As one of 2,400 artists chosen to receive a monthly $1,000 check, no strings attached, Sylvain Souklaye finally could afford to take a break.
The Brooklyn-based performance artist, who lost over a year of gigs due to the pandemic while becoming a new father, had begun to return to the stage when a severe back injury forced him to pause his physically demanding performances.
“To be able to rest, to think, to breathe is so rare for an artist,” says Souklaye, whose monthly checks became a personal and professional lifeline during his half-year recovery. “I’ve never had those six months in my life.”
The past four years have seen an explosion in guaranteed-income experiments, in which individuals and families receive regular cash payments from a range of philanthropies and some government pandemic-era funding.
Few have been as ambitious as Creatives Rebuild New York, a three-year $125 million effort to support 2,400 artists undergirded by $115 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, plus $5 million each from the Ford and Stavros Niarchos foundations. The program was designed to support everyday artists with little access to other grants at a time of immense need. Now, as the Creatives Rebuild New York program is set to wind down this year and with dozens of other cash payment efforts under evaluation, advocates, philanthropists, and policymakers have begun discussing if guaranteed income should or could become public policy.
The pandemic was the “kind of historic moment in America when the window of possibility opens,” said Sean Kline, former director of the Stanford Basic Income Lab. In the past four years, he’s counted over 200 guaranteed-income experiments across the United States. At least 70 of them are ongoing, but it’s hard to know for sure, he says, because “every week or so, I hear about a new one.”
The concept is simple: regular cash payments, for people to use as they see fit. If it sounds familiar, it may be because it resembles the stimulus checks many Americans received in 2020 and 2021 or because the idea has been around since Roman times — in his will, Julius Caesar bequeathed a small payment to every citizen after his assassination. The idea gained popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s, with Martin Luther King Jr. calling guaranteed income the “most effective” solution to poverty, a sentiment then echoed by figures as disparate as Richard Nixon, the economist Milton Friedman, and leaders of the Black Panther Party.
While guaranteed-income programs have persisted globally — Souklaye once participated in one for struggling performance artists in his native France — it wasn’t until 2019, when Michael Tubbs, then mayor of Stockton, Calif., raised $3 million from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes for a local basic-income experiment, that the idea again took hold in the United States.
“It was the spark that lit the field on fire,” said Kline, but it was the pandemic and the country’s reckonings with longstanding racial and wealth inequities that helped fuel the flames.
Because most modern guaranteed-income projects are so new, research on how they affect participants is still limited. Yet there are indications that the programs can immediately help improve the financial security and health of participants. In Stockton, people who received basic income were more likely to find full-time employment than a control group, despite fears that such programs would discourage work. But since most pilots are built to last only a couple of years, those effects may not last once the payments stop or may never be fully known.
Funding Artists, Not Just Art
By the time Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, joined the Reimagine New York Commission — a group of leaders who assembled in 2020 to devise post-Covid-19 policies— a new wave of guaranteed income experiments was beginning to take root, often spearheaded by philanthropy.
In Compton, Calif., private donations provided hundreds of dollars each month to 800 low-income families. In Gainesville, Fla., over 100 formerly incarcerated residents have received monthly payments to help ease the challenges of re-entry. In Saint Paul, Minn., 150 families began receiving $500 monthly payments at the height of the pandemic, and were found to have improved financial stability, better housing, and social support 18 months later. In January, Flint, Mich., began the first ever citywide basic-income program, with the family of every infant born this year eligible to receive $500 per month from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, state funding, and other supporters.
Even before the pandemic, the Mellon Foundation — the nation’s largest grant maker for the arts — had been undergoing a kind of soul-searching. For most of its history, the foundation primarily supported arts institutions like museums, operas, symphonies, and ballets. With more freelance artists joining the so-called gig economy and a growing awareness of the racism baked into many elite institutions, the Mellon Foundation was looking for more equitable ways to distribute its hundreds of millions in funding per year.
“There are individual artists who have never had access to organizations,” says Emil Kang, program director for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation. Many of those artists hold down non-arts jobs to help pay the bills, says Kang.
That was especially true during the pandemic. If shuttered museums and theaters struggled to keep the lights on, so too did hundreds of thousands of individual artists in their own homes and studios. At the height of the pandemic in 2020, New York City lost nearly 70 percent of jobs of its famed arts and entertainment industry.
