Economy for All 2025
More About Aisha Nyandoro
Aisha Nyandoro is the founding CEO of Springboard to Opportunities, a Jackson, Mississippi-based nonprofit that focuses on resident-driven solutions to end generational poverty for families in federally subsidized housing. She is best known for being the architect of the Magnolia Mothers’ Trust in 2018, a groundbreaking guaranteed income program that provides direct cash payments to low-income Black mothers. Through her leadership, Nyandoro has championed economic empowerment and policy reforms, emphasizing dignity and trust for marginalized communities.
Nyandoro has testified before Congress and is involved with various leadership initiatives, including being a fellow at the Aspen Institute and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In 2024, she received the prestigious Heinz Award for the Economy and was recognized as a TIME100 Next recipient in recognition of her role in the national guaranteed income movement and her contributions to advancing economic justice.
She holds a B.A. from Tennessee State University and both an M.A. and Ph.D. from Michigan State University. When not working to liberate financial capital, she is a wife and mom to two sons.
Economy for All 2024 Recap
Thank you to those of who were able to join us to kick off 2024 the right way — in community with those working to create a South that chooses hope and well-being for every person. This year’s Economy for All event featured remarks by Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom, a trenchant cultural critic, celebrated sociologist, award-winning writer, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow, who explores the everyday culture of big ideas like racism, sexism, inequality, and oppression by giving us the language to live better lives.
Here is a gallery of photos you can click through from the event.
More About Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom
Tressie McMillan Cottom is known for rearranging your brain in the span of a carefully turned phrase. Her breadth is phenomenal – it moves from the racial hierarchy of beauty standards and the class codes of dressing for work to the predation of for-profit colleges and the stain of racial capitalism on our plural democracy – all while reimagining the essay form for the 21st century as she goes.
Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom’s first book, Lower Ed, captures the zeitgeist on how profit, and debt, moved from the margins of higher education to bankrupt the very heart of American meritocracy. Influential change-makers like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and activists like The Debt Strike Collective cite her book as important for changing the conversation about higher education. Her sharp insights do not let anyone off the hook – she argues that bad federal policy, state disinvestment, amoral narratives about meritocracy, and prestige-driven cultures of traditional higher education all share responsibility.
Dr. Cottom’s far-ranging intellectual interests include books, articles, magazine profiles and opinion-editorials but it is her essays that routinely shape the discourse. Dr. Cottom’s version of the essay – or Tressays, as her devout fans refer to them – is part revolutionary pamphlet, part poetic chapbook, part sociological analysis, and part call-to-arms. Her 2019 collection of essays, Thick, was a National Book Award finalist that reimagines the modern essay form. Tressays are powerful storytelling that make problems for power. Careful and poetic, Dr. Cottom explores the everyday culture of big ideas like racism, sexism, inequality, and oppression by giving us the language to live better lives.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a 2020 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and New York Times contributing opinion writer.
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