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BIG NEWS: Cash Disbursements for 700 Families

The last month in Jackson has been challenging to say the least. While the 7-week all-city boil water notice was lifted, the reality is that the water crisis in Jackson is much bigger than a few disastrous weeks. As Yamiracle, a Springboard mom said earlier this month in an interview, “They lifted the advisory this week to boil all our water, but I just can’t believe it’s safe. This has been going on for years. It’s basically been going on my whole life. So I think most of us who live here are just asking, ‘If all it took was two weeks to fix this, why haven’t you guys already done it?’ It just doesn’t make sense.”

The Department of Justice is prepared to file an action against the city under the Safe Drinking Water Act after close to 300 boil water notices in the last two years alone, and already, parts of the city find themselves under a boil water notice again. We are hopeful that the attention brought to the system and involvement from multiple levels of government will finally bring about a long-term solution. However, we also know that this is a problem that will take much longer than a couple weeks to fix.

And more importantly, we know that the needs of each family right now is different. While there is the obvious expense of having to buy bottled water, there are plenty of other repercussions from the crisis families are dealing with. Some families are trying to make up for the extra food costs that they had to spend when schools were out and they were unable to get meals. Others need to make up for lost wages when restaurants or other businesses were closed or could offer less service. Still others are trying to make sure that they have Internet ready or funds saved for childcare if their child’s school switches to virtual again with very little notice.

At Springboard, we are dedicated to our radically resident-driven model and honoring our belief that our families know better than anyone else what it is that they need to best care for themselves and their families. With that in mind, Springboard To Opportunities will be providing $150 per month for a minimum of 6 months to each family residing in one of Springboard’s multifamily Jackson communities. This means approximately 700 families residing in low-income housing in Jackson will have additional cash resources to sustain their families through this crisis.

To put this in context, up until last spring, Mississippi’s monthly TANF payment was only $170 for a family of 3 (it has now been raised to $260 – still the 4th lowest amount in the country). At the end of 2021, only about 1,600 families were actually receiving TANF – less than 1% of the total number of families living in poverty in Mississippi. In a state that has historically accepted less than 2% of TANF applications while fraudulently reallocating funds to friends and pet projects, we are rewriting the script on what is possible when you center trust and the voices of families in times of crisis.

Since the launch of The Magnolia Mother’s Trust in 2018, Springboard has been helping to drive forward the conversation on cash and modeling what it looks like to believe that families know better than anyone else what they need. This time is no different. As we continue to learn alongside our families in these next few months, we look forward to getting show on a larger scale than ever before that when families are offered trust and have agency over their own lives and resources, they are able to thrive.

Centering Gratitude

The holiday season is officially upon us! This is always an exciting and busy time of year for Springboard with holiday celebrations in communities, year-end data reports to compile, and working with families to create and finalize Community Blueprints and work plans that will lay the foundation for programming in 2023. But especially as Thanksgiving is fast approaching, we wanted to take some time to center gratitude and reflect on some of the pieces we have been most proud of in the past few months.

At the beginning of 2022, we doubled down on our commitment to center the voices of our families, provide additional advocacy and storytelling support, and offer more spaces and opportunities for our residents to share their stories and advocate for themselves. And we are excited to share some of the amazing ways that has unfolded:

In October, Brandy, one of our Policy & Systems Change Fellows, had an opportunity to testify at the Mississippi Legislative TANF Hearing held in response to the ongoing investigation of Mississippi’s misspending and theft of at least $77 million of TANF funds. She shared both the undue burdens and frustrations of trying to apply and receive TANF and how receiving the funds could have transformed her family’s life and the lives of many other families. You can view the full video below!
In partnership with Insight Center, we have launched a new essay series featured in Nonprofit Quarterly. Locked Out: Black Women, Wealth, and Homeownership connects the lived experiences, hopes, and dreams of low-income Black women and their perspectives on homeownership to the historic and current policies that fuel our exclusionary housing market—and its impact on health and wellbeing—to advocate for equitable housing solutions for Black women. While the series features writers and experts across many disciplines, each essay is informed by and centered on the experiences of families, particularly from stories and interviews collected with our own Springboard mothers.
Another one of our fellows, Roslyn, spoke at a Moral Monday rally held in Jackson in response to the ongoing water crisis, calling on state and local leaders to ensure there is clean and safe drinking water for all people and sharing her own story, alongside her daughter, of trying to care for her family despite years of unsafe drinking water and neglected systems.
In response to the lack of social safety net benefits and systems to support new mothers in Mississippi, our Policy and Systems Change Fellows also worked together to organize and launch Springboard’s own diaper bank. After a kick-off event where 837 diapers were distributed to mothers, additional diapers are now being housed in the Springboard office and on-site at communities, so mothers can access as needed and know that they have support to care for their young children.

We still have big plans for 2023 and look forward to building upon and expanding this work that has just begun. But for now, we will take a moment to celebrate and be thankful for all that has happened. We look forward to sharing more joy from 2022 with you throughout the last part of this year!

Brandy’s Testimony at the MS Legislative Hearing on TANF

2022 Year in Review

It is truly hard to believe that it has been a whole year since we sent out our 2021 Year in Review. So much in our world and work has shifted over the past few years and sometimes it feels like we are moving at lightning speed. But as we look back on this year, we cannot help but be grateful.

