The crowdfunding campaign for “The Mincome Experiment” can be found here.
The Mincome Experiment is a documentary that is as much a story about basic income as it is about human socioeconomic evolution throughout the years. Vincent Santiago, the director for the documentary, first heard that University of Manitoba professor Dr. Evelyn Forget was looking for volunteers to digitize the results of the 1970s Mincome experiment. While Santiago did not consider himself an experienced social activist, he was nevertheless keen to study possible measures to prevent government excesses that he believed could lead to growing social inequality and injustices. Santiago was convinced that basic income and open government were foundations that could help prevent social inequality and injustice.
The Mincome experiment and the concept of basic income caught Santiago’s imagination, and he took a passionate interest in seeking out more information. He finally talked to Dr. Forget on April 2014. Another opportunity arose soon after to interview then-Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, a very vocal and strong basic income advocate in Canada. Vincent Santiago read about and researched basic income and talked to economists and others. In the process, he discovered several interesting side stories not widely known, even within Canada.
Santiago wanted to make the Mincome experiment into a documentary. He soon realized there was so much story to be told. He looked into the various forms of basic income and decided the film should be told as an engaging narrative about human socioeconomic evolution. Intertwined into the historical and visionary backdrop is the concept of basic income and its role. Of the film, Santiago said:
While the Mincome experiment is very much the central theme of the documentary, the documentary also looks into other basic income experiments and the various forms and possible implementation. I’ve started calculating the various ways to pay for it and how to implement them.
The promotional trailer created for the crowdfunding campaign asks various questions typically uttered by people who are cynical or against basic income. That is because Santiago did not want to make a film only for those already familiar with basic income. He wanted to create an entertaining and fun documentary that also draws in the skeptics by presenting facts, without shying away from common ridicule and prevailing concerns.
Another project that occupies Santiago’s time is creating a low-cost, no commission fee platform for crowdfunding, curating, and showcasing creative works. With this platform, which first went into development in 2012, Santiago is now launching the crowdfunding campaign for his documentary. The Mincome Experiment project is still a long way from reaching the stated fundraising goal, but the team remains confident the amount can be reached. Efficient use of the funds would allow the project to include more engaging footage and animation for the documentary, ensuring that it will capture and convince audiences worldwide.
The crowdfunding runs until June 15, 2017 and can be found here.
Written by the team behind “The Mincome Experiment.”
A crowdfunding campaign was just launched for the new documentary, “The Mincome Experiment”. Kreytor, a recent web platform designed for “showcasing, curating and crowdfunding creative work” launched the campaign on May 1st, 2017, only five years after the platform was created by the documentary producer Vincent Santiago, an independent artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). Over the last five years Vincent has interviewed experts in the field and gathered information for the documentary.
Funds to support the documentary is now officially open at Kreytor’s Mincome project webpage. Also, the launch provides a short video (below) that introduces the documentary, while providing background and context on basic income experiments conducted in Dauphin, Canada, in the 1970’s. Recently, the experimental results from Dauphin have been reported on more extensively, after having been archived for decades.
The team behind the upcoming Bootstraps documentary, which will follow a group of actual basic income recipients, has launched a crowdfunding campaign.
Conrad Shaw and Deia Schlosberg, the Bootstraps team, announced the campaign on the UBI Podcast to raise $50,000, in the next two months, to start a pilot program with real people.
Once the first $50,000 is raised, Shaw said they can begin handing out the basic income, initially, to a small number of recipients. Each recipient will receive $1,000 a month for two years.
For each $50,000 raised, they will be able to fund two basic income recipients.
Every time $50,000 is raised, a member of the Bootstraps newsletter can choose an American to participate in the documentary and receive a basic income.
In addition, those that contribute to the crowdfunding campaign can get rewards, such as a Bootstraps t-shirt or even tickets to the premier of the documentary.
The overall purpose of the campaign is to bring awareness of basic income to the “public at large” in the United States.
“The reason our pilot is different is that it is designed to facilitate storytelling,” Schlosberg said.
To carry out the campaign, the team is working with Handup, an organization that is focused on helping homeless individuals. Shaw said the leader of Handup is a proponent of basic income.
Schlosberg is confident that greater media interest will follow once they raise enough money.
“A lot of people have said ‘Sounds great. Get back to us once it is up and running.’”
Each day, the team will release a UBI thought of the day, which will often be accompanied by an interview with one of many basic income scholars they have interviewed.
“We’ve been interviewing a lot of thinkers on UBI and we have hours and hours of amazing material,” Schlosberg said. “We want these great thoughts out there.”
So far, most of the academics whom the team has interviewed have been proponents of the basic income. The larger resistance to the idea, Shaw said, has been from people on the street.
“What we find, in general, is it is all about how you sell the idea. Basic income sells itself,” Shaw said.
