Can Trust and Community Innovations be our Path to a New System?

The Beginning

In 2023 we ran cross-industry focus groups of individuals who identify as gig workers to understand what kind of portable benefits could be helpful in their lives. Participating gig workers ranged from industries including construction, art, events, and academia. While the types of work individuals pursued were varied, the shared worries became even clearer in our work: our current system of employer-sponsored benefits leaves many falling through the cracks for universal needs and guarantees that should be afforded to all people, regardless of their abilities and type of work they do. This problem can be further backed by many of the findings and recommendations found in our Arts Workers in CA Report conducted by Urban Institute in January 2021 with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. This seminal report became the foundation of our work at Research to Impact Lab.

In our current system, artists and other gig workers often do not get access to employer-sponsored benefits, including access to retirement or savings plans. While the “what” was diverse in what our focus groups would see as benefits to their lives (more readily accessible public transit, housing and healthcare affordability, as well as ability to take time off) the throughline undergirding the diverse worries plaguing the minds of our gig worker groups was almost too simple: financial precarity.

This made us more curious, especially with the increasing support for guaranteed income programs, what if we could pave the road for solutions built specifically for gig workers that could help solve for the financial precarity currently baked into the lives of those working outside of a standard W-2 category? Inspired by the many forms that historically extracted from communities have been forced to innovate to create their own forms of support and protections, we are excited to embark on a journey of experimentation to build new solutions with Val Elefante, a freelance research, project manager, and co-design facilitator specializing in community-led, responsible development of emerging technologies including AI and the decentralized web.

Why are we doing this?

R2I Lab and our historical work at the Center for Cultural Innovation as supporters of and champions for individuals in the arts, artists, culture bearers, and creative entrepreneurs, through grantmaking, research, and capacity building programs has made us intimately aware of the issues most impacting artists and other gig workers’ ability to live full and dignified lives.  

Our gig worker savings club (tentatively called “Cookie Jar Collective”) project comes from our many years of research and incubation specifically centering artists, culture bearers, and creative entrepreneurs from marginalized communities. 

Why a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA)? R2I Lab is interested in how many immigrant communities have relied on different forms of ROSCAs (Such as: Su su, Tanda, or polla) to support one another’s dreams of attaining more financial security. At the root of all rotating savings clubs is the inherent and unwavering trust necessary for its success. All participants are reliant on their community for each other’s success. Are there ways we can bring these values of community trust and accountability for EVERYONE’s success to new technologies?

Through this experiment we hope to leverage decentralized technology in response to the failures of current financial and social welfare systems, which have excluded these communities and therefore restricted their economic access and opportunities.

Through this experiment we hope to:

• Leverage the power of community, in conjunction with decentralized tech infrastructure, to provide an alternative system that can help fill this gap, meet peoples’ needs, and expand access to basic human rights.
• Show examples of blockchain technology uses for the greater public good
• Legitimize gig work and other excluded forms of work by building solutions specifically for people living these types of lives
• Experiment in ways we can build and govern with the values of community trust and accountability at the center

What’s Next?

• Test our ideas at DWEB Camp through a co-design session with values aligned technologists, innovators, and creatives in the Redwoods
• Invite our community to keep iterating through co-design sessions focused on different pillars of building this solution: Governance, User Experience, & Technical Backend
• Build, pressure test, and keep building
• Deliver this solution to the world to continue piloting