People Are Not Waiting to Be Empowered: What Black Mothers in Mississippi Can Teach Us About Democracy

“What did the mothers spend the money on?”

I have been asked some version of that question countless times in the better part of a decade since we launched the Magnolia Mother’s Trust: Springboard to Opportunities’ guaranteed income initiative for Black mothers living in federally subsidized affordable housing in Jackson, Mississippi. It is usually presented as practical curiosity. Funders want to understand outcomes. Reporters want specifics. Policymakers want to know whether people made the “right” choices.

But after 13 years of working alongside families at Springboard, I experience something larger inside that question. I see an assumption that people trying to survive poverty in this country must prove they can be trusted before they deserve resources. I hear the belief that the most important measure of a mother’s judgment is whether an outsider approves of how she meets her family’s needs. I smell a trope that reduces people to their scarcity and treats their humanity as an open question.

But the South has always been more than a measure of what was withheld from it. It is a blueprint for what communities can build when they turn shared struggle into care, ingenuity and collective power.

The question that should be asked is: what did the money make possible?

How did this money make room for joy? How did it create breathing room? What happens when survival is no longer consuming every ounce of energy? What happens when people have enough breathing room to make choices rather than simply react to crises? That is what policy evaluations too often miss. When people are constantly managing scarcity, they are forced to focus only on survival. But when there is space created from outside of constantly having to carry the toxic stress of meeting one’s basic needs, people can imagine, create, and plan.

For generations, the South has been cast as America’s democratic failure, a place defined by what it lacks and in need of rescue from somewhere else. Mississippi, in particular, is often discussed through a deficit lens. We are described by rankings and statistics, by poverty rates and political dysfunction, by all the ways the state falls short. But the South has always been more than a measure of what was withheld from it. It is a blueprint for what communities can build when they turn shared struggle into care, ingenuity and collective power.

The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is a microcosm of this impact; it was never just about whether mothers could manage money. There is no better person at budgeting than a mom in the grocery aisle with hungry kids at home and a skinny paycheck. The work we have been doing is not about confirming obvious answers; of course doubling the income of families living off $12,000 a year betters their financial outcomes.

The more interesting question is what becomes possible when we stop asking people to prove they are worthy of support and instead create the conditions for their inherent brilliance to emerge. What happens when we trust people with the resources and authority to determine what their families and communities need? This is not simply a question of economic mobility. It is about agency, power, and, ultimately, democracy.

The mothers in our community had been managing impossible budgets, making difficult tradeoffs and holding their families together long before Springboard arrived with a guaranteed income program. They did not need us to teach them how to be resourceful. They needed the material conditions and the dignity to live beyond perpetual crisis.

In communities like the ones Springboard serves, democracy has had to be practiced in the spaces left behind by institutional failure.

To exercise agency—to make choices, imagine a different future, and have a meaningful say in the circumstances that shape their lives—individuals must have the necessary material conditions at their disposal. When every decision is constrained by whether there will be enough money to make it through the week, choice becomes a luxury. When people have breathing room, agency becomes possible. And when people have agency, they can begin to exercise power.

Democracy’s Material Conditions

This work has taught me something fundamental about democracy: it is not only what happens in a voting booth, a courtroom, or a legislative chamber. Democracy is also what happens when people have enough stability to make choices and enough power to shape the circumstances that affect their lives.

For too long, our country has told its democratic story through institutions. We celebrate elections, constitutions, and landmark court decisions. Those things matter. But they are not the whole story, especially for people whose experiences with institutions have too often been defined by systemic exclusion, surveillance, and broken promises.

In communities like the ones Springboard serves, democracy has had to be practiced in the spaces left behind by institutional failure. Democracy lives in the neighbor who watches a child so a mother can get to work; the text threads among families who share information about resources, solve problems collectively, and offer support when a crisis arrives. Democracy survives through the wisdom people develop when they must navigate systems that were not designed with their well-being in mind.

The communities that we call marginalized have never been on the margins of democracy. They have been practicing it all along. The problem is that too many institutions have failed to recognize it.

Building Resilient Relationships

One of the most important lessons I have learned at Springboard is that collective decision-making does not begin with a listening session.

Too often, institutions approach community engagement as a task to complete. They hold a meeting, gather input, and move into action. They want the knowledge, solutions, and trust from the people most affected by a problem, but they have not done the relational work required to earn any of it. Relationships do not work that way, nor should they.

Building real relationships takes time, intention, consistency, and vulnerability. Sustaining them takes reciprocity. That means showing up before you need something from people, being honest about what you can and cannot do, accepting that community members may not agree with you, and being willing to change course when they tell you something isn’t working.

At Springboard, we describe our work as radically resident-driven. That does not mean we ask residents for feedback and then return to the office to make the decisions ourselves. Instead, it shows up as a commitment to building the conditions in which people believe their voices matter, because they have seen evidence that their voices can lead to change. That is a much higher bar than engagement.

It is also much harder to meet. We cannot expect people to share their deepest concerns, their boldest ideas, or their honest assessments with organizations that have appeared only once or twice. We shouldn’t ask communities to trust systems that have repeatedly disappointed them without first acknowledging the damage those systems have caused. And we must not claim to believe in community leadership if we are unwilling to share power when community members lead us somewhere we did not expect to go.

