On the weekend of November 13 in San Francisco, creatives and innovators armed with computers and cameras gathered from across the world in one office space. They were not employees. They were not paid to work through their weekend. They met (many if not most for the first time) to brainstorm and pursue ideas for the acceleration of the idea of Universal Basic Income in the national consciousness of the United States.
The results can be found below across the eight separate projects which emerged from the hands of the sixty fully self-motivated supporters of Universal Basic Income in the US. If sixty people can accomplish this work in a matter of hours, just imagine what the entire country can accomplish with their entire lives freed to pursue the projects they are most passionate about…
The participants of the first ever Create-A-Thon were an incredibly diverse group of writers, artists, filmmakers, organizers, developers, and entrepreneurs.
What drove these people to dedicate an entire weekend to creating projects around Basic Income with a group of strangers? Matt Orfalea spent his weekend interviewing every person in attendance and created a film of short profiles with the results.
The German Basic Income raffle, Mein GrundEinkommen, has been a fantastic success. They’ve funded over 23 years of Basic Income, supported by over 8000 donors, and had over 150,000 people apply.
This weekend in San Francisco, a group of entrepreneurs, creators, and activists launched MyBasicIncome.org, the first American crowdfunded Basic Income raffle. The project is an innovative, potentially disruptive experiment to see how transformational even a small amount of unconditional financial security would be. Influencers across the political spectrum ranging from Milton Friedman to Martin Luther King Jr., have expressed support for a basic income, so an experiment like this is long overdue.
People have a lot of questions when they first learn about Basic Income. The “Opposition Research” team at the Create-A-Thon decided to put together a strategy memo detailing the most common points of confusion around Basic Income and classify them according to a 4-part taxonomy of beliefs, fears, and interest groups. Read the memo here.
The founders of Mein GrundEinkommen, Germany’s Basic Income raffle, created a microsite for you to record 20 seconds about what you’d do with a Basic Income. Tell us here:http://www.bohmedia.de/video/ Team members: Michael Bohmeyer, Johannes Pondaer, Meera Shanti
With such a deep well of support, San Francisco is in many ways an excellent target for the first city or state in the country to establish a basic income.
However, there are logistical and policy challenges involved with implementation. Owen Poindexter spend the weekend creating a plan to make Basic Income in San Francisco a success.
If all of us have a Basic Income, how would we change, how would our relationships change, how would society change.
This international group spent the weekend imagining how a Basic Income For All, once implemented, would change life for specific societal groups, and then brainstormed how this in turn would affect current institutions and power relationships. The group came up with “Nine Arenas For Change”, which will be included in a Basic Income Manifesto. The Manifesto is a work in progress at “BIGMN - Basic Income Guarantee Minnesota”; BIGMN welcomes participation from the larger community in the further visioning and creation of this document.
Team Members: Liane Gale, Anja Wagner, Nicole Bauch, Mark Roest, Karen Gifford, Beth Grossman, Yan Liu
What if implementing Basic Income didn’t require a city or state to adopt legislation, but just a small group of dedicated citizens instead?
“Group Income is a voluntary system to automatically redistribute wealth within a decentralized group so everyone has a reliable minimum amount of income, putting people back into the center of our economies. It recognizes the right of all members to live free from financial fear or work without meaning, so that they can reach their true human potential.”
One of the most common questions about Basic Income revolves around funding.
The Basic Income Calculator team spent the weekend gathering data to create a website that allow users to set a minimum basic income in the form a negative income tax and see how that stacks up against existing cash transfer programs at the Federal level.
“Our greatest success has been in actually finding all of the relevant information and assimilating it into a piece of software that can continue to develop and refine over time.”
