Planning a UBI pilot during a pandemic
When we sent out our first press release announcing the HudsonUP UBI pilot program back on May 11, the United States was almost two months into a global pandemic that has now affected nearly every community in the country. The timing for the release and launch of a brand-new, first-of-its-kind program without any long-established framework — HudsonUP is the first American UBI pilot in a small city — made for a complex situation for our team.
On the one hand, the necessity of a universal basic income in the United States became abundantly clear when millions of American households suddenly needed financial assistance, many of which had never experienced that kind of need before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This past spring, food banks across the country saw unprecedented numbers of people. Many people have entered poverty, and therefore face a higher probability of sickness, disability, and death.
Back in March, the federal government sent $1,200 stimulus checks to every adult making less than $75,000 a year. We saw firsthand how much that money helped Americans through a terrible spring season, where enormous numbers of people lost their jobs, couldn’t pay rent, needed expensive healthcare, and faced eviction.
The stimulus checks showed that universal financial assistance from the government is not only possible, but effective. That stimulus demonstrated on a large scale that programs like our universal basic income pilot have a place in Americans’ lives, and they can work.
But launching this program during a pandemic created its own challenges. In order to communicate with people in Hudson, we had to rely largely on social media, virtual events, and word-of-mouth. Our ability to hold in-person events explaining our program was drastically curtailed. Still, Hudson residents told each other about the UBI pilot, and we attracted hundreds of potential participants.
Working with participants since their selection this fall created additional challenges in a pandemic context. Ultimately, our team worked to find a method of communication that worked for each individual participant, which turned out to be a mixture of in-person meetings and counseling, texts, emails, phone calls, and video calls.
What will this universal basic income pilot look like in a post-COVID future? It’s hard to say, especially because it is impossible to know when a post-COVID future will arrive. But our team has found that adapting to individuals’ needs must be front and center in this pilot. Without attention to every person’s individual situation, our pilot cannot work. To that end, there will likely always be a mixture of types of communication - and we learned that flexibility, in part, in response to the pandemic.
