Throughout Europe there is interest in getting local mayors to support basic income. What can German and French mayors learn from US Mayors for a Guaranteed income, and vice versa?

Olaf Michael Ostertag, Netzwerk Grundeinkommen (Germany)

Born 1969 in Nuremberg, Germany. Lives in Berlin, Germany, since 1987. Actor/Director/Comedian (since 1987), Tax accountant (since 2017). Founding member of the Basic Income working group within the political party DIE LINKE (The left), since 2004 (party member since 1998). Also member of BIEN (since 2016) and Netzwerk Grundeinkommen (German Basic Income Network, since 2004). Member of the local parliament of Marzahn-Hellersdorf (Berlin district) from 2011-2021. Participant in many, many panel discussions on the necessity of a basic income in Germany.

Simone Lange, Mayor, City of Flensburg (Schleswig-Holstein, Germany)

Born in 1976 in Rudolstadt (State of Thuringia, East Germany). 1995-1998 Study of public administration, Police specialty. Served as a criminal investigation officer from 1999-2012. Entered the state parliament (“Landtag”) of Schleswig-Holstein in 2012 (member until 2016). Since 2017 she serves as Mayor of the city of Flensburg, the city farthest north in Germany, bordering to Denmark. She gathered 51,4 % of the public vote. Lange rose to nationwide recognition when unsuccessfully running for head of party (Social Democrats, SPD) in 2018. In her book “Sozialdemokratie wagen” (Daring Social Democracy, published in 2018) she advocates in favor of a Basic Income.

Eva Jacob, BETA, University of Strasbourg (France)

I am a PhD in Economics at BETA which is the largest laboratory in Grand Est (France). My PhD thesis aims to deal with the following topic: “A new social protection based on basic income: theoretical analysis and field experiments”. I attend to assess if a basic income could be more than a theoretical question and be accepted by the population and finally experimented on the field. My topics of interest are universal basic income, social justice, philosophy and economics, inequalities, and experimental economics.

Mary Bogle is a principal research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her research often sits at the intersection of whole-family support, social networks, and economic development at the neighborhood level. She is a nationally recognized thought leader on two-generation policy and practice as well as an expert on cash-based social policies and highly effective program models for moving Americans out of poverty. She led the evaluation of the THRIVE East of the River guaranteed income pilot in Washington, DC and is currently leading a study on cash assistance and impacts on housing stability in Austin, TX, as well as leading the implementation study for the Guaranteed Income pilot program in California.

Tom Cooper, Director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction

For the past ten years, Tom Cooper (pronouns: He/him) has served as Director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction - a collaborative organization formed to tackle the City's unacceptable levels of poverty. Through the Roundtable's work, Tom engages governments -at all levels- to invest in poverty reduction initiatives and works with people experiencing poverty to amplify public policy issues that often go ignored. Tom has advocated for social assistance rates that reflect the real costs of living, tackled predatory lending in Ontario and is keenly interested in the intersection between the global climate emergency and income inequality, particularly around the impact extreme heat events have on vulnerable populations. He was engaged in the roll-out, advocacy and analysis of Ontario's first-ever basic income pilot: a critical, but short-lived initiative testing whether providing a basic income could stabilize housing, improve health and enhance social inclusion opportunities.  He is one of the co-founders of the Ontario Living Wage Network and is a Board Member of Living Wage Canada; and in 2022 he helped co-found the Hamilton Alliance for Tiny Shelters (HATS), an initiative to establish tiny cabin communities for people who are unhoused. Tom attended McMaster University and recently completed a certification in Public Policy Analysis from the London School of Economics.

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Advocating for BIG on the local level–perspectives from Germany and France