When Maile Chand reminisces about her 2016 pregnancy, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t how she prepared her daughter’s nursery or vetted baby names. Instead, she remembers constantly struggling to find enough money for food and rent in San Francisco.

Chand was just 20 years old at the time, living in the nation’s most expensive city, and working a low-paying retail job while attending community college. Navigating San Francisco’s public assistance labyrinth felt like another full-time job. The assistance never covered everything, she remembers, and she often found herself straining to secure the supplies she needed to take care of her baby. “In going through the system,” says Chand, now 25, “I just felt like there were so many gaps.”

Now, a new pilot program in San Francisco aims to use the once-radical idea of guaranteed income to help new mothers just like her. Starting this summer, the Abundant Birth Project will give $1,000 per month to 150 Black and Pacific Islander mothers for the duration of their pregnancies and the first six months of their children’s lives. The experiment is the latest in a growing collection of programs across the nation that aim to address systemic poverty, inequality, and racism not by reworking fragmented safety net programs, but by giving additional cash directly to people in need. In the last five years, similar programs have been designed in at least half a dozen cities. On Tuesday, New York University announced the establishment of its new Cash Transfer Lab, which will study the impact of policies like these.