NPR A couple of years ago, Mariah Rodriguez was forced to move out of her apartment in Denver, Colorado.

It was October. And because Mariah didn't have another place of her own to go, she and her kids suddenly found themselves homeless.

I just kept applying to whatever I could, you know what I mean?

Any resources, anything I was up early in the morning just non-stop trying to figure out what was my next move.

One night the five of them would crash at her parents.

The next they'd stay at a motel.

I was just trying to keep it together for them,

but inside, like breaking down, you know.

I just remember like sitting in the car praying, you know,

asking God like, help me because I don't know what to do. Then Mariah got a call that

kind of changed her life. Her daughter heard about this local nonprofit that

was offering a thousand bucks a month, no strings attached.

So she looked into it.

It was just like, we're going to give you money and then you do a survey every month and we pay you for the survey and I'm like what's you know I'm like this isn't real but it was real

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Whelan Wong. And I'm Adrian Ma.

The money Marai was offered was part of an experiment, a kind of experiment that we've actually

been seeing all around the country.

But this experiment was looking to test whether giving homeless people a guaranteed cash payment

every month would make a difference in their lives and the cities they live in.

Today on the show, we'll talk about how one entrepreneur brought this idea to Denver,

what the people behind this experiment learned from rolling it out,

and what happened to Mariah.

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