CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Advocates for impoverished people are urging West Virginia lawmakers to oppose two bills being heard in a House committee Thursday, that they claim punish low-income people and drug users.
Senate Bill 387 would make permanent a pilot program that screens recipients of the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, for drugs.
Josh Lohnes, food policy research director at West Virginia University, thinks the bill places an unnecessary burden on low-income people and is a waste of taxpayer dollars since not many recipients test positive.
He pointed out the bill would restrict access to cash for the most vulnerable families with children during the pandemic, when they need assistance most.
"This is anti-poor legislation," Lohnes argued. "It's discriminatory, and there's this notion that the poor are irresponsible with their funds, that they don't know how to manage money, and they're going to go and use state funds to buy drugs, which is absolutely untrue."
Supporters of the bill say it's meant to help folks with substance-abuse problems get clean.
West Virginia is one of only 15 states in the nation to require drug screenings for cash assistance.
The second bill the House Committee on Health and Human Resources will consider would make it more difficult to run harm-reduction programs such as needle exchanges and syringe services that decrease the spread of diseases.
Jill Kriesky, retired associate director of the Southwest Pennsylvania Environment Health Project and author of a West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy report on harm-reduction solutions in the state, said the bill's requirements would make the programs too expensive to run and harm folks who depend on clean equipment.
"People who don't have access to clean syringes will reduce or share syringes, and diseases that are carried through used syringes like HIV and hepatitis C will increase significantly," Kriesky predicted.
She added the bill's provisions go against the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and will cost more money for medical care.
Advocates for Senate Bill 334 say the programs cause needle litter and needle-stick injuries and pose a risk to the public.
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By Katie Fleischer for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Emily Scott for Maryland News Connection reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
Universal basic income (UBI) was propelled into mainstream awareness during Andrew Yang's campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidacy. Now, programs offering monthly cash payments to specific communities have sprung up across the country. But while the public often conflates UBI with these programs, economic justice activists warn that they have very different goals. Many anti-poverty groups agree that strategically targeted guaranteed income, not UBI, is the best path forward to ending poverty, advancing gender and racial equity and supporting low-income Americans.
In 2020, Yang's focus on UBI helped raise public awareness of the policy. His "Freedom Dividend" promised to give $1,000 per month to every American adult-"everyone from a hedge fund billionaire in New York to an impoverished single mom in West Virginia," Yang's own site explained.
For many economic justice experts, Yang's proposal raised red flags. Clearly, a monthly stipend will have an extremely different impact on people based on their level of wealth and income. But UBI doesn't take this context into account. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates would receive the same $1,000 as every low-income young adult struggling to pay for college tuition.
On the other hand, guaranteed income is targeted at the groups that need it most. It involves monthly payments of unrestricted cash, like UBI, but takes societal and historical context into account. It's designed to be a minimum "income floor" that ensures nobody is forced to live in poverty. Because of racial and gender wealth gaps, women of color are disproportionately likely to be low-income and face systemic barriers in higher education and attaining high-paying jobs. So, guaranteed income programs like the Magnolia Mother's Trust (MMT) focus on low-income Black women to address the deeply entrenched economic inequities caused by systemic racism and sexism.
Instead of giving money equally to everyone, thus reinforcing the current system and letting women of color continue to fall behind, guaranteed income centers equity. By providing $1,000 per month for a year to Black women living in extreme poverty in Mississippi, MMT gives support to those who need it most and empowers women to invest in their families and futures.
"Our country's economic system has historically barred Black people from not just upward mobility, but basic human necessities such as water, food and shelter," explained Aisha Nyandoro, CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, which runs MMT. "Practices like redlining and discriminatory employment policies have led to the current reality of massive income and wealth gaps between people of color and their white counterparts. This work is about more than guaranteed income. It is about the shaping and nurturing of radical possibilities. Our goal is to place Black women at the center-not at the center of pain, but of pathways to plenty-so that our communities, our families, we, can do more than survive, can thrive, can be secure in a place of becoming."
