Andrew Yang 's nonprofit, Humanity Forward, is joining with a group called the $1K Project to give payments of $1,000 to struggling families in the US.- Yang's nonprofit pledged to match donations to the $1K Project up to $1 million.
- "If people want to give to a struggling American family, they can do so in this way, and they'll know exactly who's receiving the
donation ," Yang told Business Insider. - The pledge echoes Yang's presidential campaign promise of a $1,000 "freedom dividend" for every US adult, a form of universal basic income.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang has pledged to spend up to $1 million as part of a scheme handing out $1,000 monthly payments to American families struggling in the
The pledge, announced Monday, echos his campaign promise of a $1,000 monthly "freedom dividend" for every US adult under a Yang presidency.
Yang told Business Insider that his nonprofit, the Humanity Forward Foundation, is partnering with a network called The $1K Project to deliver the payments.
The $1K Project was co-founded by tech entrepreneurs Alex Iskold and Minda Brusse, and exists to match donors with people who could best use the money.
Beneficiaries wil receive the financial aid in the form of direct $1,000 payments per month for three months, the project says.
Humanity Forward pledges to match every donation to the $1K Project up to $1 million.
Yang in an interview with Business Insider said: "We can all see the need right now — if you have the means to be able to help and you're looking for ways to help, this is a tremendous opportunity because you can actually see the person who's going to receive your donation."
Humanity Forward has been distributing pandemic relief funds since its inception in March.
"We were looking for ways to make it more individualized and personalized," Yang said. "The $1K project has been doing tremendous work getting people a thousand dollars a month, and they have a well-developed nomination process for recipients."
"I was really impressed with the $1K Project and their initiative in setting up these structures so that people who needed help could be identified in a way that sponsors would feel excited about and confident in."
Since April, the $1K Project has built a network of sponsors and recipients, which it vets in a three-part process.
The ways to be nominated are:
- Businesses can nominate staff they had to lay off because of the pandemic.
- Other nonprofits can nominate people they know are in hardship.
- The $1K Project's own network can nominate people.
Iskold, the co-founder, told Business Insider: "We have this database of people that are verified, and so, the more people get verified, the more people are part of the chain... think of it as like basically using six degrees to validate family — that allows us to bypass the regular bureaucracy of asking people for their financials and ... basically more paper pushing before you can actually dispatch the funds."
Brusse described the $3,000 total package as "a bridge to reemployment or other kinds of support... a meaningful dollar amount so that it is showing that we respect them.
"We didn't want it to be something that just got them a little way through. We wanted to really make a significant difference, where they could focus on what they needed to do to get to the next destination for them and their families."
The announcement of the Humanity Forward and $1K Project partnership came after the federal unemployment benefits — which included $600 monthly payments — expired at the end of July.
A new
"If Congress had its s--- together, we'd all be getting direct, recurring payments throughout this pandemic, and something like what we're doing with $1K Project would be less vital," Yang told Business Insider. "In the absence of congressional action, then what we're doing seems even more immediate and vital."