On a recent summer night, the scene inside the Fassi home in Goffstown, New Hampshire was idyllic. As Chuck Fassi doled out slices of watermelon to his wife, Jodie, and daughter, Janelle, talk turned to the state of the Democratic presidential field.

A year ago, though, this family was struggling.

“I actually was unemployed,” Chuck Fassi said. “I had lost my job working for a company for 14 years.”

Chuck had worked servicing restaurant equipment. His involuntary joblessness sent him into a deep depression and left his wife Jodie — who runs her own cleaning company and also manages the family finances — scrambling to cover Janelle’s tuition at Saint Anselm College.

“It was,” Chuck Fassi recalled, “a very stressful time for us.

While Chuck eventually found a new job, he had to take a significant pay cut. But then the Fassis got an unexpected boost: Andrew Yang — the entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Democratic presidential candidate — chose them as a test case for his big idea: Universal Basic Income, or UBI.

“I saw Andrew at an event in Keene when I was working at the New Hampshire Young Democrats last summer,” Janelle Fassi said. “He started saying he was accepting families to get his UBI, a family in New Hampshire specifically.”

After that, Janelle traded emails with the campaign and the candidate, who argues that UBI would help cushion the blow as millions of Americans lose their jobs to automation.

Eventually, Janelle ended up arranging a dramatic reveal in which Yang told her parents they’d get a thousand dollars a month, no strings attached.

“It was just a weight he took off my shoulders,” Jodie Fassi said of Yang. “OK, we can help Janelle; now it’s easier for us to make the college payment. Or if our car breaks down, we have the money in the bank.”

Now, every month, Jodie Fassi takes a backdated check from Yang to the bank. She's convinced that, if UBI ever becomes a reality, the benefits will be profound.

“For especially a family that makes under $100,000, I think it would be a game changer on their livelihood, their success, their happiness,” she said.

At first, Chuck was more skeptical of the idea, which Yang says could be largely funded by new taxes and the economic growth UBI would unleash.

He was also a bit somewhat guilty over his family’s good fortune.

“That’s one of the things I struggled with," he said. "Are we really the most deserving of this?"

“It could’ve went to a single mother who’s really struggling, and has to work full time and can’t avoid daycare,” he added.

But now, Chuck says he understands why, for Yang, choosing his family to illustrate UBI's potential made sense.

“You’re just trying to present it as, this is something for everybody,” Fassi said. “It’s not just for poor, it’s not just for rich people, it’s not just for middle class. It’s for everybody, no questions asked."

That’s the idea, anyway. And now — thanks not just to Yang, but also to the Fassis — it’s getting a measure of attention that it wasn’t getting before.