Shah Foundation helps run a guaranteed income pilot program on MA

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Jill Shah, Shah Foundation President, discuss the foundation’s involvement in a Massachusetts guaranteed income pilot program.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: With the COVID-19 pandemic driving up unemployment and job insecurity, some have renewed their calls for a nationwide universal basic income. It's certainly not a new concept. And if you remember during the Democratic presidential primary race, candidate Andrew Yang proposed sending $1,000 each month to every US citizen 18 years and older.

Joining me now is Jill Shah. She is President of the Shaw Family Foundation, which is currently supporting a universal basic income pilot program in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Jill, it's good to have you here. I know this program in Chelsea is still relatively new. You got some payments of $200 to $400 out to-- to folks there, about 2,000 participants. What has the early data told you so far?

JILL SHAH: Yeah, that's correct. Alexis, thank you very much for having me with you today. So yes, the Chelsea program is being run for 2,000 individuals or their households. There were 3,000 applicants for the program, and so these 2,000 were chosen by lottery. We're actually looking at how both of those groups are faring as we're moving, hopefully, out of this crisis.

And the early data that we have so far that's actually been completed, all being done by Jeff-- Jeff Liebman out of the Harvard Kennedy School-- Jeff is an economist who served for both President Clinton and President Obama-- is showing us that people are in really dire straits. So the early surveys let us look at how people were faring. And the city of Chelsea, as you may know, was probably one of the hardest-hit cities in America. Many of the people there work for very low wages, work in hotels and restaurants and other places that were shut down at the beginning of the pandemic.

They also live in multigenerational households, and so often living in tight quarters. And this resulted in a lot of COVID cases in the city of Chelsea, in addition to a lot of the income that comes into Chelsea just completely going away. And so there were long lines every day around every corner as people stood in line to wait for food. And this guaranteed income program was partially put in place to try to remedy that.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I know that you work as a public-private partnership there at the Shaw Foundation. Tell us about the money, where you're getting it from for this particular pilot program.