This weekend, September 9-11, writers, artists, videographers, developers, musicians, researchers, and others will gather for the first ever Basic Income Create-A-Thon in New Orleans. The event is designed to create projects that will support Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the United States.
This event will bring people together–hackathon style–who want to help advance the timeline for the eventual adoption of UBI by creating new, shareable materials to increase awareness.
“The purpose of Universal Basic Income is to not only abolish poverty and prevent hunger/homelessness by making sure everyone has at least enough money each month to cover their most basic needs without any conditions, but to thereby free them from the risks of failure to focus on whatever work is most important to them,” explains Create-A-Thon organizer Scott Santens. “That could mean school, volunteering, starting their own business, or finding whatever job best suits them, especially as technology continues eliminating our old ways of earning incomes via traditional full-time career employment.”
Santens is organizing the New Orleans event with the help of the Universal Income Project which is fiscally funded by the Roosevelt Institute.
Create-A-Thons began last year in San Francisco because basic income is an increasingly popular idea in Silicon Valley. There was also a Create-A-Thon held in Los Angeles a few months ago.
“Tech communities just seem to have a greater handle on the growing inequality and disruption tech is already bringing and will increasingly bring, that will require us to make some big changes, UBI being at the top of the list,” Santens told Silicon Bayou News.