A Journey of Faith and Resilience: Lagrina’s In Her Hands Journey
“I was to the point where I felt like I was going to die. I didn’t know how I was going to make it.”
That’s how Lagrina Simmons describes the crushing weight of the financial strain she carried before being selected for the In Her Hands guaranteed income program. As the eldest of eight siblings, Lagrina has spent her life caring for others. She is a wife, a mother of four, a grandmother, and the primary caregiver for her husband, who lives with a chronic illness. For years, she epitomized the unpaid care economy, balancing her family’s needs while managing a budget that was stretched well past its breaking point. Her life was a testament to resilience, but it was a constant fight for survival. Then, a single text message sparked a flicker of hope.
A Foundation Forged by Faith
In Her Hands provides women in Atlanta’s English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods with guaranteed income over three years, addressing the income inequity and financial insecurity that disproportionately affects women. After successful pilots in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward, Southwest Georgia’s Clay-Randolph-Terrell County cluster, and College Park, the program expanded to Westside residents during the summer of 2024.
The program’s goals are to reduce financial stress, expand opportunity, and empower women with the freedom to make their own choices. The program’s design, which provides $1,000 monthly, is among the largest cash transfer sizes tested in the U.S. to date, and its focus on these neighborhoods is a direct response to the systemic economic inequality that disproportionately impacts Black women in Georgia.
For Lagrina, learning about the program felt like an answered prayer. When a friend from church told her about In Her Hands, she felt her spirit ignite. Something told her this was the opportunity she had been praying for. But without a computer or internet at home, applying meant walking 15 minutes to meet program staff for support. The first time, she didn’t have the necessary paperwork to complete the application. Instead of letting that setback stop her, she made the walk again—paperwork in hand, ready and determined to complete her application.
But the hardest part was the waiting. Days stretched into weeks, and she checked her phone constantly, praying daily that she would be selected. When others dismissed the program as a scam, Lagrina stood firm. Her faith guided her through moments of doubt. She reminded herself, “God places good people to help others.”
The text came.
Accepted.
“I literally just started crying,” she recalls.
Years of pressure gave way in a single moment of joy and relief.
Building Freedom and a Newfound Sense of Self
Reliable, no-strings-attached monthly income support replaced her daily worry with a strategic plan. With her first payment of $800, Lagrina made a deliberate choice to prioritize stability. During her first year in the program, she has paid down debts, caught up on rent, and made sure her husband’s prescriptions were filled. She still remembers standing at the pharmacy counter, unable to afford the prescriptions he needed—a painful memory that she now leaves behind in the past.
Lagrina has maintained a job in food service at a large university here in Georgia for over 25 years, watching her wages barely increase and largely remain stagnant throughout the years. Her life was consumed by stretching her paychecks to pay for rent, food, and medical costs that never fully covered them. Some nights, she’d come home with leftovers from her workplace to make sure her children had something to eat, often not having any left for herself.
Another change that unlocked many others: transportation. “I don’t have a broken-down car,” she says now, proudly showing off the keys to her 2003 Nissan. It starts when she turns the key and gets her where she needs to go—to church, to appointments for her husband, and to pick up groceries.
The guaranteed income provided a foundation that finally allowed her to look beyond survival. As improved financial stability took root, her mental health followed. The constant knot in her chest loosened. She could sleep. She could focus. Joy returned in everyday moments, culminating in small but powerful acts. Regular visits to the beauty and nail salon became acts of self-care that helped her reclaim her personal identity, independent of her roles as caregiver and worker. She reflects, “It makes me feel more beautiful.”
A Heart for Community: Living Out a Legacy
With the essentials covered, Lagrina’s attention widened back to the people around her. This wasn’t a new impulse; even during her hardest seasons, she never stopped giving. The 59-year-old longtime Atlanta resident is known in Vine City for her generosity, preparing food not only for her family but also for her neighbors. She often prepares plates of barbecue for anyone in need of a hot meal. The Westside carries a long history of resilience and mutual care, and it’s a community she feeds, celebrates, and leans on.
“I know that I can help,” she says simply, adding that she feels it’s her responsibility to extend support to others in her community.
A New Chapter: One Year Later
Today, she dreams bigger. She’s excited to make long-term plans that once felt impossible. Her ultimate goal is to become a homeowner, leaving her children and grandchildren with the security she feels she never had.
“I want to leave something like a home for my daughter and grandchildren to reduce their struggles,” she says.
Beyond homeownership, she’s turning her passion for food and community into a business plan. She hopes to one day open a smoothie bar, a place where she can serve her neighbors with healthy drinks and food. She plans to call it “Lili’s Smoothies,” the name given to her by those who love her most.
The Power of Choice
Lagrina’s story reminds us that support can open doors that once felt shut. Her future is now In Her Hands: the choices she makes, the freedom to dream and aspire for more, and the home she wants to leave as her legacy. Poverty isn’t about individual choices; it’s about the structural barriers around us.
The In Her Hands program and the model of guaranteed income it represents are rooted in this core philosophy: when you trust women with the choices they already make every day, and provide them with opportunities for improved financial stability, they make thoughtful decisions that seek to stabilize not only their immediate household, but also their entire communities. And on the Westside blocks Lagrina calls home, those choices ripple outward—to family, neighbors, and to the next woman who sees her success as a tangible path toward building her own legacy.
The Georgia Resilience Opportunity Fund's (GRO Fund) In Her Hands program is a three-year guaranteed income initiative designed to directly address the income and wealth inequity that disproportionately impacts women, particularly women of color, in Georgia.
This project, supported by $6.2 million in funding from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, provides women residing in Atlanta's historic English Avenue, Vine City, Washington Park, and Bankhead neighborhoods with $36,000 of no-strings-attached income support over three years.
The program had two core, policy-relevant objectives:
Investment in Financial Mobility: To fundamentally improve the financial stability of participants and their families/dependents by helping them shift beyond wealth decelerators (e.g., predatory debt, high-interest loans) and gain access to wealth accelerators (e.g., higher education, entrepreneurship, asset accumulation).
Generating Policy Evidence: To generate robust, real-world data and compelling narratives relevant to philanthropic and public policy conversations on the transformative effects of direct financial assistance on economic well-being, mental health, and structural equity.