By prioritizing Black women, guaranteed income has the potential to make a difference for those struggling the most, and alleviate some of the racialized disadvantages low-income people of color face. In 2021, when parents received monthly payments through the expanded child tax credit (CTC), child poverty decreased by around 30 percent, with the CTC reaching more than 61 million children.
But in January, after the six months of payments ended, low-income Black and Latino families were hit hard: The childhood poverty rate rose from 12 percent in December to 17 percent in January-and soared to over 23 percent for Latino children and 25 percent for Black children.
Like the CTC, which supports low-income parents, guaranteed income would have an intersectional impact, helping those who need it instead of giving unnecessary money to well-off Americans.
Mother of two Kimberly, who works for the state and receives guaranteed income from MMT, shared:
"I carry a really heavy load as a single mom. There's no one else-everything is on me. So it helped ease my burden a lot when I started getting the monthly child tax credits last year. Not getting the payments anymore has definitely put a strain on my budget; there are just some things I can't afford without that extra support coming in. Overall, things have been hard. You keep working and keep going, but things never seem to change. But, being a part of the Magnolia Mother's Trust made me realize that things can change for the better. There are people out there, programs out there, that want to help mothers like me get out of a continuous cycle of poverty. It has really given me hope."
The motivations behind UBI and guaranteed income differ as well. UBI was designed to counter unemployment caused by increasing technology and automation. UBI advocates fear that automation will eventually take over industries and drive out human workers, making a basic wage a necessary replacement for most jobs. This justification primarily grew out of Silicon Valley "tech bros"-not low-income people or economic justice activists. That lack of lived experience with poverty becomes even more obvious when looking at how they plan to pay for UBI. Many proponents see UBI as a solution to the bureaucracy of America's welfare system, arguing that UBI could replace the vast majority of existing welfare programs.
Unlike UBI, guaranteed income is designed to work alongside existing welfare systems, meaning low-income people wouldn't be forced to give up the benefits they rely on. Instead, the goal of guaranteed income is explicitly anti-poverty. Offering low-income families unrestricted cash means that the recipients can make financial decisions based on what's best for their families; providing for their children and investing in their goals. MMT moms have used their monthly payments to go back to school, find stable housing, escape predatory cycles of debt and start their own businesses.
Guaranteed income recipient Annette wrote,
"If I were able to sit down with our country's leaders, I would tell them how important a program like the Trust is. It helps low-income women like myself better ourselves. The money has helped me in pursuing a better future for me and my kids and allows me to do things that I wasn't really able to before-like going back to school. I know if I finish school I will be a better person, and I'll be a better person for my kids."
And MMT recipient and low-income mom Chephirah demonstrated how guaranteed income can help break generational cycles of poverty in marginalized communities:
"[Guaranteed income] has helped me cover my monthly bills, and pay for things like my daughter's school books. My hope for her right now is to be the first one in our family to graduate from high school-my brothers and I all left school early. I want her to have a real high school diploma, not a GED. I want her to go to college, and to just know that whatever she wants to strive for, I'm gonna be right there behind her to support her 100 percent. You know, where I'm from, you just don't have that much hope. So seeing my daughter succeed and be motivated really inspires me."
Unlike UBI, guaranteed income is a transformational policy that puts marginalized communities first and prioritizes intersectionality and equity. When programs like MMT are designed to uplift Black women, it becomes not just an economic policy, but a form of gender and racial justice as well.
A federal guaranteed income program would reduce the systemic disadvantages women of color face in our economic system that was created by and for rich white men. And a federal policy would help all low-income Americans, especially those who face systemic barriers to financial security. As Nyandoro explained, "By centering and improving the situation for Black women, those hit with the double bind of racism and sexism, we are thereby raising the floor for us all."
Katie Fleischer wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.
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May is Community Action Month, and Community Action Agencies in Massachusetts are raising awareness about the wraparound services they provide to low-income residents.
