BIEN | Municipal Leaders

Municipal Leader Roundtables

The Basic Income Earth Network is eager to announce the creation of the international Municipal Leaders Roundtable, a conversation about the possibilities and realization of basic income at local, municipal and city wide, regional levels. The purpose is to facilitate a conversation between the different local authorities, municipal leaders, governors and other sub national forms of government, to share their experiences with each other and find the tools needed to issue an Unconditional Basic Income to the people in their territories. 

BIEN, together with its partners, will create a virtual space where the mayors and governors of the world who are already experimenting with different basic income systems can meet and share their stories. From the local currency basic income in Gyeonggi, South Korea, to the digital social currency of Mumbuca in Maricá, Brasil, all the way to the growing Mayors for  Guaranteed Income in the US, the purpose is to create a transcultural collective narrative about the increasing importance of doing UBI in our present moment and connect the efforts at an international level. The goal of this is to catalyze an internationalist municipal basic income movement of Mayors and other leaders around the world, and help to facilitate the narrative and scientific tools in order to do so.

For this, we welcome basic income activists from all over the world to reach out to outreach@basicincome.org if you want to help in bringing this to your local authorities and organize basic income in your area.

BIRAL

To organize the Municipal Leaders Roundtable, BIEN has created the Basic Income Research & Action Lab (BIRAL). BIRAL has two objectives:

The first objective is to create a series of seminars to share and analyze the experiences from already existing basic income systems around the world. BIRAL is meant to be a collaborative network of researchers, research teams, universities and local policy makers who are already engaged in doing research on Basic Income systems, pilots and those who are trying to enact UBI into being on the ground. BIRAL aims to synthetize the learnings from the emerging experiences around the world and turn these into useful tools for those interested in doing basic income in their regions. 

The second objective is facilitating the Municipal Leaders roundtable conversations, connect the different leaders of the Earth and facilitate knowledge-sharing and critical support for other local mayors and governors interested in UBI; to contextualize and understand which tools they have available to them in order to issue a basic income to their citizens, either in the national or local currency, and expand the imagination of what is possible at local, regional and federal levels. 

In order to begin this process, BIEN has partnered with Freiburg Institute for Basic Income Studies (FRIBIS) and the Gyeonggi Research Institute Basic Income Research Group for the organization of the first seminar. More details coming soon. 

To see an invitation to watch the first seminar on the 28th May 2021 please click here..

For further details of this project, please contact outreach@basicincome.org

The Jain Family Institute created a toolkit for municipalities interested in launching a basic income pilot. The Basic Income Earth Network does not endorse the definitions or language therein but hopes that readers will find it useful.

A translation into Chinese can be found here.