Amid that bleak backdrop and under the fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Foundation — which helped build a stand-alone team and operations for the three-year initiative — Creatives Rebuild New York opened for applications in February 2021.
Any low-income artist in New York state — regardless of their level of artistic recognition — was eligible, leading over 22,000 to apply. Using a weighted lottery that prioritized applicants of color, immigrants, caregivers, and those with disabilities, 2,400 artists were ultimately chosen to receive $1,000 monthly checks for 18 months, no strings attached.
The idea was to acknowledge the work of an artist regardless of their prestige or affiliation with big-name arts institutions, says Kang: “How do we think about the artist in the totality of their humanity?”
After moving to upstate New York in 2016, Balbir Krishan, a celebrated painter in his native India, struggled to find footing. When you move to the United States, “your success normally doesn’t come with you,” he says. “You have to prove yourself again and again.”
He had been slowly building a pool of clients when the pandemic hit and the commissions stopped, leaving him and his husband entirely reliant on the latter’s teacher pension. “I tried to apply to many other grants, but they’re almost impossible to get,” Krishan said.
When he was chosen for Creatives Rebuild New York, his monthly payments helped pull the couple out of a “very dark” financial situation. He and his husband were able to cover basic expenses and move to New York City, so that Krishan could have more access to arts opportunities, which has come in handy now that his payments have stopped coming.
From Experiment to Policy?
Like most guaranteed-income experiments, Creatives Rebuild New York was never built to last. After 18 months of $1,000 payments, the last group of artists received their final check in March.
While “it’s too early to say” exactly what will happen next, says Kang, it’s unlikely that the Mellon Foundation or New York state will fund another round of guaranteed payments for New York artists. The program was a “directly pandemic-related response” to the challenges “of that moment,” he said. It was never meant to outlive the pandemic.
That doesn’t mean the foundation is writing off guaranteed income completely. But at least in the near future, he says the foundation plans to focus on more “surgical” solutions, like connecting gig economy artists to health care or funding more modest efforts, like Maniobra, a $8 million guaranteed-employment program for artists in Puerto Rico.
Though the U.S. may be flush with guaranteed-income tests right now, that might not be the case in a few years, when momentum — and funding — tied to the pandemic dries up. Advocates say that the only path toward a large-scale permanent guaranteed income program would require federal and state governments to add more money to reconfigure existing public benefits.
“It’s a very expensive proposition, though less expensive than some people may have you believe,” said Kline of Stanford’s Basic Income Lab. Still, even he doesn’t expect to see a universal basic-income program anytime soon.
“I suspect it will take another big disruption to again upend our notion of what normal is, what’s possible, and what’s needed,” said Kline, who said that the impact of A.I. on the workforce — a hot topic in basic income circles — could be one of several contenders. “Those are the kinds of big historic shocks to our system that often lead to dramatic changes in policy.”
Within the next two years, more than 50 of the guaranteed-income experiments now underway plan to release evaluations of their approaches, says Kline, a resource that could help lay the groundwork for more permanent programs. While a few test programs have already led to policy changes — largely through the expansion of tax credits for low-income families in states like Minnesota and Washington, a move seen as a step towards basic income — most changes will likely come incrementally, if at all.
A bipartisan bill to reinstate a popular pandemic-era tax credit expansion — which temporarily slashed the national child poverty rate by 30 percent in 2021 — has stalled in Congress, foretelling an uphill battle ahead for even the most modest of guaranteed-income proposals.
That means that advocates, artists, and grant makers alike may need to be patient and persistent if they want the trial runs for guaranteed income to be remembered not as a philanthropic fad, but as a precursor to broader policy changes.
“A mistake that many foundations make is, “let me put $100,000 into it and hope I get something back,’” said Joanna Woronkowicz, co-director of the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab at Indiana University, which is currently conducting a study on the impact of Creatives Rebuild New York. The team at Creatives Rebuild New York has been trying to develop a research and advocacy arm “so that when they leave, it doesn’t just go away,” she says.
“We can’t change it overnight,” she said. “But, if we do this really well right now, then in the long term, the systemic changes that we’re hoping will happen will have a much higher chance.”
Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.
