Eshe Shukura

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.