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Three months after giving birth to her son, Amaya Jones moved into a new apartment complex. She knew no one else in the building, but it was a fresh start for her and her two children. One day, someone put up a flyer on her unit’s door, notifying her about a program called the Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT).

Launched in 2018, the MMT is the longest-running guaranteed income program in the country, and the first to target extremely low-income families headed by Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi. With no strings attached, the program provides mothers with $1,000 a month for 12 months.

While she was pregnant, Jones experienced homelessness. She applied for the program, knowing that it could be life-changing. When she found out that she had been selected for that year’s cohort, Jones “burst out into tears”, she said. “I went from full-time to part-time to barely making ends meet. I was like: ‘Oh, my God. Lord, you hear my cry.’ It was rainbows after bad weather.”

When Jones’s son was younger, he was frequently sick, and the family was living paycheck to paycheck. Missing a day of work, even to care for an infant, meant that her check would be short, and Jones struggled to ensure she was covering the day-to- day expenses for her children.

Now, she’s able to exceed it.

“It was a sigh of relief,” Jones says of the guaranteed income. “I was actually able to take my kids out of town, stuff I wouldn’t be able to do. It’s more time with my children. It’s still helping me today because I’m not struggling and I can prepare myself for the future. My kids are still taken care of.”

Being in a cohort with other single moms who receive assistance from MMT has also helped her build community. The MMT is “bigger than the money”, Jones said.

“We had meetings. We talked about mental health,” she said. “I found new people who lived in the apartments, because I knew no one. It’s like a very big sisterhood and familyhood to this day.

“When my baby was in the hospital, they would check on my baby: ‘Do you need anything?’ Even if I didn’t reply, they would text me again. Some people don’t like to talk about their problems. Some people don’t like to talk about things that they may be going through … But when they say this is an open space, everything stays in this room. We’ve talked about so many things. If you need a little free time, bring the kids to me. We build relationships and friendships. That’s what the trust is.”

‘Pure joy’

The MMT is an initiative from Springboard to Opportunities, a non-profit organization that Aisha Nyandoro, from Mississippi, co-founded in 2013. Springboard works directly with families who live in federally supported affordable housing in Jackson. Nyandoro calls it a “radically resident-driven approach”.

But by 2017, Nyandoro became concerned that Springboard wasn’t moving the needle enough on poverty. Though the organization has after-school programs, workforce development, reading circles and other programing, she started wondering what else they needed to offer.

A chance conversation with a mother put her on a new path.

“I was like: ‘Oh, what are you doing this weekend? Are you doing a movie with the kids?’ In conversation, that’s just standard theater,” Nyandoro said. “And this mom looked at me, and she was like: ‘Let me tell you – I can’t afford something like a pizza.’ And in that moment, it clicked. I was unsettled all weekend. I came back to my team, and I was like: ‘We’re missing something. This is a mom that we are intimately involved with. We have relationships with her. Her kids are involved in our programs and she’s involved with our programming, and she is telling us that she can’t afford something as inconsequential as a pizza.’”

Springboard prioritized community feedback, and asked the residents they work with what they were missing.

“That question just opened up all these stories. When we sat down and listened, I said: ‘Oh my God, all of this can be stopped with money,’” Nyandoro said. “That’s really where we started thinking about what it would look like if we just gave families that we work with the financial support that they need to actualize the goals that they have for themselves and their families.”

A year later, in December 2018, Springboard launched the first cohort of the Magnolia Mother’s Trust program, with 20 moms participating.

“The response to that first year, when moms realized that they had been selected, was pure joy,” Nyandoro said. “It was a novelty – someone is just going to give you a thousand dollars a month for 12 months and open 529 accounts for your kids? So many of our moms thought that it was a scam.”

The MMT is unapologetic about being specifically for Black mothers.

“The unfortunate reality is that the data is the data,” she said. “It’s not as if we are saying that we are working with Black women because we are trying to exclude anyone else. We are saying that we are honoring the tenets of what guaranteed income is. Guaranteed income is a specific amount of money given to a specific population for a set amount of time. And that funding is typically given to the financially most harmed within a community.

“Here in Jackson, Mississippi, the financially most harmed are Black women, specifically Black mothers, and that is because of the policies and the systems that we have put in place that make it virtually impossible for them to earn at the same level as their counterparts.”

‘It’s given me more freedom’

This year’s cohort, launched in May, faces unique challenges. The program sustained itself in 2020, through the first year of the Covid pandemic, and in 2023, when the supreme court’s decision reversing affirmation action sent destructive waves of anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) governmental, educational and social policies through the country. Those issues have since compounded and families are also facing an affordability crisis and an increasingly unstable economy.

“This year, the moms are probably a little more stressed than in previous years, because of the affordability crisis and because of the impact on the social safety net,” Nyandoro said. “They’re very aware of what’s happening with the ‘big, beautiful bill’. So you see some clear exhalation like: ‘I’m going to be OK. I got this. This is right on time.’”

When Kenja Patton was selected for this year’s cohort, she thought: “God answers prayers.” With the program’s help, she was able to surprise her son with a trip to Disney World for his kindergarten graduation.

Her son, who is now six, is asthmatic, and Patton had to leave one of her jobs during one of his extended hospital stays.

“It’s given me more freedom,” she said of the trust. “If something happens with him or if I need to go to the school, it makes a big difference.”