Last September, the Healdsburg City Council allocated funding from the American Rescue Plan Act toward the creation of a universal basic income program. Universal Basic Income also known as Guaranteed Basic Income βas a proposal to address chronic poverty, growing wealth inequality and, increasingly, automation-driven unemploymentβplaces ultimate trust in an individual to know best how to address their needs and move their life forward.
As a strategy for tackling poverty and its multiple deleterious impacts including on health, UBI came to mainstream attention with the presidential campaign of Andrew Yang. The concept is not new. Martin Luther King, Jr. A version of UBI has been a reality in Alaska since Proponents of UBI argue for its practical as well as its moral value. But proponents also stress the net benefits and economic returns to society that come from ensuring no one falls too low in socio-economic terms.
A lot of our programming is about individual empowerment, offering resources and services so that families can become more self-resilient and self-sustainable. But there are a lot of barriers that people encounter on a day-to-day basis.
A universal basic income program can help people get closer to self-sustainability, and address the inequality that exists in our community. Individual empowerment is fundamental to GBI, which trusts the individual recipient to apply funds where they are most needed and will do the most good.
The program is predicated on the idea that the people closest to the pain are the ones closest to the solutions. Unconditional financial assistance increases the agency of each family to decide what is best for them. Pilot programs like the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration SEED program, mentioned above, and another ongoing in Marin County , support that thinking and see it as integral to alleviating poverty and systemic forms of discrimination including racial inequities.
