Georgia: Guaranteed Monthly Income Program Will Give $850 to Poor Black Women in Atlanta
Penny Starr 9 Dec 2021
The state of Georgia is selecting women by race for a guaranteed income pilot program. The program, called In Her Hands, will give as many as 650 poor black women $850 a month, no strings attached.
“Launching early next year and distributing more than $13 million, it is poised to be one of the largest guaranteed income pilot programs in the U.S.,” the Huffington Post reported:
Led by the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund, a coalition of local elected officials and nonprofits, and the nonprofit GiveDirectly, the program will include participants who live in Atlanta and other parts of suburban and rural Georgia who are near or below the federal poverty line. The program will study how such unconditional cash transfers affect the financial and mental well-being of participants.
It is intentionally being started in Atlanta — a city with some of the most pronounced income inequality in the U.S. — and specifically in its Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, where Martin Luther King Jr. grew up and promoted the idea of a guaranteed income.
The median Black family in the U.S. owns $3,600 in wealth — about 2 percent of the $147,000 that the median white family owns, per 2019 research from the Institute for Policy Studies. And in Georgia, about 26 percent of Black women live in poverty, compared to 14 percent of white women.
“Black women are among the most likely groups to experience cash shortfalls that make covering basic needs difficult,” Hope Wollensack, executive director of the GRO Fund, said in a press release. “This isn’t the result of poor choices; it’s the result of pervasive economic insecurity that has the sharpest impacts on women and communities of color.”
“Guaranteed income is a step toward creating a more just and equitable economy,” Wollensack said.
more
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/12/09/georgia-guaranteed-monthly-income-program-will-give-850-to-poor-black-women-in-atlanta/
