to the models success and rapid spread.
For example, the design process with women recipients themselves, which itself led to a new component: a multi-generational approach to building wealth by starting bank accounts for the recipients’ children at the very beginning of the program. In addition, the pilot and subsequent initiatives include peer support and community building to help combat the isolating experience of poverty. By teaching these women about the structures that keep poor people poor, they begin to understand that they themselves are not “the problem.”
But how can Aisha make such efforts more than peripheral experiments? First is to prove that they work -- and that the benefits are sustained. As the longest running GI program in the U.S., Magnolia Mother’s Trust is uniquely positioned to enhance the evidence for GI programs by documenting the longer-term impacts and lifting up the voices of participants' children. From the very beginning, a key part of Aisha’s strategy has been to engage evaluation partners every step of the way. This has enabled swifter replication, increased funding, and elevated the experiment to a national movement and policy conversation.
Some of the notable data-informed outcomes Aisha has tracked, in collaboration with research partners like Social Insights:
- the ability of mothers to pay all their bills on time increased from 27 percent to 83 percent
- the percentage of mothers who had had emergency savings increased from 40 percent to 88 percent
- the percentage of mothers reporting they had enough money for food increased from 64 percent to 81 percent
Participants reported that for the first time they felt like good moms because they were able to take care of some of their kids wants, not just always focusing on their needs. Some moved into home ownership, others got married. According to Aisha, “cash gave them some room to breathe – and once they didn’t have to focus solely on surviving, they could consider the radical possibilities of thriving, asking what it is they want for themselves and their family.” Studies of MMT Alumni show that the benefits of participation extend (and persist) when the cash payments and programming stops (bank accounts for women and their children, new mental models, fewer chronic stressors, a sense of hope and possibility, a runway that allows them to pursue dreams for their future, such as going back to school). In this way, the approach represents a minor investment with lasting implications.
The second part of mainstreaming GI is to enable its spread. To that end, in 2020 Aisha co-founded the Guaranteed Income Community of Practice (GICP) with the Economic Security Project to spread the model to communities across the country. GICP has become the leading national convener of policy experts, advocates, researchers, leaders, funders, universities, and practitioners to learn and collaborate in the maturing arena of unconditional cash programs.
The pandemic presented an opportunity, which like any good entrepreneur, Aisha seized. Because of the destabilizing effects of the public health emergency, and the hundreds of millions of Americans receiving direct cash payments from the government, the cultural and political moment was ripe to build lasting support for this approach. GICP was in fact directly involved in inclusion of the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Recovery Plan – where for the first time it was extended to people without an income.
For more than a year, Aisha and her team participated in the Child Tax Credit Lab on implementation and outreach with two dozen grassroots groups from around the country. They were trying to ensure that the benefits reached the most vulnerable communities – a particular challenge given the founded level of fear and suspicion surrounding so-called handouts from the IRS. Aisha’s extensive knowledge of how communities work allowed her to use her expertise to provide direct recommendations on how the government should conduct messaging and outreach to maximize participation. In six short months the CTC cut childhood poverty in half, and while it unfortunately wasn’t extended, it provided powerful evidence for the potential of cash to provide a “bottom” for the most impoverished. Aisha seized on this moment of openness to double-down on her efforts to support local pilots and policies.
GICP’s goal is to triple the number of states with a guaranteed-income-like policy – this often takes the shape of building something like the child tax credit or earned income credit into their tax code. In 2022, GICP celebrated the launch of 100 GBI pilots in the U.S., many of which have roots in Aisha’s initial Mississippi experiment, and many of whom Aisha consulted directly with – from Chicago to Atlanta to Washington, DC. Today, there are over 140 pilots across most states. Nearly half of them are run by non-profits that are using Aisha’s playbook. The non-profit led pilots are proving to be consistent and sustained because their champions tend to become integrated into the fabric of the community.
Aisha has fully embraced this additional role of field builder – advancing the conversation, rooted in data and fueled by our unique political moment. In 2023, she testified on Capitol Hill, sharing the story of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust and calling for a social safety net that finally ends poverty by offering direct cash without restrictions as a starting point. This national visibility normalizes guaranteed income over time, but also unlocks both public and private dollars to continue to feed programs at the state and municipal level so that in a decade, guaranteed income will simply be an effective, and widely accepted tool in the economic development toolbox of the nation.
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