by Kate McFarland | Sep 15, 2017 | News
Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE), an affiliate of BIEN promoting basic income in Europe, will be holding a meeting on Sunday, September 24, in Lisbon, Portugal, one day before the start of the 2017 BIEN Congress.
This is the first time that UBIE has organized a meeting to coincide with one of BIEN’s congresses. UBIE’s goal is to increase interaction between its members and other members of BIEN.
The meeting will be held at Casa dos Direitos Sociais (Rua Ferreira de Castro, 1950-315 Lisboa) from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM, beginning with the General Assembly.
From 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM, workshops will be held on UBIE’s projects and activities. At the end of the meeting, participants will report on results from these workshops. The afternoon sessions will be open to all Congress attendees and members of BIEN and its affiliates.
UBIE will also host a workshop titled “How can basic income activism and research support each other?” on Wednesday, September 27, as part of the BIEN Congress.
Additionally, UBIE plans to organize social events on Saturday, September 23 for those who arrive early to the congress.
More information can now be found on UBIE’s (brand new and improved) website: https://ubie.org/join-us-in-lisbon-on-24-september/.
Reviewed by Caroline Pearce.
Photo: “European Panorama” CC BY-NC 2.0 NASA, International Space Station, 01/25/12.
by BIEN | Oct 9, 2016 | News
Unconditional Basic Income Europe (UBIE), a regional affiliate of BIEN, has begun to raise funds through the crowdfunding platform Open Collective.
UBIE works to secure the implementation of unconditional basic income across Europe.
The organization formed in 2014 after the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) for Basic Income had, in the previous year, brought together people from 25 countries and collected 300,000 signatures in support of the idea.
Since then, UBIE has worked with regional basic income groups to organise public events in Brussels, Athens, Maribor, Budapest, Maastricht and Hamburg. Its members are currently looking forward to their next meeting in Madrid, 14-16 October which will feature a public roundtable with Spanish, French, Swiss and Scandinavian activists and BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist. The event concludes, fittingly, on the eve of the UN’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 October).
In addition to supporting and exchanging information with regional groups, UBIE is actively engaged in lobbying and research projects. At the moment, UBIE members are writing a response to the EU’s Social Pillar proposals, developing ways to practically implement the Eurodividend first proposed by Philippe van Parijs, gathering interested localities into an EU-wide pilot project, researching the potential impact of basic income on local food systems, and organising to make sure another EU-wide ECI for basic income gains even more support than the last.
Despite having existed for only two years, UBIE was mentioned in a recent report by a research group for the European Parliament as one of the ‘key civil society organisations’ working on basic income in Europe.
So far, UBIE has been run entirely by volunteers working in their spare time. In order to fulfill its ambitions and expand its reach, however, the alliance wants to professionalise some aspects of its work. Money is needed to maintain the ‘back office’ aspects of the alliance, to help activists travel to meetings, to hire interpreters and, eventually, to staff a small office in Brussels.
Open Collective provides a transparent funding platform where contributors can make regular donations and follow how their money is being spent, while organisations can crowdsource a regular and reliable funding stream.
If you would like to support UBIE’s work, please follow this link: https://opencollective.com/ubie