Community Action was started in 1964 by the Johnson administration to fight poverty, and agencies have been working ever since to help folks - both in crisis situations and with economic empowerment.
Sharon Scott-Chandler, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), said many still are struggling to meet basic needs in the economic fallout from the pandemic.
"Community action is here, meeting as many of those needs as we can," she said. "Obviously, the demand is outsized to what the resources we have, but we continue to advocate for more funding and continue to really come up with flexible, innovative programs that can meet the evolving needs of folks."
Scott-Chandler noted that most funding for Community Action Agencies comes from the federal government; the U.S. House recently approved a 10-year reauthorization of the Community Services Block Grant, and it's now on to the U.S. Senate. The Massachusetts House also included $7.5 million in the state budget for Community Action Agencies. The state Senate's version does not, but the agencies hope it will be retained in conference committee.
In a crisis, Community Action Agencies provide services such as rent relief, fuel assistance, child care and food security.
"We are serving more people today than we ever have, and it's just, instead of getting better - I had hoped by the time I retired, that we wouldn't need food banks," said Emma Melo, who runs the food program at People Acting in Community Endeavors (PACE) in New Bedford. The PACE Food Bank serves more than 6,000 people every year.
"With COVID, with everything else, it just doesn't work," she said.
Jenniffer Gonzalez, assistant director at Springfield Partners for Community Action's Early Learning Center, also has been a client of the agency. She said agencies don't just help clients with one need - they work to assist them in gaining longer-term economic stability.
"They had helped me to pay my bill, like fuel assistance, helped me through the COVID times. And it's not just as a professional working here - but as personal, a mother," she said. "And I have a house because of Springfield Partners, so I think it's just amazing to have an agency that helps a community like that."
Massachusetts residents who think they may be eligible for some of these programs can look online at masscap.org to find their local agency and make an appointment.
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From January 2020 to December 2021, utility companies shut off power to Hoosier homes more than 260,000 times.
According to a new report from BailoutWatch and the Center for Biological Diversity, Indiana had the third-highest amount of energy shut-offs in the nation during the two-year time period.
Christopher Kuveke, data analyst at BailoutWatch, noted Indiana's shut-off rate jumped from 2020 to 2021, as moratoriums on such practices expired.
"A big problem we saw with these moratoria nationally is they did help keep people connected throughout the duration," Kuveke acknowledged. "But there weren't necessarily adequate payment programs to help the people protect themselves from racked up debt and outstanding bills that were accumulated during the moratorium."
Indiana adopted a utility shut-off moratorium early in the pandemic, which ended in August 2020. A program compelling utilities to offer extended utility payment plans expired in October 2020, but some companies continued offering long-term repayment plans and other resources to help customers meet their utility costs.
Utility companies argued the report is incomplete and fails to take into account those initiatives.
The report included data from 33 states and the District of Columbia, as not all states had shut-off numbers available.
Kuveke pointed out the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission does not require companies to collect and disclose such data.
"The authors and myself believe FERC needs to come up with a policy to mandate a uniform reporting system for utilities in every state," Kuveke asserted.
Jean Su, energy justice program director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said communities of color are disproportionately impacted by cutoffs, as they carry a higher "energy burden," or how much of their income goes toward utility bills.
"Black families in particular have three to four times the energy burden of white families," Su outlined. "Latinx families also have that same ratio."
Su explained it is an issue with two root causes. She said Black and brown communities have generally lower incomes than white ones, but their neighborhoods also tend to be hotter because of long-standing racist housing practices.
"So we have areas where public housing has far less insulation and far less energy-efficient buildings, so that raises the need for greater heating and cooling," Su emphasized. "We also see that those communities have been built with far less tree cover."
The Kaiser Family Foundation reported from 2005 to 2015, emergency room visits for heat-related illnesses increased by 67% for Black residents and 63% for Hispanic residents, compared with a 27% increase for white people.
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