At the General Assembly in Berlin on March 23 this year, you elected a new Core Group for a mandate of 24 months. The new Core Group met May 17-19 in Brussels for a retreat to discuss a working programme for the coming two years. In this mail, we would like to sum up the outcomes of this weekend (but you can also jump to the long version directly).
First, we discussed how we understand the role of the Core Group. We agreed that our main job is to build a good strategy for UBIE as a whole that reflects important political developments and windows of opportunities and to coordinate activities around that. While we still want to enable all UBIE members to pursue projects in line with our Constitution, as the Core Group we want to devote the bulk of our energy and volunteer time to a few priority initiatives. It is very important for us to ensure the broadest possible inclusion of UBIE members in their making.
Generally, we hope to see as many members as possible active in the working groups that implement our projects and activities and to reduce our role to coordination, administration, financial management and, whenever needed, political representation.
We had a brief look at UBIE’s strategy goals (as agreed at the 2015 Maribor meeting) and felt that while a lot of progress has been made on goal 2 (make UBI a hot topic of the mainstream world) and some good first steps towards goal 3 (assert the feasibility of, and arguments for, UBI and make it a credible and attractive alternative for Europe), we still need to step up efforts to advance with goals 1 (levy support in the EU Institutions and stakeholders and facilitate cooperation between them) and 4 (activate and grow UBIE while making it appealing, fun and friendly).
Therefore we decided to focus on projects and activities that further goals 1, 2 and 4 the most, i.e. sharpening UBI policies for Europe, lobbying for them at EU level and strengthening our network. In this sense, we agreed on three priority initiatives:
- Lobbying the European institutions for EU-wide basic income experiments.
- Developing a sound policy proposal around the Eurodividend idea and putting it on the agenda of the debate about the renewal of a social Europe.
- Preparing and implementing a successful European Citizens Initiative “Start UBI”.
By pursuing these, we also hope to achieve two organisational goals:
- Activating our membership’s interest, skills and energy.
- Increasing our financial resources so we can open a Brussels office for UBIE.
We discussed these activities in depth, as well as about upcoming events, fundraising and external communication.
You can read the detailed outcomes of the retreat in the 2019-21 Core Group Working Programme (PDF). Your feedback on this is most welcome (please write to board@ubie.org).
Of course, in order to make all our ambitious plans happen, we need your contribution! Please let us know if you are interested in participating in one of our working groups or have other ideas to bring UBIE forward:
- Campaign, external project and policy working groups:
- New ECI
- EU-wide basic income pilots (#30for2030)
- Eurodividend
- EP-Campaign 2019 / EP Lobbying
- Agrarian Basic Income
- FutureLab (Wow! Basic Income! Exhibition)
- Internal project and activities working groups:
- Fundraising
- Brussels Office
- Organisational Networking
- Membership administration and activation
- Communication
- Communication strategy
- Press relations
- Website
- Newsletter
- Social Media
- Administration
- IT (infrastructure, online tools, data security)
Want to get involved? Please write to welcome@ubie.org!
Kind greetings from the UBIE Core Group,
Leire Rincón (Spain, Chair)
Alessandra Bianchi (Belgium, Vice-Chair)
Dániel Fehér (Hungary, Vice-Chair)
Vladan Lausevic (Sweden, Secretary)
Ulrich Schachtschneider (Germany, Treasurer)