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Pilot studies show promise
Recipients generosity is notable
Miracles Messages has its roots in Kevin Adler’s hometown of Livermore and now has spread across the country over 10 years.
It’s also grown and diversified from a core competency of helping homeless people reunite with family members using a combination of staff and volunteers to coupling that with a pandemic-driven phone/text friend program and experiments with basic income.
Founder Adler stepped aside as and remains board chair with a new CEO and other new team members as the organization evolves.
Adler’s inspiration was his uncle who wrestled with mental illness throughout his life including bouts of homelessness before ending it. That prompted Kevin to take some biscuits and a thermos of tea and sit down on the sidewalk with a homeless man. After a few conversations, he decided that social isolation (relational poverty) is the core problem and launched Miracle Messages.
During the pandemic, San Francisco moved many homeless people into single-room residences, potentially increasing isolation. That prompted the outreach that led to Miracle Friends. I have volunteered with it for several years with my phone buddy Brian Winters in San Francisco.
Post-pandemic, the leadership was wondering whether some form of basic income would make a difference for people. Truly money with no strings that the person can spend however they like. The initial pilot was promising enough that it moved into a controlled study with the University of Southern California. The study found improvement in three areas:
- Meeting essential needs such as food, housing and transportation;
- Providing resources to weather unexpected crisises and plan to move ahead;
- Develop meaningful relationships through social support—described as “life changing.”
The program combined $750 per month cash with the phone buddy program.
Miracle Messages team members broke down the results further into a webinar that yielded some interesting findings (Adler was not on the call — he’s out of day-to-day operations). Among them was just how generous recipients were with friends in similar situations. They described people focused on taking care of other’s needs without regard to impact on their finances in the future. They also described something as simple as one person taking another to lunch and talking over a table — connecting.
Webinar participants emphasized how important the relationships were in fostering quality results.
Miracle Friends has launched chapters in Austin, TX; Burlington, VT; Eugene, OR; and Richmond, CA and are in the process of launching in Santa Cruz and Monterey, Fort Worth, TX; and Minneapolis, MN.
I have been involved long enough to have followed the various studies and my friend was a participant in the pilot and the USC study. Personally, I am leery about giving money away, having seen government waste millions upon millions on social programs with bad outcomes.
President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs are the root cause in the demise of the Black family and generations of welfare.
That said, these programs were made possible by private sector donors to nonprofits that banned together to operate them. That’s a model worth exploring further, particularly giving the seemingly intractable issues in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Tim Hunt’s statement that, “President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs are the root cause in the demise of the Black family and generations of welfare,” in an opinion piece whose topic is on the promise of universal basic income, is an example of historical negationism of America’s own history. Yes, Johnson’s programs are rightly deserving of some targeted criticism but the statement that Great Society programs ” are the root cause in the demise of the Black family and generations of welfare” is quite the extreme opinion. Great Society programs lowered both white and black poverty rates but most notably lowered child-poverty in America.
Some notable Great Society pieces of legislation are:
1)The Food Stamp Act of 1964 which is responsible for SNAP benefits
2)The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is responsible for ensuring all Americans, not just white Americans, can cast a vote
3)The Social Security Amendments of 1965 which created Medicare and Medicaid
4)The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which made illegal housing discrimination based race, religion, sex, or national origin
Low-income American’s work a main job, and usually have a side-job just to make ends meet. The goal of Tim’s opinion above is to make a public universal basic income seem unreasonable when it is really no different from an extended social security model that unemployed, disabled, and or low-income Americans can for those below a certain income level or net-worth. How do we make this model work? Remove the maximum income cap on social security taxes to extend the maximum public benefit to the most amount of people. Why is this need urgent? Because the next generation of young Americans were told to go to college and are finding entry level white-collar jobs replaced by AI agents.
I am reminded of a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on the connection between job automation and chronic poverty in America during the Post-World War 2 economic expansion:
“Hard core unemployment is now an ugly and unavoidable fact of life. Like malignant cancer, it has grown year by year and continues its spread. But automation can be used to generate an abundance of wealth for people or an abundance of poverty for millions as its human—like machines turn out human scrap along with machine scrap as a byproduct of production” (1961).
Just some thoughts to chew on.