Georgia Based Initiative, In Her Hands, Plans To Provide Black Women With $850 Cash – No Strings Attached

Black women aren’t just deserving of their flowers, they’re deserving of their coins – guaranteed, government issued, no strings attached coins. Well friends, I’m happy to spread the good news today that at least somebody is out here getting the memo. The somebody I speak of is in fact a Georgia based program by the name of In Her Hands, an initiative that plans to give $850 in cash per month to 650 low income Black women for two years.

Let the church say…

The guaranteed income pilot launches early in 2022, and will be the greatest of its kind, distributing more than $13 million by the time it is concluded. The pilot will also study just how untethered cash grants benefit recipients not only financially, but mentally as well. Because let’s face it, while self care Sundays and massage parties continue to trend, so does suicide among Black women and girls.

This effort is led by the Georgia Resilience and Opportunity Fund, and the nonprofit organization Give Directly who is responsible for continued fundraising. The collective made the informed decision to launch the program in Atlanta, while supporting other suburban rural and suburban areas. Not surprisingly, despite its multi million dollar mansions, and being home to some of the most affluent black folks in the nation, Black women residents are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as white women.

“Black women are among the most likely groups to experience cash shortfalls that make covering basic needs difficult. This isn’t the result of poor choices; it’s the result of pervasive economic insecurity that has the sharpest impacts on women and communities of color,” Hope Wollensack, executive director of the GRO Fund stated in a press release.

Support for similar programs are constantly having to disprove that poverty and how it impacts Black women specifically is largely due to systematic barriers that result in financial insecurity. On the Give Directly website, the program also addresses other frequently asked questions such as whether or not there will be financial literacy training provided to participants. Again, this initiative and the research conducted prior to its launch, report that Black women in poverty are not facing these conditions due to a failure to budget properly.

“It doesn’t matter how well you can budget when your income consistently lags behind the cost of providing for basic needs for yourself and your family,” the website reads. “Community members identified recurring cash relief as a key tool to get them “off the hamster wheel” of persistent debt.”

The program is also not invested in keeping track of how and where the money is spent. Participants of a similar program, Magnolia Mother’s Trust in Mississippi – which gave $1,000 per month to Black moms for one year – stated that the cash made a significant difference in their lives, and that is the point, the only point.

While participants have already been selected for the program, you can still donate to the fund by clicking here. The stimmies may have run out, but there is hope yet for the most vulnerable among us.