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Deepening and Expanding – Springboard in 2024

It’s hard to believe the first month of 2024 is almost over. In 2023, we celebrated 10 years of Springboard and spent a lot of the year reflecting on the past decade, celebrating our past growth and success, and identifying our strengths and core commitments as we move into the future. Springboard has always been grounded in our radically resident-driven mission, which means that as the needs and goals of our residents and the world around them shifts, our strategy and execution of that mission shifts, too.

With all that in mind, at the beginning of 2023, we started developing a strategic plan to guide the next years of our work. We talked with residents, staff, our partners, and other stakeholders to determine how Springboard can best serve residents in affordable housing. What emerged is 5 priority areas that will be the core of our strategy moving forward.

Resident Relationships

Springboard’s work has always been rooted in strong, trusting relationships with residents of affordable housing. Staff’s main job will always be building and maintaining these relationships. In this next phase of work, Springboard will strengthen its navigation, coaching capacities, referral networks, and partnerships, while continuing to ensure essential resources and basic needs for all residents are met.

Socioeconomic Well-Being

Since 2018, Springboard has been a leader in the direct cash assistance field. Springboard will continue its signature Magnolia Mother’s Trust guaranteed income program, modeling best practices for cash disbursement programs. Springboard will also expand other cash-based initiatives grounded in dignity and trust, such as direct cash disbursements in emergencies and creating new Lending Circles℠. Lending Circles℠ is a social loan program managed by Mission Asset Fund (MAF)

Fellowships

Springboard’s fellowships offer cohort-based learning, personal development, and opportunities for residents to make connections between public policy and their lived experiences to catalyze positive change in their communities. Springboard will deepen and expand these fellowships to provide residents more opportunities for off-site learning, developing meaningful networks, and enhancing their confidence as community leaders.

Policy Advocacy

Springboard believes no one knows better than families themselves how social policies can be improved. Springboard’s community-driven policy agenda centers the voices and lived experiences of our residents and advocates for policies grounded in dignity, equity, and trust. Leveraging a network of partnerships, Springboard finds places for residents’ stories and expertise to be heard, shared, and spur change.

Narrative Change

The vast majority of our country’s poverty policies and strategies are grounded in false beliefs and assumptions about low-income families. Springboard believes it is time for families to tell a new story, by shifting their own internal narratives, recognizing their own self- and community-worth, and sharing their true, lived-experience through media and other platforms willing to amplify residents’ authentic voices.

We have already spent the first month of this year developing a plan and goals for this year’s implementation, and we look forward to sharing this new journey with all of you. Thank you, as always, for your partnership and support on the journey!

The 5th Magnolia Mother’s Trust Cohort is Set to Begin!

We’ve got some big news!

We are so thrilled to announce our 5th cohort of The Magnolia Mother’s Trust (MMT), our guaranteed income program offering $1,000 per month for 12 months with no strings attached, will be launching in October. Over the past several months, we took some time to really analyze the data and feedback we have received from past cohort members and evaluations. Our commitment to being radically resident-driven means we never stop growing and never stop learning alongside our families. As their needs shift, our responses must shift too.

This year’s cohort will be our largest yet with over 100 mothers and will continue to include $1,000 deposits in 529 Children’s Savings Accounts, opportunities for community building, and goal-setting support. But we will also be adding new elements to help make the program even stronger.

For example, we have seen the importance of mental health and self-care support, like we offered through our MISS Program, and how the strengths of that program complemented the strengths of MMT. In response, we’ll be integrating the MISS Program into MMT for interested participants. We also heard families ask for more ways to build savings and education around wealth building. So we’ve created a built-in savings option that moms can opt-into and have increased our support around the 529 investment accounts and education on other wealth-building products.

The Magnolia Mother’s Trust has always been about reimagining what is possible: What’s possible when we give families cash? What’s possible when we trust families to make the best decisions for their own lives? What’s possible when we stop believing the way things have always been is the way things always have to be? Through the program itself we model what’s possible when we’re responsive to family voice and willing to try bold new ideas.

CEO, Aisha Nyandoro, testifies before the U.S. House Ways & Means Work & Welfare Subcommittee

“With so many families in poverty, we come in telling them what it is that they need or what they don’t need or how they must govern their lives. We tell them to take their baton back. But we shouldn’t have their baton to begin with.”

Dear Partners,

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to share the impact of our work in front of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Work & Welfare, where we discussed the need to reimagine the current TANF system.

As I told Ranking Member Danny Davis, the current system is like putting a band-aid on a geyser.

For years, we have wanted to share with lawmakers the stories of our families, their experiences with programs like TANF, and their insights and expertise that could make them better. I am grateful for the opportunity to have done just that.

