Emma Guttman-Slater
Emma is a strategist and advisor who helps teams and organizations move from vision to action. She takes a systems approach, examining structural and connected challenges and community-based solutions to inform her work. She works on economic justice and guaranteed income initiatives, providing program design and development, policy advocacy strategy, and field building. Most recently, she designed and launched Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ flagship $3.5 million artist guaranteed income program and advised on policy advocacy for Creatives Rebuild New York, a $125 million investment into artists across New York State. Prior to consulting, she developed and led financial justice policy advocacy, field building, and strategic communications at Beneficial State Foundation with the goal to fundamentally change the role banks play in society. She has held social justice fellowships with the Institute for the Future, Bend the Arc, and Avodah, which guide her work toward a more just world.
Presentations from Facing Race 2024
Everyone Is Essential: Guaranteed Income
What is possible when you have your basic needs met? What choices would you make? What art would you make? Care, creativity, and community action are integral to a healthy society, yet many of the people doing that important work live with financial instability. What if we could change that?
Through videos, self-reflection, and discussion, we’ll define the guaranteed income movement and ground it in the US context of Black women’s organizing movements. We’ll hear stories from people whose lives have been impacted by guaranteed income, and we’ll pull out themes from their voices as we think about our own money stories as a part of our economic and racial justice organizing work. We’ll talk about the narratives that underlie guaranteed income, because it’s more than a check.
And finally, we will place guaranteed income within the larger context of the solidarity economy, which teaches us to dispel harmful beliefs about the US social safety net and poverty and instead radically imagine a world where everyone deserves investment, financial security, and care.
Intended to provoke curiosity and to provide compelling stories that move from personal accountability to systemic injustice, Everyone Is Essential will equip participants with an understanding and/or deepen their understanding of a real policy solution that we can fight for right now.
Speakers: Emma Guttman-Slater, Eshe Shukura