Event

CASH Conference: Exploring Basic Income in a Changing Economy

10. 30. 2017

Two weeks ago, over five hundred people came to the inaugural CASH Conference in San Francisco. A diverse group of academics, organizers, artists, and practitioners met at the historic Old Mint, a building that once housed a third of our nation’s wealth.

Featured speakers such as Aisha Nyandoro of Springboard to Opportunity, and Saket Soni of National Guestworker Alliance and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice shared a range of perspectives on how our economy isn’t working — and in some cases, has never worked — for some Americans.

Tim Hwang of the Ethics and Governance of AI Fund and Andy Stern, former President of the SEIU, spoke about the future of work in our automated future. Jane McGonigal led the audience in an exercise on why it is so hard to imagine our future selves and how that difficulty produces roadblocks in the potential of bold solutions that can transform our lives.

Writer and comedian Baratunde Thurston interviewed Mayor Michael Tubbs of Stockton on life as Mayor, the vision behind the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration and his hopes for the project.

“The CASH conference, held in the heart of San Francisco, left me, for the first time, with the feeling that basic income was something that could become official policy in the near future,”

Greg Ferenstein, writing about CASH Conference in Forbes

We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, but CASH was a major moment in a new generation of thinking and action on a guaranteed income.

Highlights include: