GiveDirectly's initiative to send cash to people in three rural US counties

From the blog post:

With support from a generous grant from the Atwoods, we’re aiming to send cash to ~1,800 people across Mercer County, WV, Beaufort County, NC, and one other yet-to-be-determined region.

We are delivering up to $24,000 over the course of 16 months to families living in poverty. This means that every family will receive $1,500 per month for 16 months to spend on food, business, rent, or whatever they need most.

Here is Jeff Attword's post:

The Road Not Taken is Guaranteed Minimum Income

Rural areas offer smaller populations, which is helpful because we need to start small with lots of tightly controlled studies that we can carefully scale and improve on for larger areas. We hope to build a large body of scientific data showing that GMI really does improve the lives, and the communities, of our fellow Americans.

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The initial plan is to target a few counties that I have a personal connection to, and are still currently in poverty, decades later:

• My father was born in Mercer County, West Virginia, where the collapse of coal mining left good people struggling to survive. Their living and their way of life is now all but gone, and good jobs are hard to find.
• My mother’s birthplace, Beaufort County, North Carolina, has been hit just as hard, with farming and factory jobs disappearing and families left wondering what’s next.
• Our third county is yet to be decided, but will be a community also facing the same systemic, generational obstacles to economic stability and achieving the American Dream.

Here's an article giving background on GiveDirectly's efforts in the US:

Can GiveDirectly Show the Value of Universal Basic Income? - archive:

Operating in the United States has been less logistically complex than providing cash grants in some the world’s poorest and most unstable places. Yet what works in Kenya does not necessarily work in Kansas — and GiveDirectly has become enmeshed in debates about universal basic income, the no-strings-attached cash payments intended to even the U.S. economic playing field. Its home turf story is one of learning through failure, collaboration, and identifying the communities where it can have the biggest impact.

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Give Directly was not originally intended to work in rich countries like the United States. However in 2017, at the request of philanthropists Laura and John Arnold, the Houston-based couple interested in tackling persistent problems, the nonprofit agreed to adapt the lessons it had learned to respond to domestic disasters. That year, GiveDirectly collaborated with the Texas-based Arnold Ventures (then known as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation) to deliver nearly $10 million in cash assistance to families affected by Hurricane Harvey.

Over the past seven years, the organization has provided more than $270 million in cash payments to over 220,000 Americans. It has found that cash transfers are a highly effective way to help people several weeks after a disaster. And it has continued to experiment with different groups of aid recipients, such as pregnant mothers and homeless families.

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During the pandemic, the nonprofit found its $1,000 payments to nearly 200,000 households barely made a dent in the lives of U.S. recipients. There was no measurable difference between the households that received the cash grants and those that did not, GiveDirectly declared in a blog post based on academic studies from the University of Michigan. One reason, according to the study, was that most cash grant recipients also received government assistance, which made it harder to discern the impact of the GiveDirectly money alone.

Here's GiveDirectly's blog post about that study.

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GiveDirectly has vowed to learn from its mistake. So far, that has meant targeting populations such as pregnant mothers, infants, and families experiencing homelessness for whom regular, modest cash impacts have proven to be life altering. Academic studies and government data have shown that low-income mothers who receive cash transfers during pregnancy were less likely to have low-birth-weight children, among other problems.