by Cordelia Holst | Jul 5, 2017 | News
Organized by the Universal Income Project, the goal of the Create-a-thon is to spread awareness and raise support for the idea of basic income. Forty people attended the weekend-long event in March, including filmmakers, artists, entrepreneurs, technologists, songwriters, and activists.
The weekend kicked off with speakers from the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, the Insight Center, HandUp, and the City of San Francisco, the focus of their talks being inequality in society and how basic income could address these issues. After this first session, attendees were invited to pitch their project ideas to the group, work groups were formed and the scope for the work to be produced over the weekend was discussed. The teams worked in conference rooms with whiteboards and flip charts, face-to-face and through Slack channels. The weekend was filled with work sessions from morning to evening, with discussions, exchanges of ideas, and debates ongoing throughout the project processes, as well as on lunch and dinner breaks. The participants got to know each other better and shared diverse viewpoints on the most important issues in societies both in the US and around the world.
According to Shandhya, one of the organizer of the Create-a-thon, “These participants came up with over 20 project pitches, which coalesced into eight inspiring projects that ran the gamut from podcasts to public displays, and included a legislative scorecard as well as plans for a basic income board game.”
The Economic Security Project provided extra motivation by offering a cash stipend of up to $3000 to projects that would spread awareness and raise support for the idea of basic income. The Economic Security Project is “a two year fund to support exploration and experimentation with unconditional cash stipends”. Several of the weekend’s projects received funding for further development.
As Philippe Van Parijs, co-author of Basic income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, highlights, “In the effort to achieve Basic Income in our society we will need Visionaries, Machiavellian Thinkers and Indignant Activists.”
The Basic Income Create-a-thon is a forum that can provide a framework for activists to gather and cooperate.
See interviews with participants in this video.
by Kate McFarland | Jul 3, 2016 | News
Revenu de base Québec (RBQ) and Mouvement Français pour un Revenu de Base (MFRB) have developed a program on basic income that will take place as part of the 2016 World Social Forum, held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada from August 9-14. World Social Forum events often draw tens of thousands of participants.
This basic income Creation Marathon will span 2 ½ days (from Wednesday, August 10 to Friday, August 12) and take place at the University of Quebec.
Referred to as a “creathon” by its organizers, the program has been inspired by the Bay Area’s two “Basic Income Create-A-Thons,” held in San Francisco and Los Angeles in November and April (respectively), and the “Basic Income Hack“ in Finland last March.
Like these other recent events, the Creation Marathon will bring together artists, activists, programmers, and other creative individuals to produce ideas and materials for raising awareness of and support for basic income.
The event will be multilingual (English, French, Spanish), though the lingua franca will be English.
Registration for the World Social Forum is required to attend.
More information on the creathon (in both English and French) is available at Eventbrite here.
Photo of Université du Québec à Montréal CC Jeangagnon
Thanks to Asha Pond for reviewing a draft this write-up.
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (To see how you too can support my work for Basic Income News, click the link.)
by Kate McFarland | Apr 10, 2016 | News
The second Basic Income “Create-A-Thon” will be held in Los Angeles, California, from April 15-17. The event will unite “writers, artists, videographers, developers, musicians, and other creatives” for the purpose of creating “content and media around the theme of a Universal Basic Income in the United States.”
A similar event was held in San Francisco last November, bringing together 60 creative-minded basic income advocates, and resulting in the development of eight separate projects, including, among others, a documentary, cost-calculator, policy proposal for the city of San Francisco, and the United States’ first crowd-funded basic income raffle.
For more information, to register, or to learn about how to initiate a Basic Income Create-A-Thon in your own city, see the Create-A-Thon’s official website.
Photo of LA skyline CC Wikimedia Commons
Thanks to my supporters on Patreon. (Click the link to see how you too can support my work for Basic Income News.)
by Juliana Bidadanure | Nov 27, 2015 | Opinion
November 13-15, 2015, San Francisco. A group of basic income supporters joined forces for the first ever basic income ‘create-a-thon’. For those not familiar with the concept of create-a-thons, these are events where people from a range of professions meet up voluntarily to work and create something together. In general, they gather to work on a project that has a social dimension. Those events are inspired by the now famous hackathons that bring together software programmers, project managers and other creatives to work on developing new projects in just a few hours. The motto of the events: efficiency, creativity, and innovation.
So what does this have to do with basic income? The idea of the organizers was to use the great concept of create-a-thons to further the struggle for an unconditional basic income. They launched the event to harness the energy, creativity, skills and competences of an incredible mix of people over the course of a weekend. More than 100 people showed up at one point or another in the nice offices of the company Brigade in San Francisco, California. It really did look like a tech event: dozens of MacBooks and a lot of coffee. Developers, artists, filmmakers, community organizers, educators and seasoned basic income activists worked side by side. The participants chose a project, a sub-group, and then spent their weekend working on a particular idea.
So what did people actually do? A filmmaker made a movie where he asked each participant why we should support basic income. A group made a film called ‘Tell It To The Sun’ – a journey into the deepest reasons why people got interested in basic income in the first place; it made a few people cry. There was also a team that came up with a list of 100 reasons against basic income. Their idea was that better categorizing the objections is a first step in sketching a guide for campaigners. Helped by a group of activists that came all the way from Germany, another group launched the first American My Basic Income campaign in just three days! Everyone was amazed that all this content was created so quickly. You can see the full list of nine projects here.
Now the organizers are planning to help others create more basic income create-a-thons. They want people to benefit from this experience and are supporting those who want to meet up and get projects in place – click here if you want to find out more. Create-a-thons provide a great platform for basic income supporters to rally and coordinate, simply by inviting them to spend joyful and hopeful weekends working together. There is no doubt that many of the projects that started in San Francisco will have a long life.
And what better way to prove basic income skeptics wrong? The hard work and creativity unleashed at the first basic income create-a-thon show that people work and contribute to society in meaningful ways even when they don’t get paid for it. If people are willing to spend their precious weekends working together for a better future for all, then imagine what they could do for their communities with the extra time and security an unconditional basic income would afford them.
