At its core, anti-racist community development is about ensuring historically and currently marginalized communities have equitable access to all forms of capital (e.g., physical, human, social, financial, environmental, political, cultural), such that its residents can sustainably honor their inherent individual and collective agency and dignity.
But capitalism.
The United States government has a rich history of allowing its states to explicitly exclude Black people from pathways to homeownership through negligent policy implementation (e.g., the Federal Home Banks Act of 1932, the Home Owners Loan Act of 1933, the National Housing Act of 1934, the United States Housing Act of 1937, the 1944 GI Bill, the Housing Act of 1949, The National Interstate + Defense Highways Act of 1956) , thereby, structurally strangling Black people’s access to homeownership, one of the most successful vehicles of accumulating financial capital (i.e., wealth-building) in this country. While activism efforts, led largely by Black people, have created mechanisms of accountability for the United States government, the US has shown zero genuine interest in redistributing white’s inequitable accumulation of wealth. Instead, we have witnessed a whirlwind of band-aid programs and “strategies” that do very little to offer Black poor people a reliable pathway out of poverty.
To be clear, evidence-based interventions that have demonstrated success in alleviating poverty do exist, but as the Anti-Racist Community Development research demonstrated, “many reform practices being promoted in the sector today are treated as new + risky, but the truth is that they’re often returning to + reimagining communal approaches that were prevalent in the past, particularly in communities of color.”
One such intervention, universal basic income – the practice of issuing regular cash payments to individuals regardless of working status – has repeatedly been piloted in communities around the world, including several in the United States. The results are clear: it creates pathways to wealth-building and a significantly improved sense of wellbeing, especially amongst participants living in poverty.
Considering 52% of Black people cannot afford to cover a $400 unexpected emergency expense, a no-strings-attached monthly cash payment of $500, as in the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, or the $1000 monthly payment in a Baltimore pilot, would do wonders for financial and mental stability. Such geographically concentrated projects are important and speak to the potential to better integrate universal basic income into community development programs and services. As the research findings explain, “inequitable financing and investing has curtailed equitable community development trajectory overall, resulting in concentrated geographies of debt + depreciating assets, all of which reinforces the racial wealth gap instead of reducing it.” Geographically concentrated, direct investments in community wealth would help ameliorate that circumstance, something that the community development sector is particularly well-suited to advance.
Universal basic income honors the agency and dignity of its recipients by providing the ability to afford nutrient-dense food, car payments, electric bills, registration fees for school sports, more time to vet job opportunities during the stressful job search process, college tuition, rent, healthcare, among a myriad of other basic needs and desires.
While the federal government continues to fail in its duty to ensure its people have a humane social floor, institutional philanthropy should step up and take heed of Dr. King’s wisdom. That is, grantmakers should leverage all forms of their capital – and certainly well above the 5-7% of their $1.7 trillion collective endowment – to support localized universal basic income efforts with the intent to plant and nourish the seeds of larger, national policy implementation. Given the abundant evidence of past and current pilots, one would think this to be a low-hanging fruit solution to abolishing poverty and, more importantly, protecting our people’s right to live in their inherent agency and dignity.
But, then, how will we satisfy the insatiable appetite for white supremacist capitalism, which has plagued this country since its inception? #QuestionsThatNeedAnswers
Juwon Harris, MPH names healing justice as his North Star, and chasing it led him to create his own racial equity consulting firm, Visualizing Liberation. He has also served in several roles at public health agencies, and as the health philanthropy fellow at The Kresge Foundation, where he managed investments in community-driven solutions for equity-focused systems of health. He currently serves as a CDC Foundation COVID-19 corps health educator and outreach specialist.