More Than Enough
More Than Enough
Guaranteed Income as a tool to transform people's lives.
Mia Birdsong, Next River
Mia is a pathfinder, writer, and facilitator who steadily engages the leadership and wisdom of people experiencing injustice to chart new visions of American life. She has a gift for making visible and leveraging the brilliance of everyday people so that our collective gifts reach larger spheres of influence, cultural and political change, and create wellbeing for everyone.
Mia is the founding Executive Director of Next River, an institute for practicing the future. Next River moves conversations, culture, and resources to nourish the people and communities whose ways of being, doing, and relating can move us toward a liberated future.
Mia Birdsong's four-part podcast from The Nation explores how a Guaranteed Income might actually transform people's lives.
Mia Birdsong’s work inspires us everyday. From this amazing podcast series with the Nation on why a Guaranteed Income matters, to her current work at Next River: An Institute for Practicing the Future, Mia’s efforts to center human dignity, connectedness, and joy grounds us in the purpose of this work - not just what we hope to achieve, but why it matters.
The More Than Enough podcast series explores not just the idea of guaranteed income, but more importantly, uplifts the voices of those who would benefit most from the policy, with a particular focus on the experiences of Black women. There are so many pearls of wisdom in this series - it is definitely worth your time!
Targeted Universalism
Targeted Universalism
Policy & Practice
john a. powell, Stephen Menendian, Wendy Ake
The Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley advances groundbreaking research, policy, and ideas that examine and remediate the processes of exclusion, marginalization, and structural inequality—what we call othering—in order to build a world based on inclusion, fairness, justice, and care for the earth—what we call belonging.
Targeted Universalism offers an inspiring framework for those who want to reimagine new systems for all, while closing the opportunity gaps that are embedded in today’s systems for many historically marginalized groups.
Targeted Universalism encourages us to dream big about the world we want to build, and set universal goals that apply to all of us, as humans. And then it encourages us to look with clear eyes at the inequities embedded in and reinforced by our current systems, and craft targeted strategies to make sure that all truly means ALL, and that everyone achieves those universal goals.
We’re not only inspired by the framework, but also all the helpful tools that our friends at the Othering and Belonging Institute have published to make the framework actionable.
Check them out below!
If I Only had a Heart: A DisCO Manifesto
If I Only had a Heart: A DisCO Manifesto
Value Sovereignty, Care Work, Commons, and Distributed Cooperative Organizations
DisCO.coop
The DisCO.coop is meant to further the ideas and practices put forth in the DisCO Manifesto with a comprehensive framework designed to support the worldwide development of “Distributed Cooperativism”. DisCO.coop aims to prototype new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting meant to counteract pervasive economic inequality.
The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations.
There are lots of ways to build and reimagine collective power, but one of the ones that has most intrigued us are DAOs–Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. DAOs promise, via smart contracts and blockchain technologies, to enable decentralized ownership and governance at scale - pretty exciting stuff! And while the hype around DAOs is huge, the reality is still to be determined. We have concerns about the ways this ecosystem is shaping up, and in particular the threats of replicating the same inequities on the blockchain that exist in other parts of society and the economy today.
And yet, the promise is real! That’s why we were so excited to stumble upon DisCO.coop and The DisCO Manifesto, which names DAOs’ challenges with clear eyes, yet shares a vision for ways to leverage that technology and combine it with tried and true cooperative practices in ways that enable shared ownership and governance at scale. It’s a heady, visionary, and joyful examination of the opportunities DisCOs offer to reimagine shared ownership and governance, and we couldn’t be more excited to share it.