Obama praised the idea. Reporter Annie Lowreyand Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes recently published books about it. The city of Chicago is exploring it. And the town of Stockton, California, has begun a pilot project experimenting with it. But Mississippi is arguably one of the last places you'd expect to find an effort to provide people in poverty with a guaranteed basic income. Yet, in December, 16 mothers in public housing in Jackson will begin to receive $1,000 per month for a year, no strings attached.
The new guaranteed-income initiative, the Magnolia Mothers Trust, targets an African-American community with an average annual income of $11,300. The project emerged out of Jackson native Aisha Nyandoro's work running Springboard to Opportunities, a nonprofit serving residents in federally subsidized affordable-housing communities in Mississippi, Alabama, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Frustrated with the stubbornness of intergenerational poverty in these housing complexes, Nyandoro turned to the families living there to gather information about their experiences and needs.
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