Through powerful stories from our families and the successes of The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, I was able to show that programs centering dignity, trust, and family voice can provide powerful alternatives to our current paternalistic and punitive safety net programs. While the focus of the hearing was on recent stories of fraud, it was also an opportunity to challenge legislators to think beyond the current structure and protocols of TANF and reimagine a program based on family’s expressed needs and expertise.

As I said yesterday, “We keep talking about doing an audit of financial spending. How about we actually do an audit of what a family’s needs are? How about we actually have a panel with families to say what is it that they need? What are you dreaming of, and how can we meet you there?”

Once again, I’m honored to have had this opportunity and am continuously grateful to you all for your continued support and belief in the work we do at Springboard To Opportunities. Let us continue to work together to uplift the voices of families and reimagine programs like TANF by taking ourselves out of the equation and instead putting families at the center.

Yours in Service,
Aisha Nyandoro
CEO

Watch Aisha’s Testimony

Introducing our Policy Platform

At our core, Springboard is an organization helping families in affordable housing reach their goals in school, work, and life. But we’ve known since the beginning that it takes more than individual programs and services to lift families out of poverty. It requires real and significant policy change.

While policy and advocacy have always been a part of Springboard’s model, in the last few years, we have doubled down on our commitment to advocate for better systems where all our residents are able to thrive. Today, we are excited to launch our own policy platform. Designed in partnership with our families, we have identified core values, principles, and priority areas that center dignity, equity, and trust within our systems and create a better world for all people.

Like all of Springboard To Opportunities’ work, our policy work is grounded in our radically resident-driven mission. We believe that policies work best when they are informed by the voices and wisdom of families who are most affected by the policies. No one knows what is needed to help families move out of poverty better than families experiencing poverty themselves. We continue to elevate the stories of our families and the way our current policies and systems have prevented them from being able to reach their goals or achieve economic mobility. Unless we have more inclusive, people-centered approaches to policymaking, our systems will continue to fail families.

We believe that poverty is a policy choice, rather than an individual failing. Our community programming, from housing stability initiatives to The Magnolia Mother’s Trust, is always meant to model what could be possible if our social safety net and support programs were actually designed and implemented with community input and recognizing families as the experts on their own lives. And we have shown again and again that when we center the voices of families and ground programs in trust and dignity, everyone is better for it.

Highlights from our policy platform overview are below and you can view the full document plus more detailed documents on each priority area on our website. We hope you’ll take some time to explore them more today and join us in advocating for more people-centered policies that can move us toward more equitable systems for all people.

View our Policy Platform

Summer is here – so what’s for lunch?

Jackson, Mississippi is officially in full summer mode! Not only has the heat and humidity crept back up into sweat-drenching territory, but schools have had their last days, graduations have wrapped up, and parents are desperately trying to figure out the extra expenses (like food and childcare) that come along with the summer months.

Earlier this year, we announced that, in response to Mississippi’s failure to opt-in to the new federal Summer EBT program for families, we would be providing cash disbursements to Springboard families to support the additional food costs families have during the summer. This Tuesday, we will be sending out the first disbursements. Part of our commitment in our new strategic plan is to expand our cash disbursement support in response to unexpected disasters – including policy disasters like failing to implement Summer EBT.

While we are thrilled to be helping almost 700 students have an additional layer of food security this summer, we know this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the children across Mississippi (and the other states that opted out of Summer EBT benefits) who will not have access to additional benefits this summer. That’s why we’re doing more than just giving out cash; we’re also collecting data.

It is our belief that the best policies are always grounded in trust and dignity and informed by family voice and expertise. When polled, 75% of our families reported not having sufficient food for their family’s needs during the summer months. Many state leaders who opted-out of Summer EBT claimed that families already had access to summer feeding sites, so additional benefits were unnecessary. But only 14% of Springboard families actually reported having used summer feeding sites. The inability to take children during work hours, consistent access to transportation, and insufficient information regarding site location and hours were just a few of the issues cited.

The largest percentage of families said that additional support through Pandemic EBT funds (the pandemic-era program which laid the groundwork for the new Summer EBT program) was how they met their families’ nutritional needs during the summer. Not only was it simpler than getting kids to specific places at specific times, but it provided choice and options – allowing parents to accommodate allergies, health needs, and preferences. It provides flexibility for working parents – something these same lawmakers say is a priority – and ensures children aren’t skipping or eating inadequate meals when summer sites aren’t open.

Throughout the summer, we will be capturing stories from families about how the cash is making a difference in their lives and how it shifts their ability to keep their homes stocked with enough nutritious food throughout the summer. We’ve already seen these stories and data help states like Nebraska, Louisiana, and Alabama change course and plan to opt-in to Summer EBT moving forward. We have no doubt that Mississippi can be next.