(CNN) Low-income families of color in Oakland, California, could receive some extra financial assistance over the next year and a half.
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf announced this week that the city will launch a guaranteed income project to give hundreds of Black and Indigenous families and people of color $500 per month for 18 months.
The project's payments will be unconditional, and recipients may spend the money however they choose.
The Oakland Resilient Families program is the latest trial of a "guaranteed income" system of wealth distribution, where residents are given a set amount of money per month to supplement the existing social safety net.
The project targets groups with the city's greatest wealth disparities, per the Oakland Equality Index, which reveals the median income for White households in Oakland to be nearly three times that of Black households.
"The poverty we all witness today is not a personal failure, it is a systems failure," Schaaf said in a statement. "Guaranteed income is one of the most promising tools for systems change, racial equity and economic mobility we've seen in decades."
Guaranteed income is different from Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would provide enough income to meet everyone's basic needs.
Instead, guaranteed income is only meant to supplement other wages and programs for low-income residents, helping to build the "income floor" on which people in poverty can begin to build financially secure lives.
Although the idea has seen a resurgence in recent years, it's not new -- Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated for it in his 1967 book, "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?"
"I'm now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income," King wrote.
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