We moved deeper into our resident-centered advocacy work, building out fellowships to support residents in their own advocacy and leadership journeys and providing opportunities for residents to share their stories with lawmakers, in policy papers, and with community leaders. We expanded our cash work beyond The Magnolia Mother’s Trust to provide cash disbursements to families affected by the Jackson Water Crisis honoring our residents’ voices who said it was cash, not material donations, that would support them more in emergencies. We expanded our footprint and continued to be recognized as national and local leader on cash disbursements and developing community-centered programming.

And there’s so much more in store for 2023 – including Springboard’s 10th birthday, which we will be celebrating all year long. We are so grateful to count you as a partner on this journey and look forward to continuing forward together. But for now, take some time with us to celebrate all that happened in this past year.

Finding Holistic Prosperity

As a part of our radically resident-driven philosophy, we are always trying to listen to the voices of our residents and adjust accordingly as unexpected circumstances and changes become apparent in their lives. This was especially key in the spring of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic first descended on the country.

While we’ve talked a lot about our economic security responses during that time, the pandemic brought additional trauma into communities that were already experiencing the trauma of poverty and long-standing consequences of systemic racism in the United States. As residents worried about the health and safety of their families, experienced less time for themselves and their own needs, and became increasingly isolated from friends, family, and other relationships, residents expressed a need for mental health support and a trusted community to lean on in the midst of crisis, even if they were already receiving cash benefits.

When we talk about prosperity, we often link it simply to economic security. But we started wondering what would happen if we expanded our definition to recognize the importance of mental health and wellness in helping families thrive.

What if having trusted community and support during a crisis mattered just as much as cash? What would it look like for families to experience holistic prosperity beyond just financial prosperity?

These were some of the questions that we set out to answer as a part of Ascend at the Aspen Institute’s Family Prosperity Innovation Community. We worked alongside mental health experts and residents to co-create a self-care toolkit and program intended to support growth, healing, and leadership amongst participants we came to call the MISS Program. As a part of this program, participants reported on metrics comparable to those used in the evaluation of The Magnolia Mother’s Trust to help us better understand if there were ways self-care and mental health supports could support families in ways that cash does not.

And today, we are proud to share with you our final report summarizing the findings from this initiative. Highlights include decreases in difficulty with mood and mental health, less reported days feeling worried or anxious, improved physical health, and more healthy coping mechanisms. The full report is available below. We hope you find time to read it through. Beyond the initial statistics are quotes and stories from families finding hope and community, comparisons to our guaranteed income evaluation findings, and recommendations for cash policies and guaranteed income pilots.

Our mission has always been to help families reach their goals in all aspects of their lives. And with programs like MISS, families can take one more step toward holistic prosperity.

Cash in Crisis

In October, we announced that in response to the ongoing Jackson water crisis, we would be providing all families in our multifamily Jackson communities with $150 each month for six months to help cover the additional costs families were incurring due to continued water outages and unsafe drinking water. The last of these six month payments was disbursed this month and based on the feedback and evaluation of the program, we heard one big thing: cash works.

When asked “in times of crisis, which type of support is most helpful?,” 70% of respondents in the communities said cash. 17% preferred in-kind donations, while 13% had no preference.

When asked more about why they felt this way, the answer was clear – cash provides agency, choice, and the ability to deal with all the effects of a crisis, not just the obvious ones like not having water.

“With cash, you have options.”

Residents often cited the importance of being able to choose for themselves. Some talked about having delayed paying utility bills or other household necessities so that they could stock up on water. These participants were able to use the cash assistance toward their utility bills or rent. Another participant said she used the funds to pay her internet bill as schools were forced to close when they had no water and students needed WiFi to participate in virtual learning from home.

Others talked about using the funds to put gas in their car to make it to water distribution sites or drive to other towns to find water, especially when the shelves in stores in Jackson were empty. Still others cited that donated food – a necessity since residents were unable to cook with the water they had – often contains ingredients their families could not consume because of allergies or restrictions. Having cash allowed them to pick out items that they knew were safe and appropriate for their household.

“I could go shopping for my own personal needs and not have to wait in line and drive from site to site for assistance.”

“It allows me the freedom to allocate the assistance as I see fit.”

“Cash gives me the opportunity to budget and make sure I get everything.”

“It helps me pay on my high bills for having to boil my water in the kitchen where I don’t have hot water. This runs my light bill up high. I also can buy a few groceries with what is left over.”

“Because with cash I could, if I needed to, relocate. Go to a different county and pay for a room, or stay with a friend and help with her utilities while I’m there. Transportation to and from school or work.”

“Because during a crisis we need help in all ways and with cash it could help for anything that we are lacking.”

“We are able to get the things we need without all the stress and fear of not having what we need for our household.”

A crisis never just affects one part of a family’s life; it affects everything. Providing cash acknowledges this and trusts our residents to know better than anyone else what they need to care for their family through that crisis. When everything around someone feels like it is falling apart, cash gives back a bit of agency and stability. And that is what every family deserves, despite economic circumstances, in any crisis.