In the last six months, during the initial stage of the documentary, the general public has become much more aware of the basic income, Shaw said.
For Shaw, the campaign is an important step in establishing a Universal Basic Income throughout the country.
“You have to pick which projects have the best chance of having a large impact and we designed this project to fill a hole that we see,” Shaw said.
People often ask whether a country has to reach a certain stage of development before a basic income can become viable. A new documentary series will help answer that question.
Village One is a new series that follows a village in Uganda, Busibi, where each villager is receiving an unconditional basic income of around $18.25 USD per month for adults and $9.13 USD for children. There are 56 adults and 88 children who are receiving the basic income in the village for at least two years.
Steven Janssens, the director of Village One and the founder of Eight, discussed this project with the UBI Podcast. The series can be viewed now and will have a new episode premier each Saturday.
Eight is partnering with Ghent University to conduct research on the effects of the basic income on the village. The project has only been running since January, and Janssens said he already has seen dramatic results.
“Every child is going to school in that village now, whereas before it was around 50 percent,” he said.
The positive results on education were not just for children. One 18 year old was able to go back to school after he started receiving the basic income, Janssens said.
So far, Janssens said they have seen an improvement in health care access, increased entrepreneurship, and democratic organization, even though it has only been around three months since the basic income was started.
According to Janssens, villagers have created “saving circles” where they pool together their funds so that they can invest in larger expenditures, even for the benefit of the entire village.
“They are more social with each other. They talk more, they get involved more. They also make plans to make the water distribution better, to make the roads better,” Janssens said. “They are really talking a lot with each other to make improvements for the whole village, not only the individual.”
As for negative effects, Janssens said he has not yet seen anyone change their behavior for the worse because of the basic income, including harming the environment or spending it on “temptation goods,” such as alcohol.
“People who were already boozing before, continue to (do so), but they don’t (consume) booze more or less. People don’t start boozing or using alcohol. There is no change in that type of consumption,” he said.
GiveDirectly, which is also running a basic income program in Africa, has run into some issues with individuals skeptical of the organization refusing the basic income. Janssens said they have also had some similar instances in their case.
“There is one family that refused our project because they believe that we are going to take over the land, or they don’t believe the money is really for free,” Janssens said.
For Janssens, he said he hopes that his project can help people see the effects of basic income for themselves.
“We see a lot of inequality and it is so unfair. In all of my travels I see the same. You see so many people with so much potential, so many talents and they are actually in a lot of cases just wasted. A basic income is one of the instruments that can improve it,” Janssens said.
As the debate about basic income heats up around the world, two documentary filmmakers are trying to bring the human element to the forefront.
Deia Schlosberg and Conrad Shaw are producing an ambitious documentary, “Bootstraps – A Basic Income Film”, that will follow a group of real people around the United States who will receive a basic income for two years.
I recently interviewed Schlosberg and Shaw as part of the new BI News Podcast series. Schlosberg said she wanted to do something different from existing basic income documentaries.
“I didn’t want to make another film that was just describing it and talking about the theory, I wanted to follow individual people and tell stories about individuals, and connect with the audience that way,” Schlosberg said.
Shaw said this project will be distinct from existing basic income trials, and will fund a basic income for around 15 to 20 individuals selected for the documentary.
From those a “handful” will be selected with the most “compelling stories,” Schlosberg said. Their intention is to stop the “othering” that takes place in society, they said.
“The problem we see with the pilots that are going on…is that they are very localized,” Shaw said. While this will allow the research to be more rigorous, he said, it makes it more difficult to present an inclusive ‘American pitch’ with people from all over the country.
The team is in the process of fundraising and is in the early stages of selecting participants for the basic income. Those that are part of the mailing list for the film will be eligible for a drawing that will allow them to nominate someone to be part of the film and receive a basic income.
As of now, they hope to start handing out the basic income this summer and release the documentary in time to be “part of the election discussion” in 2020.
Schlosberg has worked on films in the past, including “Backyard” and “How to Let Go of the World and Love all the Things Climate Can’t Change,” but she said this documentary will be a unique experience following individuals for two years.
Already, Shaw and Schlosberg have found potential participants for the film including a homeless man from the east coast who was released from prison, and a man in Boston who is still in prison and declined parole because he is “afraid” of not being able to reintegrate into society.
“With those we are exploring recidivism and how basic income could ameliorate that issue on a huge scale,” Schlosberg said.
The goal, they said, is to get people from all different backgrounds, locations, and occupations so “they can watch the film and relate.”
In administering the basic income, they said they are currently looking for an outside organization to partner with on this aspect.
In making this documentary, they want to discover whether critics are correct in that basic income will make recipients lazy, or if it will encourage positive change.
“How does it change someone’s day to day with a little extra security and a little extra power over their lives?” Schlosberg asked.
