2026 WINNER

Aisha Nyandoro

Springboard To Opportunities

Springboard to Opportunities works alongside residents of federally subsidized housing as they pursue their goals in school, work, and life by providing navigation support, connections to services, and opportunities to build social capital.

Aisha Nyandoro, PhD, is the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a Jackson, Mississippi–based nonprofit known for its radically resident-driven approach to ending generational poverty. In 2018, she launched the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, the nation’s first guaranteed income program for single Black mothers.

What began as a small pilot has since supported hundreds of families and helped position Aisha as a leading national voice in the movement for guaranteed income and economic justice. Her work helped inspire cash distributions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She is also the co-founder and co-chair of the Guaranteed Income Community of Practice, which brings together policy experts, advocates, researchers, funders, practitioners, and elected officials to advance unconditional cash programs.

Raised in a family of activists, Aisha grew up at a dining table that doubled as a roundtable—where community issues were debated, and solutions imagined collectively. The Magnolia Mother’s Trust grew from those same kinds of conversations; repeatedly, mothers connected to her work said they didn’t need more programs, requirements, or forms. They needed cash—and the freedom to decide what their families needed most. Inspired by a deep belief in people’s wisdom and by Lucille Clifton’s idea of making beauty from “starshine and clay,” Aisha built the Trust on a simple but radical premise: when families are trusted, they thrive.Through her work, Aisha challenges dominant narratives about poverty and power, confronting the racialized and gendered assumptions that shape public policy and public opinion.