This is where so much of the civic-engagement conversation falls short. We often focus on participation: Did people attend? Did they vote? Did they provide input? Those are meaningful measures, but they do not tell us whether power actually moved.

The more important question is whether people had the relationships, resources, and institutional responsiveness necessary to make their participation matter.

Doing the Narrative Work

The Magnolia Mother’s Trust deepened my understanding of what community power requires. Before we started, I knew the mothers we served were brilliant. I knew they made extraordinary decisions every day with limited resources. I knew they were experts in their own lives.

What I did not fully understand was how deeply the dominant narrative about poverty had shaped how many mothers saw themselves. Our society is very good at telling people in poverty that their circumstances are evidence of personal failure. We tell mothers that if they are struggling, they must have made poor choices, while ignoring the fact that having good choices is in itself a tremendous privilege. We treat structural barriers as background noise and individual behavior as the entire story. Over time, those messages often become internalized. People who have been systematically underestimated may begin to question their own wisdom, leadership, and capacity.

That is heartbreaking to witness. And it made clear that the work of building community power is not only material, though material support is essential. It is also narrative work.

I recently got to see the power of transforming these narratives happen in real time with one of our moms, Javonica. A single mother of three, she was balancing school, work, and the daily pressures of raising a family when a difficult day at cosmetology school made her question whether she should continue. After an unexpected meeting with former Vice President Kamala Harris through a Springboard event, Javonica found encouragement from someone who reflected a possibility too often denied to Black mothers living in poverty: that she was capable, ambitious, and worthy of investing in. Harris urged her to stay in school, and shared her story with a packed audience later that evening. Seeing someone in a position of power reflect her inherent value back to her gave her the resolve to not only return to school and remain on the dean’s list, but to advocate on behalf of low-income families at the state capitol. Javonica did not suddenly become capable in that moment; she had always been capable. But being seen clearly helped her see herself clearly, too.

When people are constantly told they are deficient, they cannot be expected to see themselves with clarity. They may have been navigating impossible circumstances with creativity, intelligence, and courage, yet still carry the message that they are the problem.

When we stop requiring people to prove that they are worthy of support, we make space for a different story to emerge. A mother is not merely a recipient of assistance. She is a decision-maker. She is not a problem to solve. She is a person with knowledge, aspirations, and the ability to determine what her family needs. She is not waiting for an institution to grant her agency. She already has it.

Respecting and Uplifting Community Knowledge

The responsibility of institutions is to stop standing in the way of community knowledge. This is why I resist the framing of guaranteed income as charity. It is not charity to trust people with resources, to recognize that families deserve stability, to create conditions in which people can flourish. It is a more democratic way of organizing our economy.

As the country commemorates its 250th anniversary, we have heard many arguments about the future of American democracy. Some focus on the strength of our institutions. Others on the fragility of our political system. Both conversations are necessary. But I hope we also ask where democratic knowledge already lives—and, I can tell you, it is most certainly here in Mississippi.

Still, the failures are real, and we should not romanticize them. But they do not tell the whole story. It is certainly not the story I have witnessed in my years of working alongside families in Jackson. I have seen communities build systems of care where formal systems have failed. I have seen people share information, resources, and responsibility. I have seen mothers care for one another’s children, problem-solve together, and show up for their neighbors with an understanding that individual well-being is tied to collective well-being.

That interdependent work is not a substitute for public investment or accountable government. Communities should not have to compensate for the failures of the systems meant to serve them. But we should recognize the democratic practice embedded in how people survive and lead despite those failures.

The South is not merely a place to fix. It is a place to learn from. If we only see Mississippi and the rest of the region through what it lacks, we will miss what its people have built: enduring networks of care, shared responsibility, and collective power.

Black Southern communities have long created forms of mutual aid, economic cooperation, organizing, and shared leadership that the country is only beginning to treat as innovation. Philanthropy and the nonprofit sector must stop approaching these communities as sites of need alone. They are sites of expertise.

If we are serious about strengthening democracy, philanthropy must change how it invests, how it listens and how it understands leadership.

First, funders must invest more deeply in Southern, Black-led organizations and do so with flexible, long-term funding. Relationship building is not a short-term deliverable. Trust cannot be built on annual grant cycles, narrowly prescribed outcomes and the constant pressure to prove that an organization deserves to exist.

Second, funders must replace narratives of deficiency and resilience with narratives of agency and innovation. Resilience can sound like praise, but it often becomes an excuse. We celebrate people for surviving conditions that should never have been imposed on them, rather than changing those conditions. We need to ask not only how communities endure, but what they could build with genuine power and resources.

Finally, institutions must be willing to let community knowledge shape their strategies. This means more than adding residents to advisory boards or asking them to validate plans that have already been made. It means building from the infrastructure communities have created: their relationships, their networks, their expertise, and their visions for what is possible. That requires humility. It requires patience. And it requires institutions to relinquish the comfort of believing they already know the answer.

Democracy cannot be delivered to communities from the outside or reduced to participation without power, to consultation without accountability. It is sustained when people have the resources to live with dignity, the relationships to act collectively, and the authority to shape the systems that govern their lives.

That is the lesson I have learned from the mothers of Magnolia Mother’s Trust and from the residents who have shaped Springboard to Opportunities over the past 13 years. They have taught me that people are not waiting to be empowered. They are waiting to be recognized.