The Australian Basic Income Lab is delighted to invite you to the inaugural Australian Basic Income Lab Fellows Workshop. A fantastic line-up of Fellows have offered their time and expertise to present and moderate these panels. Your participation in this Workshop would be most welcome.
Security, Adequacy & Recognition in Australia’s Social Assistance System
ABI Fellows Workshop – 2023
Date: Friday, December 8
Time: 9:00am-1:30pm (AEST)
Format: online (Zoom), 12-minute presentations for 3 speakers & 30 minutes discussion per session.
We appreciate it is a very busy time of year and that you may not be able to attend. We would still encourage you to circulate information regarding the workshop to interested colleagues and friends.
Please note that the conference begins at 5:00 PM EST on December 7. Read more and register by clicking here.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Guaranteed Income Research has released its final report on the first county to experiment with GI during the pandemic. This report is also the first in a series entitled, “The American Guaranteed Income Studies.” The Center will be releasing will be releasing full mixed-methods findings across a range of sites in the coming months under this series.
Darryl Finkton, Jr. is a hedge fund manager turned community organizer. Raised in a poor black family in Indianapolis, Indiana, Darryl went on to graduate from Harvard College and Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. In his new book End Poverty. Make Trillions, Darryl shares how he rose from rags to riches and searched for a way to end poverty. In 2021 he left his job as a hedge fund partner to promote the adoption of a universal basic income to end poverty in the U.S. with the help of venture dollars via his EPMT (End Poverty. Make Trillions.) fund, and then came up with a proposal to ensure everyone has an opportunity to generate wealth.
He calls his proposal “The Seed Money Act”. It would establish an unconditional, permanent, regular grant to every US household, set to an amount that’s equal to the federal poverty guidelines. “For example, for a single-person household in 2020, the amount would’ve been $1,063.33 per month.” Darryl also helped found a pilot basic income project in which recipients tell their own stories on a YouTube channel, Basic Income Works. He says “I want that program to be about the participants so I don’t want to promote the details of the pilot, just provide a platform for people to tell their stories.”
RighfulShare: An Income Movement is the first unconditional basic income transfer with GoodDollar in South Africa. The project is growing in strength, pioneering fairer income access bringing both resources and web3 solutions to the small town of Groblershoop in the Northern Cape.
“We need a new approach to addressing poverty in South Africa. The current system is not working and we can no longer pretend that there will be enough jobs for everyone. By bringing visibility to the benefits of a digital basic income transfer, we’re expanding the possibilities for South Africans”, says Karen Jooste, Founder of RightfulShare.
The participants are using their monthly basic income to alleviate day-to-day financial stress and open up space for creativity and entrepreneurship.
For example, Darryl Wessles who has been building his pig farm to address a gap in the market for smaller meat parcels for the community. Meanwhile Joyberne Neels has picked up an interest in cryptocurrencies and the potential global digital financial ecosystems can provide.
All the participants are bringing their own life experiences and outlooks, providing diverse stories and outcomes to this UBI project. However, each has spoken to how relieving the constant burden of unemployment has been life changing. See more testimony by participants here.
The project was recently recognized by the Swiss/South African Blockchain Innovation Challenge as one of the most innovative projects in the blockchain space.
Currently, RightfulShare is teaming up with GlobalGiving for Giving Tuesday, an effort to connect nonprofits to donors to create targeted meaningful impact. All donations go towards supporting more young entrepreneurs in South Africa kickstart their dream venture, escape poverty and overall reduce income inequality. It is super easy to donate, simply click on the link below. All donations will be matched on the 28th November 2023
The official launch of Tijs Laenen’s latest book The Popularity of Basic Income: Evidence from the Polls was held on November 16. During the event, he presented the book, followed by a critical discussion by Prof. Philippe Van Parijs (UCLouvain, Belgium), co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network. You can view a recording of the book launch here.
