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Hundreds of Black Women in Georgia Will Get $850 per Month in Guaranteed Income

A new guaranteed income pilot will give hundreds of dollars per month to poor Black women in Georgia in an effort to improve their financial stability and mental health and tackle the racial wealth gap.

The program, called In Her Hands, will give about $850 in monthly cash, no strings attached, to up to 650 Black women for two years. 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.

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% of the $147,000 that the median white family owns, per 2019 research from the Institute for Policy Studies. And in Georgia, about 26% of Black women live in poverty, compared to 14% of white women.

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Meanwhile, for a year, Magnolia Mother’s Trust in Mississippi gave $1,000 per month to Black moms, who said it made a difference in their lives. And Oakland, California, is currently running a guaranteed income program giving $500 cash each month to 600 low-income families of color.

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