Would there still be homeless people with a basic income?
When someone loses their home because they can no longer pay the rent,
a vicious circle begins: no registered address, no employment contract; no work, no money for a flat. Could a basic income break this circle?
That is the question asked by Dominik Bloh (German): he was homeless for eleven years – and wrote the Spiegel bestseller “Unter Palmen aus Stahl” (Under palms of steel) about it:
With a basic income, money loses its importance. When everyone is secure, we can turn our attention to other things. And in doing so we will very probably find that there are many, many things more worth living for than earning money.
On 21 April, Dominik Bloh will be a guest when the non-profit NGO Mein Grundeinkommen (My basic income) raffles 21 unconditional basic incomes. Since 2014, the Berlin NGO has been giving away one-year, donation-funded basic incomes of 1,000 euros a month.
Stephan (German) also won a basic income. Before winning, he worked as a lorry driver. His meagre wages came so irregularly that a few years ago he was thrown out of his flat because he could not pay the rent:
To this day, my worst fear is losing my home. Being homeless from one moment to the next, even though you go to work – that is really hard.
Support Mein Grundeinkommen free of charge.
Generate basic income from your online shopping with the Crowdbar.
Install a browser extension in a few steps and collect for Mein Grundeinkommen along the way – at no extra cost, conveniently while shopping online.
The Crowdbar is available as an extension for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
Mein Grundeinkommen is both a non-profit start-up and a young NGO.
Donations are collected via crowdfunding, and as soon as 12,000 euros have been raised, they are raffled as an unconditional basic income of 1,000 euros a month.
The response is huge: founded in 2014, today we are fuelling the debate on unconditional basic income with more than 2.8 million users and more than 175,000 large and small donors.
Driven by the question of how we as a society want to live in the future, the young NGO is experimenting with new forms of self-organisation and collective leadership (holacracy) and, together with the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), is studying unconditional basic income according to scientific standards in the world’s first pilot project (German) run by civil society.
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