Empowering Action: Elevating Basic Income Voices to Fuel Change

Income inequality

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

The nascent movement for basic income in the U.S. has made great strides in recent years, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, high inflation, and persistent, growing wealth inequality across the country. This wealth gap is wider in California than in most other states, and nearly a third of Californians are living in or near poverty, a number that is on the rise. In Los Angeles the poverty rate is over 15%. However, California is also a leader in this space, with more than 12,000 Californians having received cash from basic income experiments. California is the first state to fund guaranteed income programs. The high need coupled with this momentum for change makes this moment opportune to build a thoughtful, community-led initiative to identify concrete policy goals and narrative-building actions that can communicate the impact and benefit of cash assistance in service of inspiring a robust statewide and national movement, one grounded in the perspectives of those with lived experience.

We will partner with Miracle Messages (MM), an award-winning CA-based nonprofit currently running a pilot for unhoused community members in LA. We will design a series of workshops for cash assistance pilot participants in LA, local community members, and others to come together to share their experiences; ideate on impactful policy changes that are rooted in the lived experiences of those who have needed or received cash assistance; and identify opportunities for community members to contribute to advancing these goals. To make our actions specific and targeted, we intend to host 3 community events throughout the year and identify 2-3 opportunities for community members to share their insights – through the media, in meetings with legislators, or other public events/actions. To build an economy rooted in dignity & equity, the voices of those who have long been marginalized need to be raised to guide change. Many of the cash assistance pilots in LA are targeting specific marginalized communities – women of color, low-income moms, and transitional-age youth – and we wish to bring these communities together to share their experience and learnings. Through this community bridging and building, we can establish concrete policy goals that serve the movement for basic income broadly and effectively, and elevate leaders with lived experience to affect impactful change. This will ensure continued momentum at a critical time in the cash assistance movement.

Connecting narrative change and direct action, this initiative will not only recognize the import and impact of cash assistance, but further the movement for basic income by identifying community-led policy goals around which to advocate for lasting impactful change in LA. At the end of this grant year, we will have identified specific objectives to guide the basic income movement forward in the city and around the state, and connected pilots, communities, and new voices in leadership to steer progress rooted in experience through storytelling and education. These actions will provide a roadmap to state legislators and policymakers to build the infrastructure necessary for sustained basic income programs in our society. With concrete goals and empowered leaders, this initiative can serve as a model for replication around the state and country, providing a strong foundation for a robust national basic income movement that can advocate for an economy rooted in dignity for all.

This initiative formalizes and builds upon the work of Income Movement, which has been growing and nurturing the grassroots community for basic income and elevating the voices of those with lived experience to inform national strategy, policy design, and pilot implementation. We are opting to invest deeper in the LA community as it is a place in high need of cash assistance programs, in a state that has shown particular openness to this objective. Thus, we believe we can have the greatest short-term impact here in service of a long-term national agenda. In this initiative, we will measure success through metrics such as # of workshops; # of attendees; articulation of policy changes; # opportunities for sharing basic income stories through media, meetings, and other actions; and policy changes proposed in the state legislature. Longer-term, we expect to translate this work across the state and country and will similarly track continued successes beyond the grant term.