The problem is as long as an experimental basic income is done in the the context of the existing means-tested poverty programs, it can't "break the cycle of poverty". There is still an effective confiscatory tax on earnings from a job in the form of lost means-tested benefits, so people living on the dole won't take jobs.
A proper universal basic income (paying people whether they work or not) has to replace all means-tested poverty alleviation programs (which pay people not to work). Once there is no loss of benefits from working, people on the dole (which would be literally all of us if a real UBI were instituted) still have an incentive to take jobs, because with a job one gets more than the basic income.
There is a reason Friedrich Hayek, one of the most savage critics of socialism (cf. his majestrial The Road to Serfdom, regarded a UBI as the only economically sound way to succor the poor with tax revenue: it does not distort the labor market at the bottom end the way means-tested programs do.
