City Of Pittsburgh: City Council To Consider Mayor Peduto's Groundbreaking Assured Cash Experiment (Ace) PGH Initiative To Address Pover ...

Press release from the City of Pittsburgh:

09.08.2021

PITTSBURGH, PA (September 8, 2021) City Council will consider Mayor William Peduto's plans for the Assured Cash Experiment PGH (AcePGH), a guaranteed basic income pilot to combat poverty and inequity that will provide an unrestricted $500 monthly cash transfer to 200 people in the City of Pittsburgh. One hundred of the participants will be Black women in response to inequities that Black women face in Pittsburgh, as clearly defined in the 2019 Gender Equity Commission report Pittsburgh’s Inequality Across Gender and Race.  

According to the report, Black women and children are more likely to live in poverty in Pittsburgh than comparable cities. Pittsburgh’s Black women are five times as likely as white men to live in poverty and twice as likely than white women. In response to this, the Office of Mayor Peduto has designed a guaranteed basic income policy to address the poverty inequitably faced by Black women in our communities at the recommendation of the Gender Equity Commission report.  

Guaranteed basic income was championed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who said that poverty could be eradicated by providing every American a direct, guaranteed middle-class income. He argued that that other programs to address poverty were less effective in that they seek to address one root cause at a time, writing “the programs of the past all have another common failing – they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.” 

Last summer, Mayor Peduto joined Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (MGI), a forward-thinking network of mayors from around the country started by Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton, California. Following Dr. King’s philosophy, they advocate providing direct, unrestricted recurring cash payments to residents to give them a boost and an income floor that lifts up families who have been struggling long before the pandemic.  

The City of Pittsburgh will join cities nationwide in utilizing relief funds from the American Rescue Plan to fund part of the program through OnePGH, a nonprofit organization that is supported by public and private investment to allow for the collaboration of local government, business, philanthropy and nonprofits to improve the lives of all Pittsburghers. The program will also be funded through grants from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and MGI.  

This table outlines how some other cities are defining and funding their pilot programs: 

AcePGH will be a pilot program that will be measured and studied with the assistance of MGI and the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research. The 200 participants must be 18 of older and will be recruited in two groups:  

Participants will receive a monthly payment of $500 on a debit card to spend on what they or their families need for 24 months. Findings from other pilots show participants most frequently use cash to meet their basic needs like food, merchandise/wholesale and utilities.  

This press release was produced by the City of Pittsburgh. The views expressed here are the author’s own.