Representatives from the Think Tank of Creatives of New York (CRNY) share their perspectives on the lessons learned from the roll out of an artists’ basic income pilot in New York, including feedback from the community members who participated in the recruitment and application phases. Representatives from Zero Babies Homeless, including their Lived Experience Consultants, will discuss the importance of community engagement and participation throughout the development of their basic income pilot, and the impact that this co-design process ultimately had on the quality of the program, the implementation phase, and the narratives that followed. Panelists will be called upon to reflect on the lessons learned, including strategies for channeling the energies of community members new to basic income towards a cohesive organizing strategy for policy change.

Keiko Sono, Forge Collective/Creatives Rebuild New York

Keiko Sono founded Forge Collective to explore a system that aligns with the intrinsic values and motivations of people, especially artists and creators. She served as a think tank member for Creatives Rebuild New York, a large scale guaranteed income and employment initiative. She directed Catskill Waters, a public outreach program funded by the NYC Department of Environmental Protection. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner fellowship and two Arts Mid-Hudson Individual Artist Grant. She served as Visiting Artist at SUNY Ulster Community College and at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

Almaz Zelleke, NYU Shanghai/Creatives Rebuild New York

Almaz Zelleke (PhD Harvard University) is Professor of Practice in Political Science at NYU Shanghai, where she teaches political science and comparative political economy and was until recently the director the undergraduate Social Science major. Her academic interests are in political theory and public policy, feminist political theory, and comparative political economy. Her articles on basic income, distributive justice, welfare policy, and feminist political theory have been published in Basic Income Studies, Political Quarterly, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Policy and Politics, Review of Social Economy, and Journal of Socio-Economics. For more information, visit almazzelleke.com.

Henry Love, Abt Associates /Zero Babies Homeless

Henry Love is a Senior Analyst at Abt Associates and Ph.D. candidate in Developmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His experience spans a wide range of anti-poverty programs and policies, including homelessness prevention, guaranteed income, self-regulation development, youth trauma, and implicit racial bias. Henry is committed to developing and testing new programs to improve the lives of BIPOC families, children, and youth living in poverty.  His lived experiences as a survivor of intimate partner violence and growing up as an African American youth—navigating the extreme levels of systemic racial inequity in his hometown of Detroit—ignited his passion for equity and reducing child poverty.

Kadisha David, The Samuels Group Homeworks/Zero Babies Homeless

I'm an advocate for homeless families and I'm here to make it a better world.

Michael Anthony Lewis is a social worker and sociologist on the faculties of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His main areas of interests are public policy, especially basic income, and quantitative methods. Lewis’ academic works have appeared in a number of journals in social work, sociology, economics, mathematics, and, in one case, physics. His popular writings have appeared in the statistics magazine and online platform Significance, on the website of Basic Income Earth Network, and on the website of United States Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG). Lewis is co-author of Economics for Social Workers, co-editor of The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee, and author of Social Workers Count. He’s also a former community organizer and a co-founder of USBIG.

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People-Centered and Bottom-Up: Community Engagement and Think Tank Involvement in Pilot Design and Implementation - Lessons from the Field